King RockerStewart Lee and Michael Cumming on their 10 favourite cult documentaries
The pair’s doc King Rocker follows the life and legacy of punk icon Robert Lloyd – from Let It Be to Liberace, they select the underdog movies that made them
It’s rare that a documentary is so proud of its unreliability. 15 minutes into King Rocker, the cult musician Robert Lloyd delivers a startling anecdote about Steve Beresford of The Slits. The story is so detailed and outrageous, it sends the typically deadpan comedian Stewart Lee into hysterics. The film then immediately cuts to Beresford, in another room, insisting to camera, “I have no memory of this happening.” In other atypical moments, Lloyd asks Lee if they can reshoot conversations to seem more dramatic. “I’m a liar, and Stew’s a liar,” Lloyd later jokes, “so it’s hard to know who’s leading on who”.
Then again, King Rocker was never going to be a by-the-numbers rock-doc. The hugely enjoyable, off-kilter film is presented by Lee, a subversive stand-up in a rare Louis Theroux role, and directed with mischief by Michael Cumming. Like Brass Eye, which was also directed by Cumming, King Rocker is keen to deconstruct the non-fiction format. “We couldn’t afford archive footage and it’s not possible to prove what happened in a lot of Rob’s stories,” Lee tells me over Zoom. “And the man it’s about doesn’t seem to want to be in it. It’s more about the process of making the film, as well as how this one man held his life together.”
How Lloyd escaped his certain fate is, indeed, fascinating. The singer toured with The Clash when he fronted The Prefects in the late 70s, then seemed destined for fame when he formed The Nightingales in 1979. However, Lloyd repeatedly sabotaged any commercial success. Despite John Peel naming The Nightingales as one of his three favourite acts, the band still remain relatively unknown. So to stay afloat, Lloyd improvises a life outside of music, such as the time he replaced Nigel Slater as GQ’s food critic despite a lack of culinary knowledge and journalism experience. Meanwhile, Lee’s interviews are joyfully loose and often interrupted by eavesdropping strangers. “I don’t know how people make documentaries,” Cumming says. “We didn’t have a researcher. When you don’t have any finances, you work it out for yourself. That’s why it took so bloody long to do.”
Pre-COVID, King Rocker was supposed to premiere at last year’s Sheffield Doc/Fest and receive a theatrical run. Instead, it’ll launch on Sky Arts, not long after Lee’s 2018 special Content Provider featured a routine about staying loyal to the BBC over “Rupert Murdoch’s evil Sky”. The BBC, it turns out, aren’t so adventurous these days. Lee explains, “We’re both BAFTA nominees, but you couldn’t get most broadcasters to even reply to your emails about it.” Cumming adds, “I think the BBC were probably sort of interested in it but not enough to actually do anything about it, in that way they seem to be very good at. Don’t put that in. Or do, if you want.”
In keeping with the spirit of King Rocker and its underdog subject, we asked Lee and Cumming to recommend their 10 favourite cult documentaries. Yes, they’re not all obscure, and one isn’t actually a documentary, but this isn’t Desert Island Discs, so let it be. Anyway, from Let It Be to Liberace, here are the highlights of our 57-minute conversation on Zoom.
LET IT BE – MICHAEL LINDSAY-HOGG (1970)
Michael Cumming: Nowadays you can find anything if you know the right torrent. But it wasn’t available after it came out in cinemas. It’s a fly-on-the-wall look at The Beatles splitting up. You could watch the most famous group in the world arguing and not getting on. It amazes me that this film could be made, then released, and nobody seemed bothered.
There’s a great bit where George is helping Ringo write ‘Octopus’s Garden’ on the piano. The rooftop gig is amazing. The fact they allowed cameras all day, every day, for weeks, seems remarkable. Peter Jackson has been given access to the footage, and he’s going to make a new version, which I think will be the “happy” Beatles story.
Stewart Lee: Maybe if King Rocker does well, it’ll help Peter Jackson’s film get some of the audience it deserves (laughs). I’ve got a little private joke I have with myself. Whenever I feel like someone’s nagging me, I quote George Harrison in that film – and no one’s seen it so they don’t know what it is. I go, (does pissed-off George Harrison impression) “My only desire is to pleeeeeease you.”
At the end of King Rocker, you have Samira Ahmed performing with The Nightingales. It’s a really satisfying conclusion, like the Beatles’ rooftop gig.
Michael Cumming: Samira took on board the idea of lip-syncing to Rob Lloyd in a way that Rob Lloyd was unable to lip-sync to his own songs. It’s amazing.
Stewart Lee: The list of people in King Rocker is hilarious. Chefs and blokes from 70s sex comedies, all jumbled up with people from the post-punk scene and stand-up comedians. You’re not expecting Nigel Slater to be in it, talking about cooking, but there he is.
THE 1970 BBC LINE-UP DOCUMENTARY ON JOHN GAWSWORTH
Stewart Lee: I don’t know who directed it. It’s not commercially available. It came as a disc extra in a book that the poet John Gawsworth had written that was published by the Friends of Arthur Machen. It was on the BBC in 1970. I was too young to see it when it went out. But I remember, there were always interesting things on Arena and quite arty documentaries about obscure figures. You don’t really get them anymore. If you do find them, bizarrely, Sky Arts – and I can’t believe I’m saying this – seem to be picking up the slack for those kind of films that BBC Four have dropped.
Gawsworth’s house where he grew up is currently on the market, I noticed, for £1.1 million, in a crescent in Holland Park. But he was homeless by the time this film was made. He slept in Hyde Park, and died in between the filming and transmission of it. You can find it on a website about Gerald Durrell, who knew him.
It’s like an unhappy version of King Rocker, in that Gawsworth starts out, becomes a minorly successful poet, edits some books, is friends with Edna O’Brien and Lawrence Durrell, becomes a Soho literature figure, and then goes into the mid-period that we find Rob in, in King Rocker, where he’s a postman, gets up in the morning, goes to the pub, gets chucked out after lunch, and goes up and down Charing Cross Road, buying second-hand books from one shop and selling them to one further up the road at a higher rate to make enough money to drink for the day – which is a real Rob Lloyd move – but there isn’t a happy third act in Gawsworth’s film like there is for Rob.
Michael Cumming: I hadn’t seen it before. It’s got fantastic footage of drunk men in pubs, slurring.
Stewart Lee: There’s a lot of footage in that Gawsworth documentary that’s not unlike Rob and me in pubs, or people trying to remember things that they can’t remember (laughs).
Michael Cumming: We cut most of it out of our film, but that film has mostly got that in it.
SLIM GAILLARD’S CIVILISATION – ANTHONY WALL (1989)
Michael Cumming: I’d never heard of Slim Gaillard. I watched it because it was Arena. It was a four-part, four-hour film on fairly primetime BBC, in 1989. Like Stew said, you can’t imagine that happening now. He was a guitarist-singer whose life story was amazing. When he was 12, he went on a sea voyage with his dad, and he accidentally got left behind on the island of Crete. The ship sailed away with his father, and he never saw him again. He worked his passage back to the United States, and ended up in Detroit, driving getaway cars for the Purple Gang during prohibition. He studied at night school to be a musician and eventually wrote a hit song called ‘Flat Foot Floogie’.
The film starts with the old test card that used to be on the BBC with the little girl. That test card comes to life, and it’s the woman as she is now, in her 40s, talking to Slim. There’s no reason to do that, but what a way to draw you in. Then there are these special music sequences that have been shot to add colour. It’s an incredibly fascinating story and a visually unusual treatment.
Stewart Lee: Is that something you were thinking of when you staged the closing number with Samira Ahmed?
Michael Cumming: Yeah. And like you (Nick) said, ‘I’d never heard of The Nightingales’ – after I saw this film, I went straight to the jazz shop on Charing Cross Road, and bought his records, and tried learning as much as I could about him. Sometimes films can do that. The hope is that’s what people might do after watching our film.
GALLIVANT – ANDREW KÖTTING (1996)
Stewart Lee: Andrew is a big influence on me, and I know his family now, which is nice, as an obsessed fan. He treats the process of making the film as indivisible from the film itself. For example, Gallivant is a film where he decides to take his daughter Eden, who was very young and had a condition called Joubert Syndrome, where she wasn’t given long to live, although she’s still alive today – he wanted to take her on a trip around the British Isle with his grandmother, Gladys, so that they would know each other. That’s it.
Halfway through the film, while he’s trying to film something from the side of the van they’re travelling in, he falls off and is run over and goes to hospital (laughs). So that really changes the film. And it doesn’t matter, because it becomes a different film where there’s a big missing bit in the middle. It’s really moving. It’s not like any other film, apart from Andrew Kötting films. It got one star in the Guardian off Peter Bradshaw, and I think it’s one of the 10 greatest films ever made, as do lots of people. He’s still making films now. The Whalebone Box was out last year. It’s superb.
What I got from him was that if something happens, that changes what the film is, and the film becomes that. Evan Parker, who’s a jazz musician, sent me a photocopy of commands and jazz wisdom. One of them was: “What happens in the room, that’s the show.” That really works for stand-up. If the room changes, you go with it. We were lucky that like Kötting in Galivant, we were such a low-impact unit that when the story changed, we could go with it. Have you seen any of his films?
Michael Cumming: I’ve seen Swandown, the one with you in it, Stew.
Stewart Lee: I had to go in a swan-shaped pedalo along the Thames with Alan Moore as some sort of comment on the gentrification of London in the wake of the Olympics (laughs).
THE WORLD OF LIBERACE – TONY PALMER (1972)
Michael Cumming: No talking heads. No voiceover. It’s basically just: Liberace shows you around his massive houses and car collection, intercut with Liberace playing on stage at the height of his pomp. You see his piano-themed bar and barbecue. He’s got an outdoor shagpile carpet around his swimming pool. He’s got his entire wardrobe, which is massive, in three different sizes, because he puts on and loses weight a lot. He’s got a llama-skin bedspread and a massive golden organ.
There’s a cookery slot where he shows you how to cook ‘Liberace lasagne’, which has four different types of meat, four different cheeses, and macadamia nuts. If that’s not a good enough reason to watch it, I don’t know what is.
TWO YEARS AT SEA – BEN RIVERS (2012)
Stewart Lee: It’s about a guy called Jake Williams, who lives as a hermit in the Cairngorms. I suspect some of the footage has been cheated, like when there’s a caravan stuck in a tree. It’s extremely silent and quiet. There’s no commentary, really. I like that about it. We’re slightly freaked out that when King Rocker goes out on Sky, it’ll be chopped up by adverts. You want it to be immersive.
Michael Cumming: Two Years at Sea is almost a piece of art, rather than a documentary. I watched it and I wasn’t sure how much was real. But who cares? That’s part of it.
Stewart Lee: In ours, I’m not sure if things Rob told us was true or not. It doesn’t matter.
Michael Cumming: Even if they weren’t or were, we might have lied about them anyway. When I did the tour of my Brass Eye film (Oxide Ghosts), in the Q&A, every time, I made sure I put in at least one lie just to keep another rumour going.
Stewart Lee: I managed to get a ridiculous, made-up story about Mark E. Smith from The Fall into Esquire magazine, which then became part of his biography. He was asked about it in interviews, and didn’t deny it. Then Steve Hanley, the bass player, in his book, wrote about being present when it happened – but I knew I’d made it up (laughs).
RONNIE’S: RONNIE SCOTT & HIS WORLD-FAMOUS JAZZ CLUB – OLIVER MURRAY(2020)
Michael Cumming: It reminded me of an old-school Arena documentary. There’s no talking heads in it apart from archive of Ronnie Scott himself. It’s all done with audio. There’s no commentary. You just watch some amazing performances, and the story of this musician. He’s obsessed by American bebop music, and realised there was nowhere in his country he could play it, so he opened up his own club. You immerse yourself in the music.
Stewart Lee: It’s also like this film in as much as, under lockdown, you see people in a place watching something, all crowded together. It makes you want to get out again. It’s also about how Ronnie Scott just had to do that. It wasn’t about the money. That’s the thing you get off Rob as well. It’s the thing they had to do. If they’re not doing it, they get really depressed.
GARNET’S GOLD – ED PERKIN (2014)
Stewart Lee: It’s about a man in his 60s who’s a carer for his mother. He then remembers a myth about a bit of treasure being lost in a lake in Scotland, and decides he’ll go find it. Obviously Ed Perkins had heard about this bloke in a pub, and shot loads of footage of him, and then had to make a story out of it. It ends up following what screenwriters call Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey.
It’s also what happens in King Rocker. I hadn’t self-consciously said, ‘Let’s try to organise this material in this way.’ But actually it’s ended up with a classic mythic structure like King Arthur or Star Wars. Rob gets going. He gets near to what he wants with the Fuzzbox years and the chart single. He blows it all, then claws back his life to a place of equilibrium and happiness.
Michael Cumming: Garnet’s Gold is a very uplifting film. I hope the ending of ours is similarly upbeat. I’ve seen too many music documentaries with a terrible ending.
Were you thinking of Robert McKee and Save the Cat when editing, Michael?
Michael Cumming: No. Probably Stewart was (laughs).
Stewart Lee: I knew we needed a fourth act before the fifth act, and Rob had to be shown to have lost everything. And he really did. He lost everything more significantly than we were able to get him to talk about. There’s a story about him being thrown out of a car in a business deal gone wrong involving criminals, but I couldn’t get to the bottom of that.
He was also aware that’s what I was trying to get out of him. At the end, Rob says, ‘Is this the kind of thing you want me to say?’– which we’ve left in. I really like that.
Michael Cumming: It reveals the contrived nature of documentaries.
THE RUTLES: ALL YOU NEED IS CASH – ERIC IDLE, GARY WEIS (1978)
Michael Cumming: The Rutles isn’t a real documentary, but to me it’s real. It’s funny, it stands the test of time, and was long before Spinal Tap. It’s the accuracy of the way it’s done. Neil Innes told me an amazing thing, which was that at the time they were making it, the Beatles got a documentary that later became The Anthology – and it wasn’t released. But they let them see a cut of the film. The Anthology came out 20 years later.
They were parodying stuff in a film that wasn’t going to come out for a long time. That’s why it looks really authentic. There’s a great performance from Mick Jagger in it as himself. The way he does it is so believable. That was always the benchmark when we were doing Brass Eye and trying to make things that would be convincing.
HONEYLAND – TAMARA KOTEVSKA, LJUBOMIR STEFANOV (2019)
Stewart Lee: It’s about a North Macedonian beekeeper and has the same shape as our film. The beekeeper, she’s doing alright, looking after her mother, and harvesting her wild bees’ honey. Then some people move into the field next-door and mess up the ecosystem, and her bees start dying. Then she manages to get them going again at the end. If you like a film about the struggles of a North Macedonian beekeeper, you’re probably going to like King Rocker. If you like a four-hour documentary about The Eagles, you’re probably not going to like King Rocker.
Because you both work in comedy, at the end of the day are you more likely to unwind in front of a documentary about a North Macedonian beekeeper than, say, Taskmaster?
Michael Cumming: You wouldn’t catch me watching Taskmaster.
Stewart Lee: I’ve seen an episode of Taskmaster. I thought it was good. Alex Horne used to do it as a live show, which I remember taking my kids to when they were really small. But King Rocker isn’t anything to do with that world. We’re very glad Sky’s taken it on to show it, because it doesn’t fit any obvious genre. And I’ve managed to completely isolate myself from the wider comedy community (laughs), so it’s not really part of that. Rob seems to think it’s his passport to minor celebrity fame. He thinks he’ll be able to become what he describes as a Bez-like figure (laughs), doing things where he drinks Bovril with celebrities.
So he’ll be on the next series of Taskmaster.
Stewart Lee: He’s more likely to be on Taskmaster than me. Can I just say one thing? We didn’t anticipate this at the time, because no one anticipated lockdown, but I feel so lucky that the last bit of work was done before everything stopped. It’s something I’m so proud to be involved in. A year down the line, talking about it, it’s a real morale boost.
I think it reminds people of the world of live music and live art that we’re in danger of completely losing. The average person doesn’t understand the economics of it, and doesn’t understand that for most people who are artists who work live, they’re working in the sort of climate that people like Rob Lloyd and the Nightingales do. It reminds people of that really vibrant world that’s often under the radar in comedy, music, fringe theatre, and all sorts of things. These practitioners are not handsomely rewarded, and whatever little resources they did have were completely chucked away in the last year.
But it’s also, I think, a feelgood film at the moment. It makes me happy to think about it going out.
Michael Cumming: The hope is that we can, at some point later in the year, put it in some cinemas and do a tour with Q&As.
Stewart Lee: We showed a half-hour rough cut at EartH Cinema in Hackney. It was 600 people really laughing at all the places you’d hope they laugh. It’d be great to show a properly funny film in a cinema, and to hear a roomful of people laughing.
Michael Cumming: If there are any cinemas left.
Stewart Lee: Or people. If there are any people left.