FOR MANY, the song of 1997 was Things Can Only Get Better, but for others well, it was something else altogether … I Get Knocked Down.
The hit from Leeds-based anarcho-pop band Chumbawamba was everywhere, permeating popular culture like few other tracks in that year of Britpop.
But for the band, getting another hit was tricky. Not quite a one-hit wonder band, the group’s star waned.
And what happened next? Founding member of the group, Dunstan Bruce, has found out, with an intriguing soul-searching film coming to Reading Biscuit Factory this spring.
On Saturday, March 11, Dunstan will be present for a screening of I Get Knocked Down, which he co-directed with filmmaker Sophie Robinson (My Beautiful Broken Brain).
In the film, he is struggling with the fact that the world seems to be going to hell in a handcart.
Twenty years after his fall from grace, Bruce is angry and frustrated, but how does a retired middle-aged radical get back up again?
In this punk version of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, Dunstan is visited by the antagonistic ghost of his anarchist past – his alter ego, ‘Babyhead’ – who forces him to question his own life, sending him on a search for his long-lost anarchist mojo.
After the screening, Dunstan will take part in a question and answer session.
Chumbawamba were a British band formed in 1982, and disbanded in 2012, and they drew on genres such as punk, pop and folk.
Their anarcho-communist political leanings led them to have an irreverent attitude toward authority, and to espouse a variety of political and social causes including animal rights and pacifism (early in their career) and later regarding class struggle, Marxism, feminism, gay liberation, pop culture, and anti-fascism.
Tickets cost £17.60, and are available by searching for ‘I GET KNOCKED DOWN’ on wegottickets.com
