Music documentaries: British codebreakers solved a cult comic's hidden code

Chris Sievey, a Manchester musician who performed as the comic Frank Sidebottom, wore a large papier-mache head on stage. He died in 2010, and left coded messages around the edges of his newsletters and cassette sleeves. In April 2019, as a documentary about his life reached DVD, it emerged that GCHQ, Britain's signals intelligence agency, had solved them.

The documentary is Being Frank, one of the music documentaries below. A music documentary tells the story of a musician, a band or a scene, usually from archive footage, old recordings and interviews. Its close cousin, the concert film, is built around a live performance as the audience saw it.

The form matters because a documentary is often where a small scene's story is finally written down. Woodstock, the 1970 film of the festival, won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. The films below are about artists and scenes that stayed smaller, and some of them show how far a small scene can reach. Relay lists 251 music documentaries and concert films cleared for US streaming. These are released between 2008 and 2020, and they cover a reggae producer, a Seattle radio DJ, a Birmingham singer and several corners of punk.

What makes a music documentary

• An archive. Home movies, tapes, notebooks and fan photos do the work a narrator would.
• People who were there. Musicians, promoters and friends explain what the scene felt like, and what they leave out is part of the story.
• A place. A radio station, a dry lake bed or a record label in a pub gives a scene an address.
• A keeper. Some of these films exist because someone held on to the material, as with Frank Sidebottom's archive.

7 music documentaries to watch

Being Frank: The Chris Sievey Story (2018)

Chris Sievey had a chart single with a Manchester band called the Freshies, "I'm in Love with the Girl on the Manchester Virgin Megastore Checkout Desk". Later he became Frank Sidebottom, a cult comic character with an oversized head, and wore a nose peg to change his voice. Sievey died of cancer in 2010, aged 54.

Steve Sullivan, the director, built the film from Sievey's archive of tapes, film reels, VHS and artwork, which was digitised. A Kickstarter campaign helped fund it. It had its world premiere at SXSW in Austin, Texas, in 2018. The hidden codes come from the same archive: Sullivan took them to GCHQ, and a fan of Frank inside the agency found the pattern by looking for "bobbins", one of Frank's favourite words.

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Desolation Center (2019)

In 1983, Stuart Swezey, a 20-year-old punk with no experience of organising events, hired school buses to carry fans to a dry lake bed in the Mojave Desert. The Minutemen and Savage Republic, two bands, played with no permit and no toilets. Swezey says the idea was to take music out of conventional venues and present it in the landscape.

Swezey put on more shows between then and 1985, including one in 1984 with the German experimental band Einstürzende Neubauten and a January 1985 show with Sonic Youth, the Meat Puppets and Redd Kross. Writers have traced the festival model of Coachella and Lollapalooza back to these events. Perry Farrell, the Jane's Addiction singer, attended and later launched Lollapalooza. Swezey made the film himself.

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Filmage: The Story of Descendents/All (2013)

The Descendents are a band from Manhattan Beach, California, playing hardcore, a faster, harder and more aggressive form of punk, with pop hooks. In 1982 they put out Milo Goes to College, an album named for Milo Aukerman, their singer, who left to study biology. He went on to earn a doctorate in biology, and the film covers his departure.

The other thread is Bill Stevenson, the Descendents' drummer, who formed the band All and later faced a brain tumor. Writers have linked the band's sound to Green Day and Blink-182. Steven Blush, author of American Hardcore, wrote that the band's formula became the most copied in rock. The film premiered in 2013 at the North by Northeast festival in Toronto.

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King Rocker (2020)

Robert Lloyd is a singer from Birmingham, England, who led the bands the Prefects and the Nightingales. Stewart Lee, a British stand-up comedian, wrote the film and Michael Cumming directed it. Lloyd says the Nightingales never had a manager, a booking agent or a publisher, and that this is part of why the film exists.

The film ties his story to a lost public sculpture. Nicholas Monro's fibreglass King Kong stood beside Birmingham's Bull Ring in 1972, after which the city declined to keep it. A used-car dealer bought it and renamed his business King Kong Car Co. Reviewers describe it as more a loose biography of Lloyd than a history of the band, and as knowing about the music documentary form itself.

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The Upsetter: The Life and Music of Lee Scratch Perry (2008)

Lee "Scratch" Perry was a Jamaican producer who is credited with pioneering dub, a style of remixing in which the mixing desk is played like an instrument. In 1973 he built his own backyard studio in Kingston, the Black Ark. Bob Marley and the Wailers recorded there. Perry died in August 2021, aged 85.

Ethan Higbee and Adam Bhala Lough filmed Perry in Switzerland, where he was living. Benicio Del Toro, the actor, narrates. Lough has said they chose to give Perry space to tell his story "whether it was factual or unfactual". The film premiered at SXSW in March 2008. Lough argues that Perry's role in Marley's rise is underrated.

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The Glamour & the Squalor (2015)

Marco Collins was a DJ at 107.7 The End in Seattle, where his show was, in one critic's words, king of new music for the city. Bainbridge Island's local paper reports he was pivotal in introducing Beck, Foo Fighters and The Presidents of the United States of America. The film is about what that influence cost him.

Marq Evans directed it, and it follows Collins through addiction and rehab, and through a life spent hiding that he was gay before he became a campaigner for marriage equality. It was second runner-up for Best Documentary at the Seattle International Film Festival and won the Audience Award for Best Documentary at Outfest in Los Angeles.

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The Godfathers of Hardcore (2017)

Agnostic Front, formed in New York, is often called the city's first homegrown hardcore band, and the nickname "godfathers of hardcore" appears in Colin Larkin's Encyclopedia of Popular Music. Ian McFarland directed this film about its two longest-serving members, the singer Roger Miret and the guitarist Vinnie Stigma.

It premiered at DOC NYC in November 2017 and won Best Documentary Feature at IFF Boston in 2018. Rolling Stone's reviewer followed it from the band's beginnings among junkies, street gangs and derelicts in the early Eighties to the present. The Hollywood Reporter found it warm-hearted but short of context for newcomers.

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Where to go next

• Mockumentary movies
• Cult classic movies

All of these are on Relay.