‘Lush: A Far From Home Movie’: Watch this unique time capsule of life as a touring indie band in 1994
In 2024, when the Criterion Channel announced the release of a new documentary about the glorious first-wave shoegaze band Lush, I presumed it might be a standard-issue career retrospective, following the trend du jour where each participant is filmed awkwardly positioning themselves on a chair inside an abandoned factory before being asked to relive the best and worst moments of their life.
And to be fair, I would happily watch the shit out of that version of a Lush doc. The actual film in question, however, which is now available for the first time to watch for free on YouTube, is something very different, and quite wonderful in many surprising ways.
Lush: A Far From Home Movie includes no interviews, no footage of the band performing on stage, and no narration or explanation of anything you’re seeing. Instead, it’s a compilation of “moments” filmed predominantly by Lush’s own bass player Phil King during the band’s 1994 world tour.
King used a Super 8 camera, already a fairly obsolete technology by the mid-1990s, to document his adventures with his bandmates across America, Europe, and Japan. The silent, black-and-white footage, which King later spliced and pieced together from presumably countless hours of van shenanigans, roadside meals, arty architectural shots, and general Gen X goofiness, would theoretically hold little interest for modern YouTube audiences accustomed to brightly coloured AI slop and impossibly professional-looking iPhone videos of their everyday lives. But instead, this short 35-minute tour film manages to do something that even an expensive Netflix period drama rarely can. It transports you out of the unrelenting noise of 2025 into a hazy but joyous “before-time.”
Lush’s music, of course, is a very big part of the equation, as the soundtrack of the entire film is made up of a half dozen tracks, mostly from the record they were touring in support of at the time, 1994’s Split. Even so, the band’s singer/songwriter/guitarist duo of Emma Anderson and Miki Berenyi are more often heard than seen over the course of the film; another counterintuitive choice that adds to the doc’s otherworldly nature, as the presumed “stars of the show” shyly pop up and wave for a few seconds here or there, often wearing giant sunglasses or a Halloween mask. It is, for lack of a better term, the very concept of shoegaze in visual form.
There are some geographical and temporal clues that prevent the film from existing entirely in its own reality—the Lush quartet visit tourist sites like Seattle’s Space Needle and the Empire State Building in New York, and you can occasionally spot other 1994 easter eggs like a poster for Frank Black’s Teenager of the Year album or Weezer’s name on a theatre marquee. King’s edit really works, though, by keeping those tidbits to a minimum and focusing on an immersive “on the move” feeling. After a while, you start to feel like you’re watching your own old home movies from that year you worked as a roadie for Lush—one of the best bands on the planet performing at the height of their powers, enjoying their globe-trotting adventures together.
The elephant in the room, or in the footage, is well known to most Lush fans. The band member who gets by far the most on-screen time in A Far From Home Movie is the band’s drummer, the effervescent Chris Acland, who would tragically take his own life just two years later. This fact certainly adds an undercurrent of sadness that goes beyond the usual nostalgia, particularly toward the end of the film when King includes the only footage of anything on stage, a funny moment when Acland was serenaded with the ‘Happy Birthday’ song by two Elvis impersonators at the end of one of Lush’s gigs. He had just turned 28.
The film’s greatest success, though, is that—without the use of any tearful interviews or emotional manipulation—it manages to feel like a celebration of a life. Acland is almost always smiling when King points the camera at him, and the whole band seem less like conquering rockstars and more like excited kids on their first big holiday, even when they’re looking impossibly cool in the most 1994 of ways.
Anyone who already appreciates Lush and their greatly underrated contributions to ‘90s music should consider this required viewing. Emma Anderson recently endorsed the YouTube release herself on Instagram, noting that it is “dedicated to the memory of Chris.”
