Picturehouse Central cinema on Shaftesbury Avenue is a staggeringly good improvement on its previous incarnation as a Cineworld.

I’ve never seen such a radical transformation.

What used to be a pretty soulless venue has blossomed into a stylish urban space with a buzzing atmosphere.

I arrived forty minutes before the film was due to start, entering the ground floor café from Great Windmill Street. The café’s impressive array of cakes, scones and muffins might have been tempting at another time but this was a Friday night and beer was required.

I ordered an Estrella Damm Daura, which was pretty good.

The film I’d come to see tonight was ‘We Like It Like That’ (2014), a documentary about Latin boogaloo music.

It was showing as part of this year’s Doc’n Roll Festival, a celebration of music subcultures and independent film.

The screen 2 auditorium was almost full for this showing.

What a great film ‘We Like It Like That’ turned out to be.

The music was wonderful.

The depiction of 1960s Latino New York was vivid and engrossing.

And key figures from the boogaloo scene of the era such as Joe Bataan, Richie Ray, and Johnny Colon were given enough screen time to come across as interesting characters in their own right, not just for their musical significance.

One of the highlights of the film for me was a short scene featuring Orlando Marin as he demonstrated the component parts of his timbales kit.

The sound he got from it was fabulous.

After ‘We Like It Like That’ ended there was an interesting Q&A with director Mathew Ramirez Warren.

DJ, musician and journalist Snowboy interviewed Warren for a few minutes before throwing it open to the audience for questions.

When Joe Bataan’s name came up, someone in the audience shouted ‘Bring him to England!’ to which Warren replied, ‘He is coming, to Ronnie Scott’s.’

It’s great that people like Joe Bataan, Pete Rodriguez, Johnny Colon and others are still performing, so many decades after their 1960s boogaloo hits.

‘We Like It Like That’, Mathew Ramirez Warren’s loving tribute to the music and the musicians, should inspire even more interest in the somewhat overlooked genre of boogaloo and expand the audience for these great musicians to keep on playing to appreciative audiences all over the world.

Related Post: ‘Havana Club Rumba Sessions: La Clave’, ICA London

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