This short musical directed by Barney Broom is a curious time capsule, capturing the sights of British seaside town Great Yarmouth and the diverse sounds of the British pop charts in 1980. It reflects the somewhat anarchic state of the UK music scene of the time, sitting on the cusp of the tail end of punk and the mainstreaming of “new wave.” Running just 24 minutes, the film did the UK rounds accompanying Norman J. Warren’s Inseminoid (1980), Videodrome (1983) and Brimstone and Treacle (1982) at various times in the early 80s.

There’s very little plot to speak of. A quartet of unruly louts (Pete-Lee Wilson, Jon Eden, Mark Draper and Danie Peacock, the latter providing a voiceover though it’s supposed to be coming from Wilson’s character) cruise around Great Yarmouth causing trouble that ranges from mild mischief to pursuing and assaulting a quartet of young women (Cindy Day, Jenny Bonada, Tiffany Brown and Jeanette Neely). The gang are often described as punks though they’re a fairly mixed bunch. More easily identified are a mysterious group, another quartet, the “knights electric” of the title (Peter Harvey, Ziggy B. Summers, Mark Scott and Eddie Riseman), dressed in PVC one-suits and displaying no emotion. They’re straight from a Gary Numan video, an implacable presence who keep appearing and disappearing seemingly at will to continually thwart the gang. Who are these “Numanoids”? Aliens? Robots? No-one knows… Nor do we entirely know what becomes of the laddish yobs at the climax – in a subtly disturbing moment they appear to be attacked by the knights on a roller coaster who then make off with the girls in their vintage car, though the voice over tells us that despite it being “a bit of a dust up, we’re all right though. I’m just a little upset that they pulled they pulled the birds…”

It’s a fun little vignette, though perhaps with some reservations. The gang are misogynistic borderline racists but we’re never really expected to like them despite them being the central characters. Their behaviour is mostly childish and fairly innocuous though their relentless pursuit of the women, and their willingness to violently assault them as the mood takes them is disturbing. The fact that we know nothing else about them, the girls or the knights other than what we see in the film might have been a problem, but somehow Broom makes it all work while leaving the characters at nest unfathomable, at worst ciphers.

Neither the plot nor the characters are the thing here really though. Broom manages to capture the allure and the seediness of a British seaside town very nicely and the many shots of the gang rampaging around the town are a lovely time capsule of a town now forty years out of time. The music selections are intriguing, running the gamut from traditional punk (The Ruts) to the new electronic pop (Gary Numan’s Tubeway Army, John Foxx) though chart-friendly pop (The Pretenders, Blondie, Madness, Martha and the Muffins) to an unexpected but very welcome intervention from Japanese electronics maestro Isao Tomita. It’s all indicative of the exciting nature of the British music in 1980 where almost anything went and Broom uses the songs to vaguely fit in with what’s going on on screen.

It’s a lovely little short – enigmatic, exciting even at times a tad psychedelic (the gang suffer solarised and distorted lens visions after slightly too good a time in a funhouse). Its fantastical content is oblique and hard to pin down. Whatever the knights are, they’re no mere mortals but exactly what they are remains tantalisingly and pleasingly obscure. Its 24 minutes rocket past in a blur of seaside sights and invigorating music and it’s shame that Broom never went on to do much else – his only other theatrically released film as a director appears to have been another short, The Third Dimension in 1985, a documentary made for the Ministry of Defence about a Russian Tupolev TU-95 aircraft attempting to infiltrate British airspace and the response from a Panavia Tornado F2 ADV. He’s not been idle though, creating hundreds of music videos and corporate videos. Based on what he achieved with Knights Electric, he should have been a big name in British film, but with the industry teetering on the brink of collapse we were sadly denied that pleasure.