Fandom can be a beautiful, contradictory thing. We want to share the things we love, but we also want to hold them close, to keep them pure. Nothing kills a cult act as quickly as acceptance by the mainstream. Rock history is littered with fringe acts who drifted a little too close to the sun, who torched their existing audience as they went seeking a new one.
For Rob Lloyd, singer and songwriter in short-lived Birmingham punks the Prefects, and their post-punk reincarnation, the Nightingales, that Rubicon arrived in the late Eighties when, having put the band on hiatus, he somehow reinvented himself as a soft-focus pop singer, a kind of reverse Scott Walker. Backed by Virgin, it looked like his solo album, Me and My Mouth, might – in defiance of all logic – transform him into a Rick Astley-like heartthrob, and shift his poster from the bedrooms of grungy teen boys to those of their tween sisters.
Of course, it didn’t happen. Even if it had, it might not have stuck. Some cult figures don’t get that way by choice; they just can’t stomach the kinds of creative compromise that pave the way to Radio One playlists and BBC One shows.
Which segues us nicely into the careers of Michael Cumming and Stewart Lee, the former a groundbreaking director, responsible for a string of cult British comedies, including Brass Eye, Snuff Box and Toast of London; the latter a scabrous stand-up comedian, who berates his audiences for only coming to see him because they recognise him off the TV. Aptly, the pair have bootstrapped a documentary about Rob Lloyd, called King Rocker, which tracks his career from Birmingham’s Seventies punk scene up to the present day, which finds him, in his sixties, still writing and recording new music with an updated Nightingales lineup.
Lloyd comes across like a kind of shadow-Zelig, always on the cusp of stardom but – whether through self-sabotage or bad luck – never quite achieving it. Early on, the Prefects were drafted for the Clash’s White Riot tour after the Jam dropped out, but were jettisoned after abusing audiences, and for wearing the Clash t-shirts they’d been given inside out in protest. The Clash’s manager, Bernie Rhodes, labeled Lloyd and co “amateur wankers”; 25 years later, having never actually got round to recording an album proper, they repurposed the slur for a 2004 retrospective LP.
Or there’s the time, in the mid-Eighties, as Lloyd was performing with the Nightingales and running Vindaloo Records, when he wrote the earworm ‘Rocking With Rita’ for Fuzzbox, a girlband he’d signed. A saccharine surf-pop record, the group ended up performing it on an ITV kids’ show Razzamatazz, and it was on the cusp of becoming a novelty hit – complete with expensive music video – only for a broadcast ban on music promos to sink its chances.
Then there was the pop reinvention, or the time he was commissioned by gangsters to shoot the video for the theme song to Disney’s Anastasia and wound up being thrown out of a moving car, or the sitcom he wrote for the BBC, or the food column he somehow ended up with in GQ.
All of which is explored in King Rocker, which is not, as you might have guessed by now, your typical rock documentary. Fittingly, considering the pair behind it, it’s as much a musing on the role of storytelling, of the tensions between commerce and honesty, and a hunt for an enormous statue of King Kong.
I want to start by asking, do you think Rob could have ever been successful?
Stewart Lee: I think there's a world in which he's Jarvis Cocker.
Michael Cumming: Yeah, at the time of the Virgin record, it certainly felt very close. Although knowing Rob, he probably would've then made the next album that was so inaccessible.
Stewart: A lot of those cult artists, if they have one accessible album, they can drag a load of people through with them. He was unlucky with that one. That's partly what the film is about; getting to that point where everything's aligned and then it not coming together. Although he may have found a way to sabotage it.
So there’s almost an alternative path he might have taken, which feels quite apt for a documentary where his own memories are so unreliable.
Stewart: Rob emailed me the other day saying, ‘Did you know I was the first person in Britain ever to wear a baseball cap?’ And he explained at length about that [laughs]. I thought, well, that would've been a good story [laughs]. Actually, Michael has put together a different edit of the film which is basically all the stuff we cut, but he's assembled it to tell essentially the same story using entirely different material. Of course there's another version of it to be made which is all the things that we've found out afterwards.
Michael: We jokingly entitled that – he sent us that email about the baseball cap – and we proposed ideas for King Rocker 2 [laughs].
Stewart: It's interesting you say that. One of the things about it was that, because we couldn't get straight answers from people about things, we began to enjoy the fact that it's an unreliable history. People contradict each other and so to remake the film with entirely different information that disproved its original thrust would be within the tradition of it actually [laughs].
Michael: It would. That thing about conflicting versions of events sort of took over really and became a thing, which is something I really like to do, messing with the truth. Obviously Stewart's stand up, there's an element of that in it. It just felt the right thing to do. At the end I wish there was more of that, but then that would've probably been contrived.
Stewart: It's because it was only us working at our own speed, we hadn't got backers as such and we found out what the film was as it went along. We had an idea for this through-line about the the King Kong [a statue of Kong was erected in Birmingham in 1972 as part of a public art programme, only to rejected by locals and end up first advertising a used car dealership, then a Scottish market, until it was finally rescued and restored in Penrith], and the story of Rob's life does break down into a neat sort of four- or five-act structure, so to speak. But we were able to follow some really fun blind alleys like the cookery column story. The idea that the stories were conflicting gradually evolved through it. For example, really early on, Rob mentioned that he tried to heckle off Steve Beresford, the free improvising piano player, at some event. And I know Steve Beresford, we can check that. [Steve Beresford appears immediately after Rob tells that story, disavowing it completely].
Michael: That was the first one wasn't it? I thought, that's a great way of dealing with that. Describing what you're going to do on camera and then what will come up will be a completely opposite version [laughs].
Stewart: I think in that way people will recognise it as something that we've been involved with because you can see the skeleton of it and you can see the choices being made by the people writing and putting it together. I also think that's within the tradition of the sort of world The Nightingales come from as well. It's kind of robust and it's punk rock, but it is critical of itself and it interrogates itself and its art as well. It's nice to put something back to that world, which is something that inspired both of us, that whole world of John Peel British underground counterculture, post-punk art, you know. It's a homage to that world, really.
Michael: Rob even wrote a song called ‘Gales Doc’, about the ridiculous notion that somebody would make a documentary about The Nightingales. That’s in the film, feeding back on itself.
It doesn't feel like a music documentary in the traditional sense. They tend to follow a very specific narrative – the struggle, the rise, the glory years, then either an explosive demise or gradual fade out. But Rob and the Nightingales lend themselves to a more interesting story. Did you know from the outset you wanted that difference?
Stewart: When we first talked about this, I watched loads and loads of ‘rockumentaries’ and my son, who was about 10 at the time, would stick his head in and I'd go, ‘what have all these things got in common?’ He said, ‘they're all loads of footage of old men remembering things, and then black and white photos’. I thought, ‘yes, we need to avoid that.’ But it's not going to be like a normal rockumentary anyway. Partly because there's so little actual footage of them [laughs] or evidence of them having done anything. I mean we basically used every piece of live footage that we could get, didn't we?
Michael: Yeah.
Stewart: Nothing.
Michael: Also documentaries generally don't – I'm sure there's exceptions – but they generally don't have a character like Stewart who's telling the story, and it's his personal thing. When we first discussed it we weren't sure how much Stewart would actually be in it, and when we did our first interviews we had a camera on Stewart, but we also shot it in a way that he could be excluded. But Stewart and Rob got on so well together and their became part of the thing, really. That's what makes it different for me.
Stewart: There's a sort of accidental thing in it, as well, about him being a sort of father figure that you're trying to help or understand. For that story to pan out, it's useful to have another person in it. I hope Rob doesn't think there's too much of me and not enough of him, but actually it was lucky that I ended up being in it, in a way, because Rob often didn't really want to talk, say anything or give anything away. So it's quite hard to be invited to make a film about someone who you then realise doesn't really want to tell you anything about their life [laughs] or speak very much about it. And also, at times when he has agreed to speak, he's often in a state where it's after a gig and he's really wrecked.
Michael: Also it's two different versions of the same thing, a lot of the time.
Stewart: That's really early on. In the Marc Riley session, he denied something that he'd said to me about three days previously on camera [laughs]. Normally, when you watch a biopic of a famous person, you know what the end is. If you watch one about Jimi Hendrix, you know at some point he chokes on vomit, right? So you're sort of waiting for that to happen. Whereas with this, presumably most people seeing it won't. They'll know they're not famous, because they'd have heard of them, but they won't really know what's going to happen next. There's some incredible surprises in it, like they suddenly are on Razzamatazz, on mainstream television dancing with loads of women in day-glo clothes [laughs] and children and recognisable Eighties DJs. And, then, what, a sitcom? He nearly gets a sitcom made. And then he becomes a food critic. It seems like a made up story, doesn't it? [laughs]
It really does. The idea that you could have a punk like Rob Lloyd, and Ted Chippington, this abrasive, anti-humour comedian, singing a weird Hawaiian blues song on ITV doesn’t seem like it could possibly ever have appeared.
Stewart: Well funnily enough, when I did that piece for The Culture Show about Ted Chippington, in 2007, the producer suddenly had the director in and went, ‘alright, I know what's going on – this is a hoax, isn't it? You've cooked up this weird hoax with Stewart Lee and Phil Jupitus to get me to put on a film about someone who's never existed, because why haven't I ever heard of this bloke and why's there no footage of him?’ [laughs] We had to go, ‘no he is real’. They thought he was a made up prank. But King Rocker also has the feel of this, doesn't it? It's partly because they were the Birmingham punk band, and Birmingham's so self-effacing. It can produce a group that [legendary music journalist] Paul Morley is happy to tell us are hugely significant. The Prefects were on The Clash’s White Riot tour, and yet they're barely documented anywhere. It's a rock journalist cliche to say they're mythical, but they are mythical. When I got into The Nightingales as a kid, I found out they'd been in this group, The Prefects, I just couldn't find any evidence they ever existed at all [laughs].
Michael: Part of the appeal for me when I first started listening to The Nightingales was that people hadn't heard of them. They were your band because. To their detriment, probably, but it made me very pleased that I knew about this thing that other people didn't know so much about.
Stewart: Rob said to me in an email recently, ‘do you think I'll be able to capitalise on this and become a Bez-like figure?’
Michael: [Laughs]
Stewart: Because he thought he might be able to get a cooking programme or something like that. He's got this kind of dysmorphia about his talent. Bez is very good, but he was a man who danced with maracas. Rob has got all the character and personality that a Bez-like figure has got, but he's clearly a writer and an artist in his own right and yet he seems so self-effacing and modest about it most of the time. He's not a Bez like figure is he? Bez? [Snorts]
Michael: I would like to see his cookery show. I'd like to make his cookery show.
Stewart: Actually, it wasn't cooking. He sent a list of women he thought he'd like to meet and said that he should have a pint and a pork pie with them. A lot of them were world leaders. If this film does make any sort of impact, you know, I do feel like he's got that in him.
I’d never heard of him, but what struck me is that every song that came on, I thought, ‘this is amazing. Why have I not heard this?’ And the sitcom, which you do a table read of, is hilarious. You’d think that someone who’s that good, in every permutation of a 40-year career, would have one thing would cut through.
Stewart: Yeah, but it's a meritocracy up to a point. There's just so many random elements involved. There's so many great people in stand-up that I've met over 35 years that no one's ever heard of.
Michael: His second album, that would've been the next thing he released on Virgin, is amazing. He's still got a cassette of it and we used a tiny bit of it in the film and we might try and release some of it, but it is really good and really not like The Nightingales.
Stewart: You used that track that he wrote that's like a Scott Walker song, and yet we were at his house in Telford and he suddenly went, ‘oh I've got demos for a second album’. I went, ‘what?’ And he goes in this box and finds a tape, but some of it had been erased, and then he just played us it in the room and it had that incredible Scott Walker-y kind of song on it. It only sort of occurred to him then that that might be of interest.
When did you both first discover the Nightingales?
Stewart: I didn't see The Nightingales in their first incarnation, but I saw them as soon as they got back together at the start of this century.
Michael: I hadn't caught up with the newer version of The Nightingales live. I knew they were putting out a few bits and pieces, but I saw them originally, because I'm old as fuck. I saw them a couple of times at the time of the country period, their third album, and I used to go and see Ted Chippington whenever I could. I tried to get Ted Chippington in a film that I was making when I was a film student and he never got back to me [laughs]. Apt, given that he also never turned up to the interview in our film.
Stewart: In this I mean he never turned up for his own interview did he? I mean it was, it's really funny.
Michael: Maybe you did make him up Stew, maybe he never really did exist [laughs].
There's a point in the documentary, on your book tour, Stewart, where you talk about how working class creatives like Rob have been basically legislated out of existence by the Tories. Do you think that there's still like a space for people like him to exist?
Stewart: What I was thinking of when I wrote that – and it's written as a deliberately overstated line – but even as late as 1989, when I came to London from university to try to do stand-up, there were squats, there was housing benefit, there was enterprise allowance, there was unemployment benefit. My rent was £25 a week. Now people are in debt if they've been to further education, there's no little crevices that they can hibernate in while they work out what they're doing. You see it in stand-up, I think it's meant that people are driven much more quickly to make slightly immoral choices about where they work and how they work. They step on other people. They call it social networking but it's not, it's basically trampling over the heads of the dead. They sometimes develop more commercial acts than they might want to, because they have to see a result more quickly. It struck me as an irony, a few years ago, when Boris Johnson was mayor of London he celebrated the 40th anniversary of punk, there was no way that that creative outpouring could ever have happened in the city that he was now running because of the sheer cost of living there and the way that all the little slipstreams people used to be able to inhabit have been dammed up. So I think Rob is a product of a particular time. But young people will tell you that there are different ways of doing those things now, and I'm sure there are, and I don't want to sound like some 52 year old guy going, ‘it was all better in our day’.
Michael: [Laughs]
Stewart: But it was kind of an adventure in the real world, trying to be that sort of person in the Seventies and Eighties and Sixties. Whereas now, it's an adventure in a virtual world. Of course, we don't know what sort of talents will be left standing on the other side of all this, or when people will be able to make work in real spaces again. That's all I’m going to say on that.
You touch on this a fair amount in the film, but what do you think Rob hopes the impact of the film is for The Nightingales, and his legacy in general?
Stewart: Oh, can I answer that Michael?
Michael: Of course.
Stewart: I think he's partly in denial about it. He tries to say that he just hopes it means they can get some money, and he won't be drawn on the idea that he wants to be recognised as a talent or to be given credit. But what Michael's managed to find – that's why we took him up to that stone circle, because it's a monument that's survived. And he wouldn't be drawn on that, he absolutely took the piss out of the whole idea of going there [laughs]. That's what I was trying to say to him up there: ‘You've asked for us to make this but you don't seem to know why you wanted it to be made’ [laughs].
Michael: I also think he would be pleased that you said you'd never heard of them and then you watched it and you really liked the music. I think that would be one of the reasons he did it and I think a few people have said that to me about watching it, saying that I didn't know anything about this, I'd never heard of them and I really like the music. I remember when we were filming at 6Music, an old mate of mine who's a sound recordist came along as a favour and was recording it. He's an old punk and he'd never heard of them, then they played their first song in the session at 6Music and I just heard him go, ‘fucking hell, that was brilliant’.
Stewart: It does seem like there was a point where a lot of people from that era, like Gang of Four, were being given their chance to be recognised in the 00s. Some of them got really good second careers out of it, or at least a nice little feature on the BBC 2 Arts programme, but they didn't really ever get any of that. It does seem strange.
Michael: I think part of that might be that when he came back with Nightingales version two, he brought them back as a going concern of a band. He very rarely plays old material. Although they didn't have a massive fanbase, I imagine some of even the older Nightingales fans would've probably started to back away because he's not playing the jangly songs that they remember. It's always been that sort of moving forward, playing the recent stuff, not being a heritage act. Which seems ridiculous, because they weren't that famous, but even within their small group of people, not just playing the old stuff –
Stewart: I love that edit you made at the start where you cut between the 1981 footage and the 2019 footage and when we come back to that song at the end, it looks so great that song they're doing. It doesn't feel remotely like a heritage act going through the motions of nostalgia and when that song finishes, he looks like he's won. He absolutely looks like he's won the game of life to be doing that at 60, not the same as 40 years ago but a brilliant thing. I love the way that end comes together, and I can say this because I wasn't involved in that structuring, it just feels like uh on his own terms, he's made a real success of that idea.
Michael: Our intention with this was to tour it to cinemas first of all, to try and tie that in with Nightingales shows, I didn't really think this would get onto television.
Stewart: We've benefitted from the fact that the virus means that content is running out [laughs].
Michael: We were lucky because, in a few of the things to raise money, we show little clips of it and certainly for me – and I'm sure for Stewart as well – seeing an audience react to it–
Stewart: Oh god.
Michael: You know, Stew's a stand up and that's what he gets all the time, but as a person who makes TV or films, you don't get to see people sit at home and watch the things you make.
Stewart: We did it about three times to an audience of about 600 people, at EartH in East London, and hearing a full cinema of people laughing at a film was great. It reminded me of seeing Airplane or something at the cinema as a kid, you know, really laughing, and also we realised that the humour of some of where the cuts were had really worked. The bit when he's denying that Frank Skinner was in it, and you cut straight to Frank Skinner talking about being in it – that got a huge laugh in the cinema. It wasn't anything anyone had said, it was about the juxtaposition of the images. It was really nice seeing that. It's a rockumentary but it's – the weird thing about it I didn't realise until afterwards is how, without planning it, it's organised along the dictates of Joseph Campbell's idea of the hero's journey [laughs]. This ancient idea of someone who starts out, and then is knocked back and then has to learn something about themselves, and comes back to succeed. So the film, although it's a rockumentary and it's funny, Rob’s created this story that has that shape to it.
It helps that Rob’s lived his life like that.
Stewart: Yeah, he comes back like you know, Aslan the Lion or Gandalf, he comes back [laughs] for the last third, even more powerful, they strike him down but he comes back more powerful [laughs].
The cutaways, where you essentially fact-check Rob’s stories with the people he’s talking about, where there any people you wish you could get who you couldn’t?
Stewart: Oh yeah, a lot. Julie Christie, couldn't get her.
Michael: Who was the one off Eastenders we wanted?
Stewart: Patsy from Eastenders wouldn't talk to us without a fee about whether she left her milk bottles out or not.
Michael: When Rob was a postman, he said that she was on his round and she never cleaned her milk bottles [laughs]. So we wanted to ask about that, obviously.
Stewart: We wanted to talk to Pete Shelley, because Rob claimed that Pete Shelley offered him the uh vocal slot in The Buzzcocks after Howard Devoto left. But Pete Shelley died to avoid being in the film [laughs].
I was amazed at how many people Robin Askwith had showers with.
Stewart: Wasn't Askwith great? He's known as this bloke from broad comedies, but he's done all sorts of things, he was in Pasolini films. He's not actually a sex milkman in real life [laughs].
Michael: If you'd have tried to plan that, it could never have happened, but that was one of those brilliant Rob moments, just chuck that in. When we were in front of the statue talking about King Kong, and Stew was talking about Queen Kong and Robin Askwith mentioned, that's, when Rob said, ‘well I can tell you about when I had a shower with Robin Askwith’. That was the first time we had heard anything about that, we didn't know it was going to happen. It wasn't set-up to get that answer. On the way back down to London Stew drafted an email to Robin Askwith. I got in touch with a mate of mine who I knew would probably have his email address. I sent him it and by the next morning, Askwt had replied with this very funny email saying about all the people he's had showers with, but he doesn't remember having one with Robert Lloyd, and yes he'd be happy to say that on camera.
Stewart: That's one of the reasons I'd like it to be in cinemas. I'd like there to be a poster with little stars, with all the names of the different people that are in it, for someone to walk by and think what kind of film is that? [Laughs] That's got Robin Asquith in it.
Michael: Samira Ahmed, in the same film.
It isn't Anvil-type film about a comedy band, but it is a very funny film about a band.
Michael: Well, Rob's a funny fella and Stewart's pretty good at comedy. So it's going to be.
Stewart: I did three panel shows about 15 years ago, and I hated the fact that people don't set you up for things? They try and shut you down all the time, because they want to be the person that gets the laugh, and if you do set them up so that they can get the laugh for the good of the show, they seem to see it as an act of weakness. It's like some horrible Samurai combat. And Rob had a really good, intuitive, old-school double act feel for where the laugh was coming. I asked him a really long question, and then he goes, ‘the problem with you is that you overanalyse everything’ [laughs]. He's really funny, but it wasn't like someone trying to get the better of you.
You talked before about the scaffolding, showing how things work. Did you know everything about where the King Kong statue – it started in Birmingham, then ended up on the scrapheap, then was rescued and restored in Penrith – before you started filming?
Stewart: I knew enough of it to know that King Kong statue follows the hero's journey as well. It's abandoned and then made a comeback. But it's partly chosen because it doesn't quite work. It's partly chosen to show that you're trying to impose a narrative over something, and then of course again Rob was very intuitively good at the end. We're both looking at the statue, and I'm trying to make it fit the story of his life, and he goes, ‘is that the kind of thing you want me to say?’ [laughs] The whole idea of telling a story, it's a lie [laughs].
Michael: All documentaries are contrived, really. They're all making some sort of story out of something, so you might as well just make a virtue out of it.
King Rocker is on Sky Arts at 9pm on 6 February
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