Various Artists Awaydays Review

Disaffection, joylessness and despair virtually seep from every track of Awaydays, the hard-hitting film adaptation of Kevin Sampson's brutalist tale of football hooliganism and reaching adulthood in England's north west in 1979.

And how dreary, bleak and nihilistic the end of the 1970s was: post punk, pre New Romantics, with unemployment racing towards three million and the mean-spirited political convulsion of Thatcherism on the brink of declaring that society didn't exist. Churning away beneath the surface of Sampson's debut novel was a pinpoint accurate soundtrack that threw grim, grey light on a world slowly consumed by its own solipsistic avarice and aggression.

Interspersed with dialogue lifted from the film, the soundtrack seethes with inchoate discontent. The dark centre of gravity is undoubtedly Joy Division's Insight, ''Guess your dreams always end / They don't rise up, just descend / But I don't care anymore / I've lost the will to want more''. But adding their own thrashing adrenaline charge to proceedings are Ultravox's Young Savage (''Condemned to be a stranger / Subway dweller, dead-end danger''); Magazine's The Light Pours Out Of Me and bedsit land's very own poet laureates, Echo And The Bunnymen, with Going Up.

Contributions from the likes of The Jam, Elvis Costello, The Teardrop Explodes, Cabaret Voltaire, OMD and Gang Of Four add their own authentic amalgam of deracinated disdain and disenchantment.

As soundtracks go, this one squats menacingly in the shadows, glowering out at the world it inhabits to offer a harsh but honest commentary of its own.