Latest news with #DeneMichael
Telegraph
11 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Life after Agadoo: The curse of the ‘Worst Song of All Time'
In the crepuscular gloom of a barely lit stage, a bearded man of pensionable age and with a 52-inch chest is swaying in the barrel-shaped costume of a tropical fruit. Audible, just, is the ghost of Eighties parties past. 'Ah…' chant monk-like voices. 'Ga…' they continue over funereal beats as the portly pineapple approaches a microphone stand. 'Dooo…' Altogether now: 'Agadoo doo doo, push pineapple shake the tree / Agadoo 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!' (Daft dance, carnival whistles, rinky-dink keyboards, frolicking bananas and lurid Hawaiian shirts not pictured. Not yet, anyway.) With what will transpire is a typical mix of the haunting, the humbling and the hilarious, so begins Still Pushing Pineapples: with an image of its subject trapped in the metaphorical comedy clobber that characterises a 40-year novelty pop career that, against the odds, continues. Just about. Premiering at this month's Sheffield DocFest, it tells, in part, the story of Black Lace and their deathless – you might say death-conjuring – 1984 song Agadoo. But really it's the story of Dene Michael. The Yorkshire musician is the sole surviving core member of a group who, having come seventh for Britain at Eurovision 1979 with the song Mary Ann, bestrode the Eighties like a cheesy colossus. Black Lace enjoyed a run of gimmicky hits that also included Superman, I Am the Music Man, Do the Conga and the tinny disco reboot we didn't know we needed, of Hokey Cokey. I've re-listened to these so you don't have to. For the best part of two years, documentarian Kim Hopkins followed Michael as he plied his archaic Black Lace trade for the ageing and expiring holidaymakers of Blackpool, Whitby, Skegness and Minehead, his mobile disco machine, colourful shirts and ego-free pluck rattling in the back of his VW hatchback. The result is a film that – counter-intuitively given the profoundly naff musical subject matter – manages to be tender, empathetic and heartfelt. The 65-year-old director's last film was the Bafta-longlisted A Bunch of Amateurs. About the embattled Bradford Movie Makers, one of the oldest amateur filmmaking clubs in the world, it won the Audience Award at Sheffield DocFest 2022. She then began casting around for a subject for her next project. 'I was seeing lots of these IP – intellectual property – films.' By which she means proprietorial, self-authored films such as Taylor Swift's The Eras Tour. 'And I thought: 'I can't get to Taylor Swift or Madonna. What IP can I get to?'' Then a song this former punk dimly remembered from the mid-Eighties bobbed into her mind like a tiny paper brolly floating in a Sex on the Beach. 'I asked Alexa to play Agadoo. First time I'd heard it for 30 years. I thought: 'What happened to these people? Who are they?'' A quick Google revealed that these people, like her, had their roots in Yorkshire ('I didn't even know they were Brits!'). She duly contacted Michael and invited him to the Bradford premiere of A Bunch of Amateurs, 'to see the type of work that we do. Dean really enjoyed it and agreed for us to film, warts and all.' How does her subject feel about being, in Hopkins' filmmaking terms, the closest Britain has to Swift or Madonna? 'I'll tell you what, Craig, I'm very honoured that Kim did think about us!' replies the doughtily jovial Michael as he and the director share a video call from their respective corners of Yorkshire (she's in York, he's in the Dales). 'It's an honour, really,' he adds, comfy on a couch that's overhung by a Black Lace photograph and a poster from another totem of Yorkshire culture, Kes. 'Not many people get to tell their life story in a movie. So, hard work but very exciting.' Four decades on Michael, now 68, has a career he owes mostly to Agadoo. Written by a group of Frenchmen in the 1970s, Black Lace's cover reached Number Two, spent 30 weeks in the Top 75 and was voted The Worst Song of All Time in a 2003 poll in music magazine Q. The one-time staple of nightclub, holiday cabaret and wedding party is, then, both talisman and albatross – a song the singer dreads performing but has no option otherwise. Because, as great archive footage from Top of the Pops shows, Black Lace had quite the ride. They even enjoyed a new lease of life when, this century, Eighties nostalgia firmly kicked in. Michael recalls one 2015 celebrity booking thus: 'We'd done all these [retro] festivals with 30,000 people there. But the one that stood out for me was playing Ant and Dec's birthday party. It was their joint 40th, and it was in London [at Kensington Roof Gardens]. Everybody that was there was famous, and they were conga-ing around the room. There was Keith Lemon, Belinda Carlisle, Cheryl Cole – she actually got up on stage to sing Agadoo with us. Cheryl was doing the dance beside us!' And they were enjoying the music fully and un-ironically? 'They loved it! And funnily enough, after we come off stage, we was chatting with everybody, and they were all coming up and saying: 'Can we have a selfie with you?' All these famous people!' he marvels. There was markedly less good humour at Leeds Crown Court the following year, when Michael – under his full name Dene Michael Betteridge – was sentenced to six months in jail for fraudulently claiming £25,000 in disability benefits, despite his ability to perform what were described as 'vigorous' dance moves on stage with Black Lace. None of which is featured in Still Pushing Pineapples. Why? 'It's a film set in the present,' says Hopkins, 'with only the first five minutes showing Black Lace's heyday. It's not meant to be a comprehensive story covering Dene's entire life. He had many highs and lows, divorces, wives, children – and on a practical level, there's no archive material aside from some newspaper headlines. It's not relevant to the story I was trying to tell. The defining element of his life is the song.' Now, a decade on, the days of conga-ing in Kensington with Cheryl seem even more distant. As Hopkins' embedded cameras reveal, Michael is imprisoned in a different way. He now performs in notably reduced circumstances, often accompanied by his disabled mother and biggest fan, 91-year-old Anne, with whom he lives in a modest house in Bradford. In one of the few nightclubs left open to entertainers like him, we see the singer do his cheerful best to grab the grannies of Blackpool with his bag of party tunes and well-worn dance routines. At Southport Pontins, this long-term singleton divorcé reconnects with an old pal, single mum Hayley; within two months they're so loved up she's having his name and face tattooed on her arm. (Spoiler alert: reader, he didn't marry her, but they are still together.) Shortly after that, the trio embark on a road-trip. 'One of mum's dying [sic] wishes was to go back to Benidorm,' says Michael, 'because that was one of her favourite holiday places when my dad was alive.' So the new couple buy a Ford Transit Camper Van, plaster it with pineapple-based stickers and head off. Without narration, talking-head interviews or, notably, judgement or condescension, Hopkins crafts a gem of end-of-the-pier cinema verité. Those lows include some floor-clearing gigs when Michael sings his Motown medley and him enduring on-camera cryolipolysis (having his fat frozen), the better to impress his new girlfriend. The highs, meanwhile, are Black Lace turning on the Christmas lights in Wythenshawe town centre. Even the circumstances surrounding Michael's role as the sole torch-carrying hold-out from the good old days fall into Hopkins 'warts and all' category. His original partner in Black Lace, Barnsley native Alan Barton, died in 1995 when the tour bus carrying Smokie, the band Barton had joined after Black Lace, crashed in Germany during a storm. Michael's Black Lace origin story, too, is, to say the least, tricky. At Christmas 1985 he was promoted from backing singer to full-time member of the band, alongside Barton. He took the place of Colin Routh, fired due to, as the newspaper headlines had it, his 'underage sex shame' – a relationship with a 15-year-old (Routh said at the time he thought 'she was in her late teens or early twenties'). 'It's quite a difficult area,' acknowledges Hopkins with some understatement. 'I thought long and hard how to play that. That was also one of the reasons why I wasn't interested in a full history lesson on Black Lace. That would have been a different film. 'What I was really interested in was the fleeting nature of stardom,' she continues. 'In what happens to people when they've committed their entire lives to avoiding that nine-to-five job. Being a filmmaker, I'm in the same position. Dene and I are both from Yorkshire, we're of a similar age, we're both committed to what we do. And when you get to our age, you're left going: 'What was all that about?' That was the thing that really interested me.' Because, against all the odds and, you might say, all common sense, 'Dene is still on the road.' Hence, she says, the film's opening image of Michael dressed in – trapped in – the fruity costume. 'That's the metaphor… and the metamorphosis. There's no escaping the pineapple.' For Michael that remains the case, even when, towards the end of the film, after 40 years' service to the Black Lace 'brand', he's sacked – by text – by the longstanding manager and owner of said brand. He's duly reduced to billing himself as Dene Michael, 'former member of Black Lace'. It leaves only three gigs in the diary, climaxing at that booking in Wythenshawe, 50 miles from his home. It's the loneliness of the short-distance tribute act, with Michael a tribute to himself. But that pineapple must still be pushed. That point was further driven home to Hopkins last summer. Routh died, aged 70, and she filmed Michael watching a video of his old bandmate's Tenerife funeral. We hear the vicar saying that Routh was happy with Agadoo being regularly described as the worst song ever written. 'And of course,' says Hopkins, 'Agadoo was played as his coffin was taken out. 'I thought: 'You can't escape this. You have become part of this. It's one and the same thing.' That was a eureka moment for me. Dean is not going to escape Agadoo. He has to embrace it.' Yet Michael remains as hopeful as he is defiant as he is deluded. As he says at one point, considering the possibility of one more novelty hit and cranking up ChatGPT to have a go at writing one, 'I've still got that ambition, still got that hope'. Which is why, as it says on stickers on his motorhome and VW's bumpers, he's 'still pushing pineapples'. The result is affectionate social realism – or, given the room-emptying qualities that many ascribe to Agadoo and Black Lace, anti-social realism. So much so that the film opens with an on-screen warning: 'This film features scenes from the 1980s that portray attitudes of the time which may or may not align with today's values. Viewer discretion is advised.' Is that, I wonder, a reference to another of Black Lace's, er, bangers, Gang Bang ('a gang bang is the thing to do, we'd like to give you one')? ' Pretty much, yes,' replies Hopkins. 'Wig Wam Bam is also probably pretty difficult these days,' she adds of another of their iffy hits. 'It's basically cultural appropriation – it's about Native Americans.' Michael and Barton famously appeared as themselves in Alan Clarke's classic, Bradford-set, kitchen-sink comedy Rita, Sue and Bob Too (1987), performing Gang Bang. Does he still play it now? 'I do to audiences over 18,' the musician replies. 'Obviously, when there's children in there, I wouldn't perform it. But in nightclubs, when they've all had a drink and everything, I do. And obviously people recognise me from the film, although I've changed my image a little bit. So people still know the song and still want to hear it performed.' You'd be hard pushed to describe Still Pushing Pineapples as anything like a typical music documentary, as hagiographic or as even celebratory. It's downbeat, melancholic, but also strangely warming. It's a measured, thoughtful, pathos-rich, slow TV-style elegy for a lost time, a lost culture, a lost Britain. None of which are adjectives or ideas you'd normally connect with a band whose ear-maggot music was very much of its era. Hopkins admits she 'started off with a film featuring party anthems'. But as she followed Michael back and forth along the A64, 'what I saw and felt was something else. Without making too grandiose claims, there's some allegorical feeling about that lie about Britain that we constantly try and [hide].' She mentions Adam Curtis's new iPlayer documentary series Shifty, which digs deep into that very idea (the UK is in 'a hazy, dream-like flux in which no one can predict what is coming next'), and the comparison is valid. 'Dene's fanbase is in Blackpool and Skegness and Minehead, these places that are really struggling. And that fanbase is dwindling. They're getting older. They're dying off. The club circuit's disappearing. So the feeling I had by the end is: the party's over.' On one level, Dene Michael would go along with that. 'I've got spondylitis in the back, and I've just found out I've got prostate cancer. But they've caught it in time. So I'm OK. I'm going to be fine.' But on another level, tickled by his close-up moment at Sheffield DocFest, he's as driven as ever. As Hopkins, radiating affection for her subject, puts it: 'Mum and Dene don't have a glass-half-full philosophy. They're glass-is-completely-full.' So, even though the film draws to a close with Michael concerned about sparse bookings, an empty diary and fears about how he's going to support himself and his mum, the man talking to me now speaks of more gigs – and more hope. 'I choose the venues that I like to perform at now, because I'm sort of semi-retired. But who knows – after this film, I'll probably be back on tour again!' 'I hope so, Dene,' says Hopkins.
Yahoo
24-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
On this day: Chuckle Brothers feature on Bradford Burns Unit track
On this day ten years ago, the Telegraph and Argus reported that a cover version of the anthem 'You'll Never Walk Alone' had been recorded to raise money for the Bradford Burns Unit. The track, featuring stars such as the Chuckle Brothers, Billy Pearce, and Black Lace's Dene Michael, was set to be released on download sites on May 11, the anniversary of the fire disaster. It was also set to be played to the crowd at Bradford City's League One clash with Barnsley on April 25, 2015 (the day after reporting). Nigel Hunter, a driving force behind the recording, said at the time: "All the money from sales is going straight to the burns unit. "And we would love it to get to the top of the charts." He added: "I am extremely proud of it. "It sounds really good. "The artists have gone way over what we expected and gave their time for free as well. "I am ecstatic. "It's been a bit of a hard slog, but definitely worth it. "I want to say thank you to everybody involved. "Tim Walker for producing it, and all the artists – Dene Michael, Clive Jackson, Owen Paul, Billy Shears, Billy Pearce, the Chuckle Brothers, Flint Bedrock, Rick Wild, Danny Tetley, The Aim, Tom and Dom from Bantams Banter, and all the local musicians on it." The idea for the charity track came from lifelong Bradford City fan Lloyd Spencer.
