The Levellers
A Curious Life
Words: Richard O'Hagan
A Curious Life - Running time 78 mins | Directed by Dunstan Bruce | Produced by Dandy Films | Cert 15.
‘A Curious Life’ is indeed a curious thing. Directed by former Chumbawamba frontman Dunstan Bruce, and purporting to be a review of the 25-year history of The Levellers, it comes out just in time for their 28th anniversary and is, in fact, a potted life story of bass player Jeremy Cunningham rather than a detailed overview of the band’s career.
To some extent, this is no bad thing. Cunningham has always been the most interesting and most engaging of the sextet – an artist talented enough to produce a pen and ink sketch of the Albert Hall from memory and who yet prefers to produce giant paintings which scare his mother, a man whose flat is filled with books on ancient and mediaeval history (including a couple of doctoral theses) and yet who can’t find his way from London's Chinatown to Old Compton Street unaided, and a man whose drug addiction means that he’s remortgaged said flat more often than he can remember, but who happily spends (when he eventually locates Old Compton Street) a hundred pounds on two bottles of quality malt whiskey. Frankly, you could almost have made the entire 78 minutes just about Cunningham and not made it any less interesting.
And that’s part of the problem. Cunningham is such a strong force within the film that the parts without him sag. There are the occasional gems - guitarist Simon Friend, so often perceived as the angry face of the band, comes across as a gentle soul with a very dry wit and a fine sense of comic timing; keyboard player Matt Savage - the only addition to the band since 1990 - reveals that he wasn’t actually a Levellers fan until he joined them; but there’s little to match the sight of the bass player rooting through the band’s archives or rummaging through the loft of a production company in search of footage of their 1992 Glastonbury performance.
In many ways, the film raises more questions than it answers, too. There’s little to explain the band’s longevity beyond violinist Jon Sevink’s offhand comment that they are all otherwise unemployable. Whilst the band themselves reject the suggestion that they are a democracy, there’s no attempt to challenge this in the light of former guitarist Alan Miles’ claim that he left the band after singer Mark Chadwick tried to suggest that he (Chadwick) was more important than the rest of them.
But then maybe Cunningham hits the nail right on the head at the very start of the film, when he opines that ‘…the most interesting thing about me is that I’m in The Levellers’. And maybe the most interesting thing about The Levellers is that, after all these years, they are still The Levellers. Still principled, still different and even more unusually in the music industry, still friends. In that sense, this documentary captures them perfectly.
The Levellers are currently on “A CURIOUS LIFE TOUR' where dates will feature a screening of the film followed by a full band live acoustic performance. Remaining dates as below.
February
24. ISLE OF WIGHT Shanklin
25. BURY ST EDMUNDS The Apex
26. LONDON Union Chapel
27. LEEDS Town Hall
28. BEXHILL De La Warr Pavilion
March
01. WARWICK Arts Centre
03. NORTHAMPTON Derngate
04. BASINGSTOKE The Anvil
05. BUXTON Opera House
06. LIVERPOOL Philharmonic Hall
07. BATH Forum
No comments:
Post a Comment