We spoke to musician and filmmaker Dunstan Bruce about his documentary A CURIOUS LIFE, which looks at the history of Cambridge Folk Festival favourites The Levellers. The documentary will screen at Cambridge Film Festival this year, and Dunstan will be joining the audience for Q&A after the second screening, which will take place at St Philips Church in Romsey Town.
Rosy Hunt: The blurb for A CURIOUS LIFE mentions “battling demons” and “struggle”… but substance abuse aside, it primarily comes across as a great music doc/buddy movie. Was this because of the focus on jolly Jeremy Cunningham, rather than those band members who were reluctant to appear?
Dunstan Bruce: We had a few issues with band members talking openly about their pasts. Jeremy had already had to address his drug addiction with his parents previously when a biography of the band, Dance Before The Storm, was published in 1999, but even now he still expresses a kind of tired resignation to me bringing the subject up. The fact is that there were issues within the band about drug and alcohol use/addiction, but some members felt that it was something that shouldn’t define them, or that it even adversely affected their career.
It’s obviously an age-old rock and roll story and I was interested in how it affected their relationships and the running of the band and their own creative output, rather than hearing the same old anecdotes about getting wasted in Hamburg or lost in Amsterdam for 3 days (those are made up, by the way!).
Strangely Mark [Chadwick] has just released a solo album which deals with his own problems with drink and how he has coped and dealt with that. Maybe me trying to get him to talk about it in my film gave him the idea to address it in his own time and in his own way. Other members of the band hadn’t actually discussed their sordid pasts with their children yet, and so weren’t necessarily ready to deal with it, and some were still dealing with their own demons! These are some of the reasons why it feels like an implicit problem within the band rather than a huge issue, and why Jeremy is the most vocal.
… as Jeremy says, the music is definitely folk and the attitude is punk!
RH: How does the band fit in at the Cambridge Folk Festival?
DB: To be honest, you’d have to ask them about that! I know they’ve never been regarded as pure folk, but they have been partially embraced by the folk world. They did receive a Radio 2 Folk Award a few years back which was largely for being so damn popular and selling so many tickets for their shows, whilst retaining a folk element to their music. The Levellers obviously aren’t trad-folk, but as Jeremy says, the music is definitely folk and the attitude is punk!
RH: The section on “Battle of the Beanfield” was great – what is your memory of that period?
DB: I was in Chumbawamba at the time of all the Stonehenge, Beanfield, Convoy and Glastonbury goings on. We had just come out of the miners’ strike which we had been heavily involved in. We were very much focussed on class politics at the time and Thatcher’s attempts to redefine the state and society. It was impossible not to draw the links between what she had done to the miners, and what she was trying to do to the travelling community. It felt like we were starting to live in a police state. it was essential that we all worked together at that time, and formed bonds and links with different protest groups and movements to present some sort of united front. I think of that period as the end of single issue politics, and the start of mass resistance. Depressing and exciting all at the same time.
RH: Why do you reckon The Levellers never broke America – even with the bluegrass The Devil Went Down To Georgia on offer?
DB: Funnily enough, their experience in the US is a deleted scene! The story of their attempt to “crack America” didn’t make it into the film because I felt we didn’t really learn that much about the band or band members. It merely told the story of them going and failing to make any dent in the US market, in a rather dry way. Basically they went over there three times in all, but were never really prepared to put up with the heartbreaking, soul-destroying interminable trips across the country to go and play to 6 people in a bar in the middle of Utah on a Monday night. They felt that they had spent years doing that sort of thing around the UK, and were aware of the work involved and the difference in scale with the US which is daunting at times. So the reason they didn’t break America was simply because they never had a song that captured the nation’s hearts, nor did they put in the hours, days, weeks, months, years required to get somewhere!
RH: What do you hope non-Levellers fans will get out of the doc?
DB: When we screened the film at East End Film Festival in June I took along a friend of mine who had no interest in the Levellers whatsoever. I took her in part as a guinea pig to gauge her response to the film as an outsider. Luckily for us both, she loved it! She didn’t necessarily love the music but found Jeremy engaging, amusing and very loveable. She also said that she was fascinated in their machinations as well, because they operate differently to most bands. It sounds like I’m making this up, I know. I’m not, honestly!
Click here to book tickets to see A CURIOUS LIFE at the Picturehouse on the 30th August, or at St Philip’s Church on the 5th Sept with a Q&A.
httpvh://youtu.be/t1VDhe73Qi8