Festival of Ideas: I Get Knocked Down
The untold story of Leeds-based anarcho-pop band Chumbawamba.
A collaboration with the University of Sussex, The Festival of Ideas harnesses the transformative power of the arts and humanities to fashion new ways of thinking about the past, present and future.
Founding band-member Dunstan Bruce is 59, and 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. A personal voyage of rediscovery, redemption, and reawakening, this is a call to arms to those who think activism is best undertaken by someone else.
