What happens to angry young punk radicals when they hit middle age? Does commercial success automatically mean selling out your principles? Is it even still possible to be a politically engaged artist in the 2020s? These are some of the questions running through I Get Knocked Down, an autobiographical docu-memoir co-directed by its principal protagonist, Dunstan Bruce, founding member and former singer of the British anarcho-punk band Chumbawamba, who scored a freakish worldwide hit single 25 years ago. Judging by Bruce’s glum soul-searching here, he never quite recovered from this catastrophic success. Screening at IFFR this week, this charmingly offbeat film is unlikely to top the charts, but it has plenty to offer anyone who still believes pop music has an inherently political dimension.
Co-directed by Sophie Robinson, who won acclaim and awards for her Netflix documentary My Beautiful Broken Brain (2014), I Get Knocked Down blends archive material from Chumbawamba’s three-decade career with contemporary footage, including interviews with ex-members, fans and critics of the band. “Once upon a time I really thought I could change the world,” Bruce confesses in the opening montage, fretting about his increasing irrelevance and invisibility as his 60th birthday looms. He may no longer be a young punk firebrand, but the smartly dressed, elegantly coiffed singer is still “mad as hell” about political and social issues. His dilemma is how to channel that rage. Will anybody care? Will anybody even listen?
In the course of his ruminations, Bruce returns to the semi-derelict house in the English city of Leeds where Chumbawamba formed in 1982, born from a commune-style collective that one ex-member likens to a religious cult. Galvanised into action by opposition to Margaret Thatcher’s government, support for the highly contentious 1984-85 Miners’ Strike, and other left-wing causes, the band combined punk attitude with folk melodies, sloganeering lyrics, street theatre and performance art. But their heavy-handed, hectoring brand of protest pop was routinely derided by critics, even those sympathetic to their political principles, and they spent much of their early career on the resolutely uncommercial margins.
But everything changed for Chumbawamba in 1997. Politically disillusioned and on the verge of disbanding, they signed a deal with major music label EMI and unexpectedly scored a huge international hit, Tubthumping. A boisterous sing-along anthem about boozy celebration and working-class resilience, the song struck a universal chord, topping the charts in multiple countries, and peaking at Number Two in the UK. Transforming the band into unlikely pop stars, this obstinately infectious earworm scored multi-platinum success and propelled its parent album, Tubthumper, to more than five million sales. In the US, Chumbawamba appeared on primetime talk shows including David Letterman, and even inspired musical homages on The Simpsons and Family Guy.
Chumbawamba treated multi-platinum success as a Trojan Horse, allowing them to smuggle political protest out to a much wider audience. “We were in the belly of the beast,” Bruce recalls. In Britain, the band achieved overnight notoriety by pouring icy water over Tony Blair’s deputy prime minister John Prescott at a major industry awards ceremony. In America, they angered their record label bosses by encouraging low-income fans to steal their albums from stores. Thanks partly to this kind of gleeful self-sabotage, the band’s commercial peak was short-lived, and they went down in pop history as novelty pranksters. Bruce and several other founder members quit in 2004, returning for a formal farewell in 2012.
Bruce uses I Get Knocked Down to re-assess the band’s legacy from a more nuanced, jaundiced, older perspective. Along the way he seeks out encouraging words from political fellow travellers such as veteran film-maker Ken Loach, whose glib endorsement is wholly unsurprising. He also reconnects with former bandmates including Alice Nutter (aka Anne Holden), now a screenwriter whose credits include Danny Boyle’s feted 2018 TV miniseries Trust.
Throughout the film, Bruce is shadowed and mocked by a figure in a toothy horror mask, a live-action recreation of the cover of the Tubthumper album. Of course, this sinister stalker is really a nightmarish embodiment of the singer’s nagging conscience, allowing him to dialectically debate his feelings of self-doubt, ideological impotence and midlife insignificance. “Give up, go home, nobody cares,” the goading gargoyle advises him at one point.
Made in the same lo-fi DIY spirit as Chumbawamba’s early albums, I Get Knocked Down is an engagingly quirky labour of love, if a little self-indulgent and thin on detail in places. A more rigorously objective film-maker might have gone deeper into the band’s political philosophy, the personality clashes which hastened their split, and the singer’s own troubled family background, which is only hinted at here. The question of what ageing anarchists do with their rage in middle age also proves to be something of a red herring: for the last decade, Bruce has been performing low-key shows with his new band, Interrobang, and making music-themed documentaries, including this one.
Even so, this frequently amusing, occasionally inspiring film should appeal to Chumbawamba lovers, haters and agnostics alike, plus students of post-punk pop culture generally. The closing credits coda, which features dozens of musicians from around the world covering Tubthumping in a wide range of styles, is a joyful testament to the song’s enduring appeal.
Directors: Dunstan Bruce, Sophie Robinson
Cinematography: Ollie Verschoyle, Alex Wykes, David McDowell
Editing: Paul Holland, James Scott
Music: Nick Norton-Smith
Producer: Sophie Robinson
Production company: So & So Pictures (UK)
World sales: Canoe Film
Venue: Rotterdam International Film Festival (Art Direction)
In English
87 minutes
