History hasn't been too kind to Flowered Up. At the time that they were around, most people wrote them off as a third-rate baggy-by-numbers outfit, toting the full requisite of sampling, funky drumming, Hammond Organ, jangly guitar and even their own highly-embarrassing Bez-style dancer, Basil Mooncult, who pranced about in a giant flower costume. Public opinion hasn't really changed much since, but that opinion is a grossly unfair one. Toting a highly-individual attitude which blended nineties neo-hippy with an acute streetwise awareness (their name was full of peace and love vibes, but its initials are confrontational and offensive in the extreme!), the band were more than mere bandwagon jumpers. The sprightly panpipe riff of 'It's On' is one of the more enduring moments of early 'nineties alternative music, and their sole album "A Life With Brian" was a charming homegrown leftfield pop offering, in which funky, upbeat tunes are revealed to take serious lyrical stances ("please don't say nothing, no - nothing's a no-man's game, another day of torment, anguish on the brain" is one of the brighter passages from the sarcastically-titled 'Sunshine'), and the band's edgy, energetic live shows were refreshingly out of step with the introspective mood of the times. At the 1991 Reading Festival, vocalist Liam actually hurled a dangerous-looking wooden missile straight back into the crowd!

Early in 1992, Flowered Up released the recording for which they are probably best known. Clocking in at a lofty twelve minutes and fifty-three seconds, unlike many similarly lengthy songs 'Weekender' never fails to hold the attention of the listener. Opening and closing with sampled dialogue from "Quadrophenia", what seems at first to be a standard 'Madchester' style number is broken up by seamless diversions into techno, hard rock, acid jazz and ambient house, while astutely selected samples and pointed lyrics mercilessly satirise the 'rave' scene which was then as its height. Surprisingly, 'Weekender' actually managed to make a significant dent on the UK charts, although nobody seemed to be quite sure of why it went on for so long. Until the film came along, that was.

Directed by the appropriately-named Wiz, the action in "Weekender" the film closely mirrors the pattern of its soundtrack as it takes a wry look as a weekend in the life of a diehard 'raver'. It opens as a stereotypical young lad with a Gazza haircut and a Top Man shirt ironed by his mother snorts at the television-fixated inertia of his family. Pausing only for a quick inhalation of Amyl Nitrate, he slams the front door and steps off into his weekend world of dancing and debauchery. After getting his hands on a couple of dodgy-lloking tablets, our hero hotfoots it to a threadbare and sparsely-attended club, which to his drug-addled eyes looks like the party to end all parties. Paranoid hallucinations of being chased around a record by a giant needle prevent him from pulling the girl of his dreams, and following a clever shot where we see the sordid, drug-fuelled debauchery of the club toilets reflected in a mirror, he runs off into the night in search of somewhere to sleep. As the final weary line "Weekender - whatever you do, just make sure what you do makes you happy" echoes over the soundtrack, his makeshift bed suddenly starts to move upwards, eventually revealing itself to be the high-rise window cleaning hoist that he spends his weekdays working on. "Monday's back, what can you do?". Good question.

"Weekender" had little exposure at the time, barring a video release and a couple of showings on Channel 4. Flowered Up survived long enough to give a startling rendition of the song at that year's Glastonbury Festival, and to release a brilliantly rowdy cover of Right Said Fred's 'Don't Talk Just Kiss', but soon afterwards internal squabbles spelt the end of the band. Tied to a scene that was badly adrift of changing fashions, and dogged by incredible bad luck (including "The Chart Show" playing the video of 'It's On' without any sound), Flowered Up were unable to agree on a new direction and split, leaving their second album languishing in the vaults. "Weekender" does not deserve this forgotten stauts, and neither do Flowered Up themselves. Although the film takes swipes at a lifestyle that few would call their own, the questions that it inadvertently raises have some degree of relevance to all our lives. Whether you view the end of the working week as an opportunity to overindulge in sport, reading or even shopping, we are all 'weekenders' in our own way. So whatever you do, just make sure what you do makes you happy.