I Get Knocked Down: Chumbawamba singer Dunstan Bruce gets up again – SXSW interview

In 1997, the anarchist U.K. band Chumbawamba kicked into the mainstream with their smash hit “Tubthumping,” a rousing earworm that instantly became the drinking song of choice in every pub and dorm room that year. With its massive and inspiring chorus (“I get knocked down / But I get up again”) the song topped charts across the globe, and for most casual fans, that was all they would come to know of Chumbawamba. Unbeknownst to most, Chumbawamba had already been a band for 15 years before “Tubthumping” was released, playing and releasing aggressive political punk rock and touring the world.

Chumbawamba singer Dunstan Bruce aims to set the record straight on the band and their experience with the mainstream in a new documentary, the aptly-tilted I Get Knocked Down. Co-directed by Bruce and filmmaker Sophie Robinson, I Get Knocked Down finds Dunstan reckoning with Chumbawamba’s impact a decade after the band dissolved as he looks for new ways to channel his activism and music as he approaches his 60’s. The film features new interviews with Bruce’s former bandmates, along with contributions from fellow ‘80s peace punks like Penny Rimbaud from Crass, who Bruce seeks out for a sense of absolution for the band “selling out” to a major label in the ‘90s.

A thought-provoking look at how to change consumerist culture from inside the beast, I Get Knocked Down is also a personal story of one man reflecting on his wild past and how to continue making a difference as one gets older in a culture continuously obsessed with the latest youth trends.

We caught up with co-directors Dunstan Bruce and Sophie Robinson ahead of their trip to Austin’s SXSW Film Festival, which is hosting both in-person and online screenings of the film. Tickets and the screening schedule are available here.

Bad Feeling Magazine: What was the initial inspiration for the film? How did you come to direct it together?

Dunstan Bruce: I always wanted to make a film about Chumbawamba, and I wanted to make a film about what you could possibly achieve when you entered the mainstream as a political band, whether you could have any influence on the mainstream, whether you could actually help change the world in some way. And so, because of what happened to us, and what happened with “Tubthumping,” I wanted to explore what we’ve done, and to see if there was any sort of blueprint that bands could follow, or artists could follow as an idea.

And so when the band finished, I didn’t want to tread on anyone’s toes prior to that because the band still existed, so I wanted to wait until it came to an end. And then I set off on this journey of trying to get some funding to make that film, and I failed miserably. I had interest from people who thought it was an interesting idea, who knew the band vaguely but knew the song very well. And so I was aware of the fact that there was only interest in the song rather than the band.

I was trying to raise some money via Kickstarter to get the film off the ground, and Sophie was working with an editor called Jim Scott at the time, who I’d worked with on a film that I made when I went to China in 2009 with Sham 69, and I made a film about that. Sophie was editing her film with Jim, My Beautiful Broken Brain, which is on Netflix, which is really good. And so Jim introduced us, he said Sophie had done a really successful Kickstarter campaign for that film, and maybe she could help me raise some money for my film.

So when I met with Sophie, and I told her the idea for the film, she just knew that song, that’s all she knew, she didn’t know anything about Chumbawamba at all. She’s really good at making films and telling stories. I just had, you know, my own anarchist troublemaking past to bring to the film. Our two worlds sort of clashed in a way, and so when I said, “Will you help me just do a Kickstarter?” she was like, “Well, I will, but I’m not just going to do that and then leave it at that.” She was like, “I want to help make the film because it sounds like a really interesting story.”

So that was six, seven years ago that we started working on the film. And at that point, we didn’t really know what the film was, other than this initial idea that I had. And so we started going to film festivals and pitching the idea. A lot of interest we had was not so much about the story of Chumbawamba, it was the contemporary story. And so we developed the idea of the film. We’ve actually told my story, rather than just the story of the band. And so what started off as a sort of quite a straightforward relationship where I was in the film, and Sophie was producing and directing, that sort of became a thing where we were both directing it, and we just took on different roles within the making of the film.

Sophie Robinson: I was really fascinated with the story. And I’d done one music documentary before, and it was with a very mainstream band. And I really liked the whole sort of punk ethos and anarchist ethos behind what they were doing, and all the amazing things that they did, and were trying to do as a band. And so I very much wanted to be part of it. And it felt like fun, you know, a lot of the films that I’ve made are often quite tragic, and about people going through very difficult times in their lives, you know, people having lifesaving operations or having some kind of brain tumor.

Dunstan Bruce: What that time actually gave us was time to really think about what we wanted the film to be. Because I think if we’d made the film from the moment we met, it would not it would be not be anything like what it is now. Time has given us the luxury of discussing how to put the film together, what we wanted to do in the film that was different from a normal music documentary. We developed this whole other character within the film like he’s my Ghost of Christmas Past in A Christmas Carol. And it’s like this character that we’ve invented that sort of acts as the antagonist and I’m the protagonist in the film. And we would never have done that if we’d made the film really quickly, we would never have had those ideas.

The film focuses on your reckoning with Chumbawamba and with the mainstream success of the band;  did your feelings on your work in Chumbawamba change over those six years?

Dunstan Bruce: I think what was important in that process was, it was the point at which we decided that we were going to make a film that was my story, rather than me trying to tell the story of everyone in Chumbawamba. We did a screening with the band, just like an online screening during lockdown when we thought the film was at a stage where we could show it to everybody. And the feeling then was like, there was like this sort of sense of relief from the band that what I had done was I’d told my story. Although most of them do appear in the film and were very willing contributors, they were in it but they didn’t have any editorial control in the film. It’s very much my journey.

In about 2000, I made a film with this guy Ben Unwin called Weldon, a film about Chumbawamba. That was over 20 years ago. So I’ve thought about Chumbawamba a lot, you know, and what my role in the band was, and what the band actually achieved and where we were at, you know, as a band. And one of the reasons I wanted to make the film was because I didn’t want Chumbawamba to disappear, or not to be recognized for the things that we tried to do. And I didn’t want us to just be regarded as a one-hit wonder.

One of the things that Sophie didn’t know when we met and started making the film, was that we existed for 15 years before we had that song. And the things that we did in those 15 years were huge, you know? We were involved in a lot of underground political activity. We were part of a political underground sort of world. A lot of people just thought we came along and were an overnight success, we had this one hit and we just disappeared.

In the making of the film, if I think about what were the interesting times, I think they were when we first started out, and we lived in a squat together, and we’d discovered the political idea of anarchism, and tried to live our lives in a certain way. And then I think the really big interesting time was then until something happened, and how we dealt with all that.

After that, when we disappeared, when we had this fall from grace, we sort of disappeared without a trace and it felt as though we went back to just existing on a sort of underground level. There was no big fallout, there were no people going into rehab, there were no deaths or resurrections. It was trying to pinpoint the bits that were actually interesting, and to tell a story that wasn’t just for people who were in a band, you know? The story is about what you do when you get to my age, and you still want to be involved politically, you still want to engage in a political world, and you’re still wondering how you can best try to change the world in a way.

I think if I’d made the film without Sophie I would have made a very introspective film that was probably full of in-jokes that’d mean nothing to a lot of people. Sophie is a brilliant storyteller, and she can see the bigger picture. And I think I maybe wouldn’t have seen the bigger picture in the same way.

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There’s a whole book that recently came out about punk bands selling out. It feels like that notion doesn’t necessarily exist for newer punk bands the same way it did in the ‘90s or even earlier. Were you still seeking some sort of validation that this move you made into the mainstream was worth it? Did either of you have different opinions on that during the course of the filming?

Dunstan Bruce: Part of the thing about the film was like, how big is that world? You know, how big is the Penny Rimbaud world? How big is the Ian MacKaye world? How big is the Dunstan Bruce world? There’s a whole world outside of there who don’t give a shit if we sold out or not, but would not even consider the idea of us selling out. Where I live now, my neighbours, they’ve seen the film, they love the film. They love what I did. They love the song. They don’t give a shit if I was on EMI or Universal or if I was on Crass records, they don’t care about those things because that’s not their world. And I think that’s something that I could have gotten really sucked into in the film. It was brilliant, having Sophie say, “Look, let’s deal with the bigger ideas and the bigger picture.”

Sophie Robinson: As much as you want to speak to the rest of the world, you find your people, don’t you, and you don’t want to walk away from your own people. So it was trying to get that balance in the film. I think that was partly the journey to me, was not to say it doesn’t matter what you think, because it does really matter what Penny and that crowd thinks and what the kind of hardcore fans think.

In the end, you want to talk to the mainstream, but you’ve got to stay with your people as well. And that’s why it was interesting for me then going on to film Dunstan today doing Interrobang?!, because that was very much going back to those people. You want to speak beyond the echo chamber, but you need the echo chamber to carry you through it as well.

Dunstan Bruce: That’s a really good point, I think about when I started Interrobang?! and started playing again, DIY shows, playing in small pubs, reconnecting with all those people from years ago, and realizing that, yeah, these are my people, this is my world. This is where I felt comfortable. And I felt a part of a scene again, and it was a really positive, life-affirming thing for me, getting a band together again and going out, starting from scratch again.

That was really, really rewarding. And I think that’s why that became part of the film as well because I think it was like saying, I went back to that sort of grassroots DIY sort of world. I don’t think it’s a normal documentary. We’ve tried to do something unusual with it and I just hope people come along on that journey with us.

Are there any plans to celebrate the 25th-anniversary of “Tubthumping?”

Dunstan Bruce: Weirdly, I’ve been sort of quite into the idea of it getting re-released in some form, but I don’t think it’s ever going to happen, because different people in the band have a different opinion on that sort of thing. So it’s never a conversation that really took off in a way.

It is weird. It’s the 25th-anniversary, it still feels like it was yesterday. It doesn’t feel like it was that long ago, and the song still seems to crop up absolutely everywhere. We still get requests from films and adverts and TV shows to use the song, so it hasn’t lost any of its appeal in all that time. And I think that is something that we hoped that we could use as a springboard, you know, to help the film along.

I think that was partly why we chose the title of the film as well actually because we just thought it was the most instantly recognizable thing, the song itself. It’s stupid because it’s called “Tubthumping,” and we never say the word tubthumping in the song. It was like we were already shooting ourselves in the foot with the song. It’s absolutely stupid.

I Get Knocked Down is screening in-person and virtually as part of this year’s SXSW Film Festival. Tickets and the screening schedule are available here