This Demeans Us Further - The Annotated Dennis Wool

As 2022 began, the mood was uncertain. A second Christmas in a row had been deadened by COVID, except in Westminster which we were discovering had been a non-stop party. "It was Dante's Inferno for us, Disco Inferno for them", a renowned wit (me) had pithily tweeted. I was using the nationwide emergence from restrictions to force myself out of a period of low mental health and isolation that long preceded the pandemic. I'd started going to a weekly chess night at a pub in Brighton and was in a bluegrass band.

November of 2021 had brought the release of The Beatles: Get Back. Over the pandemic I'd been an avid listener of Your Own Personal Beatles, and I was totally immersed in the band. When the 8 hour documentary dropped, I was entranced. Seeing, for the first time, the creation of a record I'd been listening to for as long as I could remember was one of the most haunting experiences I've had in front of a TV.

Meanwhile, cinematographer, producer, and workaholic Ollie Hopkins and I had been kicking around ideas for a short film to shoot in a tremendous location we had access to in St Leonards-on-Sea, a sort of art-deco cabaret bar in a Victorian hotel. We'd been imagining a sleazy Northern club singer who terrorises a man in the audience who's there on a date, locking the doors and forcing him to sing along, etc. Then over Christmas, my brother and I had watched Peter Greenaway's The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, and I was so taken with Michael Gambon's repellent cockney gangster tyrant Albert Spica, I instantly decided to drop the Northern element and make the character a Londoner--specifically the Deep South London where I was born, which my blues musician father refers to as the "Wandle Delta".

I already had a song I'd not done much with, a blue-eyed soul number with a Motown beat called "This Demeans Us All". It was from the perspective of one half of a couple who were getting divorced; while both parties felt the split necessary, there was clearly bitterness, as displayed by the refrain "And I'll see you in Hell". And bongo, there's your character: a foul-mouthed cockney soul-man going through a bitter divorce. We'll make it a mockumentary, so the camerawork doesn't have to be tidy and we don't have to hide the lapel mics. But if you make a mockumentary about a musician, it's inherently going to be compared to This Is Spinal Tap, which is a very high bar to set for yourself. However, that's a movie about gigging and touring. We're in post-COVID England, and we have no money. So, let's make it a mockumentary about the recording process, like Get Back; the perfectionism, the hours of boredom broken by sudden floods of inspiration, the mountains of tea and toast. We'll make it about five minutes long, round up a few of our talented friends who've been going mad with boredom, two or three days of shooting, bosh. Something to show what we're capable of. It'll be done in a month.

00:00

Misattributing the work of one Beatle to another is something I've always found funny. (In a long lost YouTube video from a decade ago, I introduce a rendition of "Something" by attributing it to "John McCartney".) In this case I find it doubly funny knowing that "Silly Love Songs" was written at least in part as a response to Lennon's diss track of McCartney, "How Do You Sleep", and to Lennon's criticisms, shared by the music press of the day, that Paul's own work was sentimental fluff.

While the misattribution of the quote could have been the fault of the film's heard-but-not-seen director, it is also very much the kind of mistake Dennis himself would make, and I hereby declare it canon that it was added to the film at Dennis's request.

I will try to refrain from making these annotations nothing more than joyless explanations of semi-obscure jokes, but there will be enough of that so you feel you've got your money's worth.

00:05 

I decided quite early on that I wanted to open the film with a jokeless pastiche of the opening montage from Dog Day Afternoon. Practically, this had the advantage that it could be shot before I had finished the song (my leisurely songwriting pace being the main factor causing the production to take two years), as well as being a rare location shoot that didn't require me to operate the sound recording gear while simultaneously performing as Dennis. As I recall, it was a pleasant shoot day. Ollie and I drove around Brighton in his van, while I pointed the camera out the window and captured the moving shots. (Normally I'm not allowed to operate the camera so it was an extra treat.) Then we parked and hauled the tripod around town and I walked and smoked disgusting herbal prop cigarettes in visually appealing locations. Then we had falafel for lunch. At one point, a very inebriated man berated Ollie for filming, though all he had been shooting in that particular street were the rooftops of buildings. I saw the man a few days later at the bus stop, sober. I wonder where he is now.

00:43

Here I am pictured smoking a cigarette in front of the Royal Albion Hotel, which several months later would be partially destroyed in a fire for the second time in its history. Doubtless, we obtained the last significant footage of it before the blaze, rendering this film an essential piece of Brighton history. I specifically wanted the Albion in the film because of its appearance in the Neil Jordan film Mona Lisa, starring the legendary Bob Hoskins, who was a major influence on my performance, along with Michael Gambon in TCTTHW&HL as previously mentioned.

01:39

The Frog and Bucket in Ide Hill (not Ide's Hill, as I/Dennis erroneously record it here) was a pub beloved for its live music offerings, and was where my mum and dad first met when he played a gig there. (There will be no more personal connections in the film so don't go looking for any.) When I meet drinkers of a certain vintage in pubs in the West Sussex/Surrey/Kent border region, I always like to ask if they remember The Frog and Bucket.

This graphic was hand-made using the arcane methods passed down by the Zine Elders, then scanned on my iPhone as I didn't have a scanner at the time. I've been guilty in the past of spending far too long trying to Photoshop a graphic so that it looks realistically analogue rather than just making it by hand.

01:48

Case in point. This took me ages. Not so much the graphic, though, as finding out precisely what format and area code a Wallington phone number would have had in the nebulous period in which I imagine the film to have taken place. Despite this conceptual thoroughness, the film contains many shots in which anachronisms can be seen. I could have spent months going through them shot by shot and digitally scrubbing them out, but you've got to pick your battles.

01:58

Another analogue graphic. "That fake torn photo looks really good," Ollie told me after he watched the finished sequence. That's because I schlepped up to Boots on a Friday evening to get the picture printed and actually tore it up.

Eagle-eyed viewers will recognise the location of Dennis and Michelle's wedding later in the dream sequence.

02:33

I have never been inside the Rose & Crown, though I have driven past it literally hundreds of times. It is pictured here as I remember it, albeit with older cars in the car park. It now has fancy modern signage, eliminating any trace of its former character.

Dennis refers to the pub as a "great little boozer"; this is a direct quote from someone I met at the jam night at the Ship Inn in East Grinstead remembering the Frog and Bucket, as referred to in the annotation at 01:39. I could have mentioned it then, but I decided to save it until now, to provide the illusion of structure.

02:38

This was our first day of production (3rd January 2022) on what we were then calling "Dennis" and expected to be a silly 5-10 minute sketch/character piece with a few songs. We had decided that the film would be vaguely set in the early 80s, with an aesthetic to reflect that, but, as it was only a fun short and we had no money, we were not going to stress ourselves out trying to hide every single modern detail we could think of. What fools we were! I'm incapable of watching these shots of Michelle in front of the bookcase without wishing I'd gone through my many books and put only the old ones on the shelves. For this reason, I consider the entire film a failure.

03:00

The way Megan rolls each of her eyes individually here astounds me. My face is often the thing I feel the least in control of as an actor (which is partly the reason Dennis wears sunglasses for the entire film), but Meg is capable of conveying so much purely through expression.

03:23

"Tie A Yellow Ribbon" by Tony Orlando and Dawn is one of many songs on a playlist I assembled during production comprising the imagined repertoire of Dennis's solo act, consisting largely of crooned ballads and syrupy pop. It was the first thing that entered my head when improvising this line requiring to me name the least sexy song to have sung to you while making love.

04:09

Prior to 1982, British TV had only three channels: BBC1, formerly the BBC Television Service; BBC2, a "mixed-genre channel appealing to a broad adult audience with programmes of depth and substance"; and ITV, a commercial service made up of regional franchises. It stands to reason that the snobbish Dennis would only be interested in being broadcast nationally.

04:46

We were all excited to finally be making something again, but it had been ages since I had done any acting, and while we all had tons of experience improvising, I don't think most of us had done much of it on camera. I remember while filming this scene thinking how effortlessly in-character Meg was, whereas I, who didn't go to drama school and hadn't acted since 2016, was fine at bragging into a camera while sat in a rocking chair but felt like a fraud trying to convey actual emotions with a scene partner. Later that evening, when I'd cut together a preliminary edit, I felt better about it. It was only two years later, as we were finishing the film, that Meg told me she felt like she'd done an awful job on the day, and only realised what we'd done was actually quite good when I sent everybody the edit. Madness!

05:27

Another effortlessly hilarious Meg face.

06:06

I was very scared when Meg started getting angry with me at this point. Say what you like about improv, it definitely makes things feel more real in the moment.

06:32

A proper prop master, on a proper film, would have prepared more than one set of divorce papers for this scene, just on the off-chance an actor decided to tear them up and eat them during a take.  

06:42

This talk about wiping my arse was a reference to The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, in which Michael Gambon is constantly invoking shit and the wiping of bums, often as a means of verbally amusing his wife, played by Helen Mirren.

06:46

"I'm losing my bloody balls here" is precisely the kind of perfectly nonsensical line which only improvising can produce. Meg obviously meant to say marbles instead of balls; the abrupt cut hides her embarrassed corpsing and my delirious off-camera laughter.

06:54

"Cut, cunt" is Ollie's favourite line in the film. I really like this shot. Ollie is such a masterful gaffer and cinematographer that he can create shots like this with minimal lighting and decade old entry-level consumer cameras.

Once we had all shown the preliminary edit to a few people, we decided that these characters had legs, and, as we already had about five minutes of material and hadn't even got to the songs yet, the film could well end up being about fifteen minutes or so. With what we'd done as a proof of concept, we enlisted another five actors and an extra cameraman to gather in my dad's garden for the day.

07:15

Having decided to expand the film, Ollie and I chose all the character names by picking first names which suited the rough characters we'd assigned our cast, then mostly throwing out random funny words until we found a good match. I like Jeremy Moth because it's a similarly short and fuzzy word to Wool, and also implies a little about the relationship, moths being so fond of yet destructive to wool.

Jarrod Hopson as Jeremy Wool

07:28

Ollie really hates this rusty metal pole, which was constantly getting in the way of shots. I like it. It adds character, and more importantly, holds up the washing line.

07:34

Melody Maker was a music magazine in Britain which ran for the bulk of the 20th Century and featured a large classified ads section which allowed musicians to meet each other. Apparently, Suede (from just up the road in Burgess Hill) were formed this way.

07:38

"Andy Frennell" was a name pitched by Ollie. I'd not heard the word before and thought it was the perfect funny sound. In actuality, it's spelled "fresnel", and, characteristically of Ollie, is some sort of lighting equipment. You have to be careful with gaffers, or they'll take over the whole film (see The Neon Demon for proof.)

Andy is eating an entire loaf's worth of toast. This is another Beatles reference; throughout the Get Back documentary, we repeatedly see great quantities of toast and tea scattered about the studios the band are working in. Originally, this was to be a recurring joke in the film, and Dennis was also to be seen with great quantities of toast in his home studio area, the implication being, I suppose, that all musicians are constantly eating toast. As it stands in the final film, it is just a quirk of Andy Frennell.

Andy is portrayed by Morrison Twigg, who I've known since secondary school. He studied Physical Theatre at uni and is the most talented physical comedian I know. For years, I thought he was the clumsiest person I knew. When I invited him to go paintballing for my 16th birthday, I thought, this will be hilarious, he doesn't stand a chance. He was like the fucking Terminator. The paintball facility offered him a job afterwards, he worked there for at least a year. In the wake of this, I came to a realisation. He'd done ballet as a child, and was actually in tremendous command of his body; he was being clumsy on purpose, to make people laugh. This sums up his whole personality, really, as he's one of the nicest, kindest people I've ever met. That being said, I have seen him being non-deliberately clumsy at least once, when he slipped while walking down a muddy verge while taking an ill-advised shortcut to our GCSE English class, and spent the remainder of the day coated in filth. God knows why I decided to cast him in a role he largely spends sat or stood motionlessly rather than doing elaborate pratfalls.

Me and Morrison

08:23

This is the scene most enjoyed by all the musicians I've showed the film to. Despite Western music having an extensive lexicon to describe most ways you could play an instrument, communicating how you want something to sound (or decoding how someone wants you to sound) remains torturous. The most guilty parties are the Synesthetes, who think they're somehow being helpful when they tell you they want your playing to sound more orange.

08:51

In another genius piece of casting against type by yours truly, I had Tom Rainn, who I've seen effortlessly portray many characters but particularly effervescent, hyperactive ones, play the grumpiest, most grounded character in the film.

Tom Rainn being filmed by Ollie Hopkins

08:57

I have no idea if this kind of stuff is funny or interesting to non-musicians, but frankly, if I'd had my way, I'd have got rid of all the emotions and narrative and just shot three hours of this kind of granular musical arguing, as it's the stuff in Get Back that thrilled me so.

09:41

Another Beatles reference. "I always hear myself annoying you."

10:23

This improvised line from Ollie behind the camera is my favourite in the film. The rapid cut is to hide Tom's corpsing.

11:36

A third of the way through the film and we're only now seeing Dennis perform for the first time. Great structure, there.

This take was originally longer, following through to the end of the song as Dennis becomes increasingly distraught singing about the fate he's resigned himself to, which keeps going on and on and on because he's chosen to end the song on a fade out.

12:22

Two more examples of my not making nearly enough out of my talented cast; as well as both being tremendous actors, Jericho Taylor is the best singer I know, and Tascha Liebig speaks fluent German. It occurs to me now I should have had her play a character based on Nico, delivering weird semi-sung monologues with odd vowel pronunciations. 

12:47

"some sort of Elvis" is another of the beautiful turns of phrase you only end up with through improv.

14:12

I like this scene as allows Dennis a momentary win, and for once he's not the oblivious idiot in the scene. You can probably detect Ollie and Adam laughing behind the camera here as Callum lowers his head to try and keep from corpsing.

14:30

I have a complicated history with punk. My older brother and I shared a bedroom for four years while I was in secondary school after we moved to a smaller house. My brother was always more into capital-R Rock music than I was, and by the time we were confined together, he mostly listened to punk, post-punk, and various other stomach-churningly noisy subgenres. (My impression of the music he likes consists of tunelessly wailing the phrase "IIIIII'M getting a DIVOOOOOOORCE".) While I do enjoy some heavy music, I have sensory-processing issues, so I don't tend to want to listen to it all evening after I've spent the day at school surrounded by loud and smelly teenagers. None of us realised these were sensory issues until my brother and I were grown up, and I'm sure if he'd known the music he played was causing me physical anguish he wouldn't have played it; I was never able to calmly express that I didn't want to listen to it, because one of the effects of my sensitivity was an instant rage. The majority of our family interactions in this period were my brother making a noise, me screaming at my brother, and my mum yelling at me to stop screaming. If only I'd not been vaccinated as a child.

Anyway, by the time I was 18 I'd inadvertently been exposed to every punk documentary there was, particularly those about the Sex Pistols. Around the time of filming, Disney Plus put out a quite shit programme about the Pistols, with him from Love Actually as Malcom McLaren, and I was once again struck by how fucking daft the whole thing was. Hence, the character of Sputum, expertly portrayed by Jude Martin.

I don't know whether punks actually dealt cannabis; from what I understand they largely took speed. 

14:45

Jude does a great job with a Steve Jones-esque London accent, but in retrospect, I might have had him give Sputum a Rotten-esque semi-posh drawl.

14:56

Having a Drugs Scene is such a cliché of low budget/student film that we were torn on it, but ultimately it serves three purposes: 1) It establishes Dennis as having that particular kind of control-freak personality that doesn't wish to relinquish sobriety (I understand Donald Trump is like this) but also the susceptibility to peer pressure a fundamentally self-loathing person might have. 2) It leads into the trip/dream sequence, which was essential to our conception of the film. 3) It allowed us to do the gag of cutting to Jeremy with a significantly larger bifter than we had seen previously. This was originally a joke conceived by Ollie about Jarrod's height, which doesn't really read that clearly on screen as nobody in the film is particularly tall anyway. I like it more as an initial breaking of the documentary reality of the film thus far, which primes us for the inclusion of a dream sequence.

15:03

At one point, the final act of the film was to revolve around Dennis performing a gig with Sputum's band, The Goitres, opening for him, which devolved into a riot. The Goitres' music would have been direct pastiche of the Pistols', down to John Lydon's characteristic vocal delivery, only all of the lyrics would have been about piss.

17:00

The music for this transition into the trip section (the only music in the film which isn't one of Dennis's songs, as it happens, though it does also contain my vocals) was one of the later additions to the film, by which time Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie's incredible TV series The Curse was just wrapping up. I was very taken with the aesthetics of the show, which, like our film, was shot on 1080p rather than 4K or higher, and used lots of long lenses, as well as several tracks by Alice Coltrane on the soundtrack, particularly "Jai Ramachandra", the influence of which can perhaps be heard on the music for this scene.

17:41

Ollie and I decided early on that we should have a section which, for whatever reason, broke the format of the documentary, and was filmed not with the ancient DSLRs we shot the doc style footage on but with Ollie's professional modern filmmaking equipment. The trip/dream concept came easily, but we were less sure about what the sequence itself would be. The original plan was for a "Girls On Film" type 80s music video, where we would go out on a boat, float about in a swimming pool, and get a couple of dancers in. The song would be a Yacht Rock pastiche, primarily modelled after Steely Dan's "Peg". (The finished song, "Livin' With A Bad Knee", appears on the soundtrack album as a bonus track.) Ultimately we decided against such a demanding location shoot, which was probably for the best as the back end of the album is already fairly Yacht Rocky to begin with. We then returned to the idea of using the Regency Rooms in St Leonard's on Sea, the location which had originally inspired the entire project. My next thought was that the song should be a Roy Orbison pastiche, which would effectively make the sequence a David Lynch pastiche. I would have enjoyed this a lot, but if there's one thing that's more cliched than a drugs scene, it's a Lynch homage, so I decided against it. Finally, I remembered the Annie Ross song "Twisted", a brilliant rapid-fire piece of Vocalese (where instrumental jazz solos are transcribed and have words set to them retroactively). The song came together fairly quickly; I wrote a rough draft of the lyrics, which gave me the rhythmic frame for the melody, and all I had to do was decide on the notes.

Meg and I were both excited to use the sequence as an excuse to actually look glamorous in a role for once, as nobody else ever casts us in those kinds of parts. (To be fair, I suppose even I cast us in roles where we would largely be dressing and acting ludicrously. Do as I say, not as I do.) She definitely looks glamorous; whether I do or not depends on whether you view the Blues Brothers as glamorous. 

BTS from shooting the dream sequence in St Leonards-on-Sea

18:00

For this shot, which I love, I lay on a skateboard and pushed myself out from under a table with my legs while a very heavy camera and tripod hung directly over my face. It took two people to pull me back up off the skateboard without causing myself catastrophic injury. It made me feel very old.

19:11

In spite of my having met Ollie at a Hallowe'en park in West Sussex where most of us in the film worked as actors at various times, this brief section is so far the only piece of horror filmmaking we've released.

19:45

The final few seconds of the dream sequence comprise the most complicated piece of sound mixing in the whole film, as not only was it shot MOS (film jargon for "there wasn't any sound being recorded"), it's the only part of the film that's in stereo, which meant I got to have fun playing with the spatial arrangement of the foley effects. It's little things that are necessary but nobody notices other than me that I have the most fun with when making films.

20:15

Dennis says "imxi" here, a Maltese word meaning move, go, etc. which my family semi-jokingly use as a demand to hurry. It is my suspicion that Wool is not the surname Dennis was born with, and that he has abandoned his true heritage in the name of showbusiness.

20:32

I was shocked to find upon uploading the film to YouTube that it had been flagged as containing copyrighted material due to the use of the hymn Jerusalem, which is not only in the public domain as a composition, but is played here in a completely original arrangement and recording, which I modelled vaguely on Bert Jansch. I find it quite scary that computers can accurately detect this much now, regardless of whether or not the detected material is actually infringing copyright or not.

22:42

This accordion, which I bought on eBay when I was 13 or so, is not the one which can be heard on the track, as by this point it was very beaten up and would barely play. I used the accordion sample patch in Logic instead, which doesn't quite have the right sound to my ears, but it works in context. I'd love another accordion, but there are so many other instruments I'd like as well, and it seems silly to spend money on one so cumbersome and largely disliked by the public.

22:46

This bass, an Epiphone SG, is not one I play on any of the recorded tracks on the album, as I bought it very much for its short scale length and portability rather than its sound, which is more suited to rock than soul or funk. However, all the bass parts were recorded with the washing-up sponge string mute method seen here. Just call me Brillo Pastorius.

22:51

It took me nearly a decade to get the hang of playing the jaw harp, which looks incredibly easy but is actually both difficult and uncomfortable, as it involves letting two bars of thick metal vibrate directly against your teeth. Now I can do it, I try and fit it into songs wherever possible.

25:08

We shot this scene on the hottest day of the year so far at a fairly busy section of Rottingdean beach. We hadn't really had a chance to think through the narrative of the scene in detail, and the heat wasn't helping, so after I ran offscreen at the end of a take, we cut and discussed whether the scene should in fact end with Dennis walking into the sea. We hadn't planned for it and I hadn't brought a change of clothes. Eventually we decided to go for it. Obviously we only had the one shot at it, which is partly why my performance is fairly subdued. Had the beach not been busy, I'd have made much more of a meal of it, presenting it more as a threat of suicide rather than the childish indulgence it ultimately comes across as. You can't really go to a busy beach on a sunny day and walk into the sea while yelling at a woman about killing yourself, even if there is a man filming you from a distance. I mean, I suppose you could, but this is why I'm not Sacha Baron-Cohen or Eric Andre; I'm not at all under the impression that my stupid film should come at the expense of members of the public enjoying their day. The sea itself was beautifully warm and very pleasant to float in, and even after coming back out, the only discomfort was the wetness and heaviness of my clothes, I wasn't chilly at all.

25:41

So protracted was the filming of This Demeans Us All that between starting it and filming this sequence, Frazer, seen here in the role of Mick for the first time, moved in with me, then moved out again to live with his girlfriend. 

25:55

This Akai 4000DS reel-to-reel was my dad's in the 80s. It only has the capacity to record two tracks, with no mixing, so none of the album was directly recorded on it, but the entire thing was sent through it as part of the mastering process to give an authentic tape sound.

Mastering with tape