#Tim v sham 69 windows

It was gonna be a band battling against the odds.

They wanted something that followed the Anvil template: a bunch of middle aged musicians who’d been battling, doing part time jobs to keep the band going, and this was gonna be their moment when everything was gonna turn around and be wonderful. I think – this is only my assumption – that they wanted a certain sort of film to be made about the band. It basically became a film about a group of middle aged men dealing with being on tour, having a belief in the band Sham 69 but not necessarily all getting on with each other. I was immediately building up all this information about what they all thought about each other. They will talk to you about other people in the band, saying stuff they wouldn’t say to other members or to the specific people they’re moaning about. It’s a weird position to be in, being on the road with a band, because you almost become a confidante or a pressure valve for each member of the band. It was a process of getting to know the band and working out the relationships between them as we were out there. They started in about ’76, I started in about ’81. But even then we just told her we were making a film to show our friends back home.ĭid you know Sham from your days in a band? Only once in Tiananmen Square when a tourist guide approached us, and we didn’t believe she was a tourist guide. We existed in this paranoid world.ĭid anything ever happen, or come close to happening? Every moment we were outside we thought we were gonna get arrested. She had authorization, she had a fixer with her, she had a government official with her, and she still got arrested twice. I’d talked to a filmmaker before I went who had gone to make a film about a blind Chinese musician. We went into China with no papers, no authority to do any filming whatsoever. So this was beyond DIY – this was getting thrown in at the deep end. We flew to Shanghai and met them there, having just had one meeting with Tim V prior to going. So I had to get myself and a cameraman there. They had no money, but they wanted someone to go and film the tour, with the possibility of making a documentary out of it. Jerry couldn’t do it, he was working on other stuff, but he said I know somebody who would probably be really good for it, and he put the band in touch with me. Sham 69 had seen the film and had asked Jerry to make a film about them and their tour of China in 2009.

MFW: How did you get involved with Sham and the China project?ĭunstan Bruce: What happened was that Jerry Rothwell, he’d made the documentary Heavy Load, and Heavy Load the band had played with Sham 69. Can the passionate rebellion of punk still unite the kids across gulfs of language, culture, and time? Can a band of middle-aged true believers survive trying to find out? Finding that out was no easy ride, Bruce told MFW – and getting through two weeks in China was just the half of it.

#Tim v sham 69 windows

At that point Sham had only one original member, guitarist Dave Parsons (founder and frontman Jimmy Pursey having left a few years earlier), a fact of little moment to their enthusiastic Chinese audiences but an unspoken source of friction between Parsons and his bandmates: drummer Ian Whitewood, bassist Al Campbell, and singer Tim V.īruce, a former member of long running anarcho-punk collective Chumbawamba (that’s him singing lead on their unlikely galactic hit “Tubthumping”), was no stranger to intra-band dynamics, and This Band Is So Gorgeous!, his DIY document of the tour, captures Sham splintering as they find themselves again serving as punk pied pipers, amid the disorienting reality of a fast-changing society viewed from train windows and club stages. Three decades later, Sham was still soldiering on, if not quite so united, as filmmaker Dunstan Bruce discovered when he accompanied the band on a tour of China, the first such trek by a major UK punk act. Sham 69′s 1978 anthem “If the Kids Are United” was one of the signature songs of British punk. With their usual fine taste, the programmers selected several films MFW has reported on previously, so we’re reposting some of those pieces for the benefit of the Leeds audience, and anyone else who might have missed them the first time around. MusicFilmWeb is pleased to be a media partner of the 2012 Leeds International Film Festival, focusing on the music documentary lineup.