The 32nd edition of the Sheffield DocFest kicks off on June 18 with … no, not a bang, but a banger. “Entertainment, working class culture, human connection, the power of pop and the state of Britain align in a funny, irreverent road movie that follows an aging pop star trying to revive and keep alive his past triumph.” So reads the synopsis for director and cinematographer Kim Hopkins‘ new documentary, Still Pushing Pineapples, which tells the melancholic and heartfelt story of the former singer of pop band Black Lace, best known for the novelty hit “Agadoo,” a much-maglined novelty song, along with such other British wedding and party favorites as “Superman,” “Do the Conga,” and, yes, “We’re Having a Gang Bang.”
If you think you have never heard the 40-year-old “Agadoo,” you may be surprised to realize you have when you read its famous chorus: “Ag-a-doo-doo-doo, push pineapple, shake the tree. Aga-doo-doo-doo, push pineapple, grind coffee. To the left, to the right, jump up and down and to the knees.
Come and dance every night, sing with a hula melody.”
In her cinéma vérité style, Hopkins and her camera followed Dene Michael, who still goes on the road to perform this and other hits, with his aging mother and his young partner in tow, dreaming of a comeback and writing a hit song that is different from his usual stage repertoire.
The doc’s title is inspired by the “Agadoo” lyrics-inspired title of Michael’s book Still Pushing Pineapples: The True Story of The Legendary Dene Michael. “The film highlights the fleeting nature of fame and the ever-changing landscape of British society and cultural tastes,” highlights a summary on the Sheffield DocFest website. “Above all, Michael’s charm and affability shine through, resulting in an entertaining, and ultimately touching, life drama.”
Produced by Margareta Szabo and edited by Leah Marino, the film gets its world premiere as the opening-night presentation of the Sheffield DocFest, which runs through June 23. Jenny Bohnhoff at MetFilm Sales is handling sales on the project.
Ahead of the world premiere of Still Pushing Pineapples, Hopkins talked, via Zoom from York in northern England, about the inspiration for the film, her fly-on-the-wall doc style that is like “jumping off a plane with a suitcase” and being a doctor on call, how she feels many docs have lost authenticity, her plans for completing her “trilogy of working-class stories” with a doc about a pub, and why she always wants to make “films that have hope in them.”
How did you find out about Dene, find him, and decide to make a doc about him?
I was at my mother’s and had just finished a film. There were loads and loads of IP films around on lots of musicians, Wham!, and whatever. And I was thinking what IP I could get. What can I possibly get to? And I asked my mother: Do you remember that band? They had that terrible song in the ’80s, and then it came to me. So I said, “Alexa, play ‘Agadoo,’ and that was the first time I’d heard it in something like 30 years. And so I did a Google search on them, found out that they were actually from Yorkshire, in the north of England. I didn’t even know they were British. And I had a meeting with Dene, invited him to see my previous film, A Bunch of Amateurs, which he loved. He kind of understood the type of films I made. And he was completely afraid. I said, “Look, unlike with these IP films, I want total access. That’s how I make films. It’s about a genuine relationship, and you have to trust me. And we will make this film together.”
Tell me more about your fly-on-the-wall, immersive documentary style and why that is so important for your storytelling?
I went to the National Film and Television school, and I was, I was brought up on cinéma vérité, observational cinema, or direct cinema, whatever people want to call it these days. It’s moved on from those long takes, and you tend to edit for story more nowadays. But I’ve always maintained that the very DNA of documentary film is this authenticity you get without sitting somebody in the studio and asking them to tell you about what’s happened in their lives, out of context of everything.
I believe that the documentary is currently suffering because of this. They have thrown the baby out with the bath water. It has lost its authenticity. The unique selling point of documentaries is that stuff. I think audiences see themselves reflected, they relate, and they go on these journeys with people. So, no sit-down interviews, no narration. Try and tell the story as it unfolds.
Of course, that leads to the story. Things happen – you have completely unexpected turns of narrative. For example, when I started filming with Dene, I had no idea [his partner] Hayley was going to come along at all. My original idea was: Here is a guy who’s been singing party songs for 40 years, and whatever’s going on in his life, no matter how he’s feeling, he drives across the country and has to sing these party anthems, then goes home at three in the morning and sits in his flat. And that was his life. And then, of course, Hayley came along, and that changed things. Actually, I think Haley brought a lot to the film, an awful lot. And those are the beautiful things that happen in this type of filmmaking when you just allow it. It’s like jumping out of an airplane holding just a suitcase handle. You just have to go with it.
I caught myself feeling with and for her, him, and them. So, sometimes I ended up being torn while watching them. How is that for you as a filmmaker?
Being a filmmaker or being a journalist or being anything where your job is more than your job becomes part of your life. It becomes you. We get defined by what we do, some of us very much so. And I think Dene very much got defined by what he did. Hence, the metamorphosis, symbolism I was really interested in.
When I first met Dene, he’d got his autobiography called Still Pushing Pineapples out, and it was the word “still” that really interested me. 40 years, I thought – what does this do to somebody? What does singing “Agadoo” 20,000 times do to somebody? There is no escape. And as you see in the film, when they bury his singing partner, or cremate his singing partner, Colin, even at his funeral, the song is played. And I think it was at that point that Dene really realized that he has to embrace this. “This is who I am and how I’m going to be defined forever. Go with it!” It is also about the idea of what sacrifices you make in life when your job defines you. What happens to family, what happens to all of this stuff? It’s the idea that he finds Haley, finds children, the young children, and that he has something else that he can aim for in what’s left of his life.
‘Still Pushing Pineapples’
Courtesy of Labour of Love Films
The issue of finding one’s role in the world and the freedom one has to change it, or not, goes beyond Dene Michael. How much of a universal story did you feel you were telling?
You’re absolutely right. I think it is universal. For a lot of us, our careers just take over, and there comes a point in your life when you kind of start to reevaluate. “Did I make the right life choices along the way, and what did I sacrifice making those choices?” Dene, I think, really embodies that. And I think that is a universal theme.
You know the idea that musicians end up getting defined by certain pieces of music, whoever they are – whether you’re Leonard Cohen singing “Hallelujah,” or something else. The opening of the film shows a line from Mick Jagger who said: “If I reach 45 and I’m singing ‘Satisfaction,’ I’d rather be dead.” But what is it like to sing “Agadoo” for 40 years, not just when you’re 45, but when you’re in your 60s?
How long did you spend filming Dene?
These films always take more or less the same time, about two and a half years. I think that is the biggest commodity I can give to people: time. I regard my job as being like a doctor on call, so I’m always available. And that’s a big sacrifice in life to make.
I had a conversation with Dene’s mother, and I said: “You know, should something really bad happen to you, should you pass away, can I film? How do you feel about that? I would like to film at your funeral. This would be a big change in Dene’s life.” And so all of these things are discussed while making a film, and that only comes through time. Time creates trust. That’s what we do with friends. We gain trust by having long relationships with people.
The tone of the film is a mix of warmth but also sadness. How would you describe it?
Melancholy? Yeah, melancholy.
How do you deal with drama that unfolds in front of your camera when there is a risk that it could feel exploitative?
Drama does happen. There was this incident when Dene’s mother got very, very ill in the van on the way to Benidorm, Spain. They’d set off in this old camper van that had no air con. It was that summer, when it was reaching 38 degrees [Celsius], a really hot summer. And Dene’s mom got heat stroke in the van. We had to stop. We pulled her out of that van. We got her into another van with air con on, and we stopped filming the whole thing. And we got her into a room. So, yes, there are points where you make those decisions.
This is real life, there are real people who are going to have a life when I’ve left. And so there are points where we do stop, but not for things like pride and things that are not materially damaging to people. Dene struggling to find work is a universal thing.
How do you find where to end your films? And tell me a bit about how the ending of this film came about? [SPOILER WARNING: details about the doc’s ending are contained in this answer.]
I’m always trying to make films that have got hope in them. And working-class lives are tough, and it’s sometimes quite hard to find hope. And with Dene, I really wanted some kind of crescendo. I wanted him to get a big audience at the end, and that just wasn’t going to happen. I just didn’t think he was ever going to get another hit record. And I thought: what can we do? How can we give Dene hope at the end?
He insisted he could sing, even though he was just singing “Agadoo,” “Superman,” and “Do the Conga.” When his mother told us about this very beautiful ballad, I thought I’m going to see if I can get the rights to that. And we gave Dene an opportunity and said: Do you want to record this? He said, “Yes, I’d love to, for mom. I’d love to record it.” And so we got him in the studio, and he sang. And he sings it really beautifully. I think it proves that he does have a voice. And that gave him some kind of legitimacy after 40 years of agony, derided by the music press. I just wanted to give him something that was credible, along with his finding a new family, finding hope in love. We wanted to leave it with some hope, even if it wasn’t him making a new hit record or finding a new big audience.
That final scene was actually shot in the Scottish Borders [in southeastern Scotland, bordering England] where they have these really lovely venues in quite small towns.
Why did you pick the title Still Pushing Pineapples?
He chose Still Pushing Pineapples as the title of his autobiography, and, as the film alludes to, he wasn’t going to escape from that. In some ways, it’s like creating Frankenstein. You end up being the monster yourself.
‘Still Pushing Pineapples,’ courtesy of Labour of Love Films
Courtesy of Labour of Love Films
Is there anything new that you’re already working on?
My previous film, A Bunch of Amateurs, was basically about an amateur filmmaking club, again a working-class story about who art belongs to. Who does creativity belong to? And again, it was in a genre that is struggling to keep going. It kind of was an allegory of Hollywood and the collapse of Hollywood.
Now, we have Still Pushing Pineapples. And then the third film that we’re making in a trilogy is set in a real ale pub in Bradford, Yorkshire. The film is called The Local. We’ve already been filming for a year and a half in it.
Martha Gellhorn, who was married to Ernest Hemingway, said when she visited the U.K.: “If you want to find out what’s happening in the U.K., visit the pubs.” And I am kind of using that as a guiding force. So, we’ve been filming in this pub [called Jacobs Well], finding out what people are thinking about, what’s happening globally, what’s happening in their local town, what’s happening in their own lives, and what’s really important to them in this world that’s really quite mixed up. This is going to be the third part of this trilogy of working-class stories, and particularly northern [English] working-class stories. It’s nearly shot, and we hope to get that out maybe late next year.
We have found that pets are massive. You can talk about Musk or Trump, or are we going to have a nuclear war, what’s happening in the Ukraine, what’s happening to their local town? But ultimately, the thing that tends to bond people is their love of their animals.
How does it feel to open Sheffield DocFest?
It’s a brave film for Sheffield to open with. In these fairly troubled times, they could have chosen something much more overtly political. This film, set in the north of England that has some humor in it and has something really quite profound to say about things that I think will speak to ordinary people, not the bubble of documentary makers, is a very good choice, I find personally. But it’s quite brave.
Dene is a kind of anti-hero in lots of ways. He’s very unfashionable. He’s a white working-class bloke who has hooked up with a girlfriend 30 years younger than himself. But we do maintain empathy for the whole thing. It is really important to have empathy for our characters in these types of films.