Eddie Cochran: Don't Forget Me

Despite being just twenty-one when he died, it's impressive to watch just how many of rock music's luminaries are prepared to go on record and extol the considerable musical virtues of Eddie Cochran. Keith Richards is always good value as are Ronnie Wood, Sirs Cliff Richard, Rod Stewart, Tim Rice and Roger Daltrey as well as Alice Cooper and Suzi Quattro who all have tales to tell of this man's role in inspiring this most diverse group of musicians - all the more impressive given most never met or even saw the man. From his upbringing in small-town 1950s America, we use a modest amount of archive footage - mostly audio - and some enlightening chat with members of his family to learn a little about what made this handsome and charismatic man tick; how he was prepared to travel coast to coast on little better than a subsistence basis determined to make it. Hits like "Summertime Blues" and "C'mon Everybody" finally cross the Atlantic and lead him to a UK where the demands of continual touring begin to make the man homesick, but that's a trip he never quite manages to take. Apparently, he used to sign his autographs "Don't Forget Me.." and there are questions asked here about whether or not he had something of an Alexandrian premonition of burning brightly but not for too long, and those are played out in dramatised conversations with his mum (Frances Barber). I'm not so sure that helped tell this story and there is a disclaimer at the end telling us that AI was used here - though we didn't know when - that made me feel that some of the "archive" might not have been exactly that, but this still provides an interesting British-slanted chronology of a star trailblazing his way through a world still uncertain about the "inappropriateness" of all this bopping and of women whose skirts stopped above the knee-line.