Human Traffic

One Cardiff weekend, scored by late-90s dancefloor records

The film starts on a Friday already underway. For two days Cardiff is organised around five friends who have already decided the week was a mistake, and the club is the only place they still trust. Justin Kerrigan’s Human Traffic (1999) spends forty-eight hours with Jip, Lulu, Koop, Nina and Moff (John Simm, Lorraine Pilkington, Shaun Parkes, Nicola Reynolds and Danny Dyer) talking faster than they think, working jobs they despise, and treating the dancefloor as mutual aid rather than a moral problem. The film refuses the lecture. It wants the atmosphere, the venues, and the Monday already waiting in the hallway.

Kerrigan wrote the script barely out of his teens and filmed his own city without turning it into a postcard of vice. Pubs, queues, toilets, the walk home on St Mary Street: locations, not metaphors pasted on. What the picture understands, and what sterner films about the same years often miss, is that the weekend was a form of care as much as a chemical. People looked after each other on dancefloors because the rest of the calendar would not. The jokes are filthy and local. The fear of the comedown is shot with the same attention as the peak, which is how you know the director was in the room for both.

The soundtrack is the other half of the story. London Records released a double album, the second disc mixed by Pete Tong, and it still plays like a late-nineties radio that trusted dancers. Fatboy Slim’s Build It Up, Tear It Down, Orbital’s Belfast, Underworld’s Kittens, Energy 52’s Café del Mar, Carl Cox, Armand Van Helden, Dillinja’s Never Believe, Death in Vegas, Primal Scream’s Come Together: house, techno, drum and bass and big beat share a night without being asked to represent a thesis. Tracks do not decorate montages of pills; they structure friendship for the length of a set. Belfast, especially, carries the comedown: a loop that feels like morning light through a cheap curtain, when the club has closed and the city is only Cardiff again.