4 minute read
DUNSTAN BRUCE
IS THEATRE THE OBVIOUS NEXT STEP FOR AN ANARCHIST ‘ONE HIT WONDER’? LEE FISHER QUESTIONS DUNSTAN BRUCE TO FIND OUT
The story of Chumbawamba is a fascinating, exciting, powerful one, especially when you get to the point in 1997 when they had a bona fide pop hit and ruffled some anarcho-punk feathers by signing to EMI (“it wasn’t THAT EMI”, as Dunstan Bruce points out). It’s a story worthy of a great film, which Bruce – former Chumbawamba and latterly Interrobang‽ singer – has made. And it’s brilliant. But while Bruce and his co-director Sophie Robinson were grappling with licensing and distribution and that whole hellscape, lockdown came along and Bruce wondered what the hell to do next.
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“Interrobang‽ couldn’t get it together to write a second album and I had all these lyrics I wanted to do something with. So I started doing this one-man show that was only about 25 minutes long, The Existential Angst Of Dunstan Bruce. It just wasn’t cut out for the gig environment, but Sophie said, ‘Look, make that 50 minutes long and I’ll direct it!’ We started developing it in lockdown, introducing ideas about how to present it. If you were to draw a Venn diagram of the film and the show, there’d be quite a large overlap of the two, but it’s less about Chumbawamba and more about one man’s personal journey – ‘what do you do when you reach middle age, when you still want to remain relevant and visible, you’re still angry. Where’s your place in the world?’”
Bruce admits theatre was outside his comfort zone. “Chumbawamba had a big theatrical element but that was never really my role in the band. I didn’t want to do stand-up or ‘An Evening With…’, I wanted to do something that was poetry and prose and music, I use a lot Interrobang‽ songs in the show and obviously I reference Tubthumping. I’ve never felt any sort of ill will towards that song, it’s never been an albatross. I feel as though that song liberated me in a way, to do a lot of things I would never have been able to do.”
As someone who’s keen on reinvention and challenging himself, Bruce admits it’s a massive adrenaline rush. “I think it’s brilliant at my age to be experiencing something new, it makes me wonder what I’m going to do I when I get to 70. I’ve no desire to go skydiving or deep-sea-diving or anything like that.”
From the beginning, Interrobang‽ were always quite theatrical. “I made a decision right at the beginning of the band to not engage with the audience, because I wanted to present the whole thing as one piece. I wasn’t interested in banter or asking people how they were. And that’s what you do in theatre, you’re not supposed to break the fourth wall.” Writing outside the Chumbawamba collective has also been an important step for him. “Interrobang‽ was the first time that I had complete control over the lyrics, and that was a really liberating experience. It enables me to expose myself, it’s more personal.
With Chumbawamba, it was never from a personal point of view, but now you get the vulnerability and the humanity as well, not just the anger all the time.”
Dunstan Bruce performs Am I Invisible Yet? at The Exchange, North Shields on Friday 7th and Saturday 8th, and at The Georgian Theatre, Stockton on Sunday 9th October. The film I Get Knocked Down should appear in 2023. www.aiiy.co.uk
