Our old friend Graham Fellows doesn’t seem to know how to take things easy. Both of his Sheffield-based alter egos have been on stage recently. Jilted John just played the Rebellion Festival in Blackpool, and his other comedy alter ego, John Shuttleworth, played a gig in the Devil’s Arse Cavern, which almost ended in disaster and made the national news. On top of all that, he’s returned to filmmaking with his new documentary, Father Earth, having had its world premiere at the Leadmill this month. As he attempted to have a brief, relaxing pint in the Broomhill Tavern recently, who should spot him but our own comedy hound, Mark Perkins…
If I buy you a pint, will you tell me all about your new film, Graham?
Go on then. I’ve been making the film for some time – since 2008 really, but I’ve only recently decided it was finished, and edited it into what I’ve called Father Earth. Some years ago, I bought a church in Orkney to renovate and around the same time bought an electric car. I had an idea to drive this car to Orkney and to make a film about it, but the idea was soon eclipsed by several other people who started doing road trips in their electric cars, so I quickly forgot about it. At around the same time, I knew I wanted a document of my dad, who was this crazy bloke who just spoke his mind. He was very mathematically driven, very scientific, quite autistic, and was at one point diagnosed as Aspergic. So I decided to take my dad up to Orkney with a cameraman to film what happened. We even staged a gig in my dad’s sheltered accommodation in Broomhill with him in the audience, watching John entertain the residents. At the same time, I had started filming myself on a digital Flip camera, which was quite popular at the time, having conversations in a mirror between myself and John Shuttleworth. All these projects got shelved when my dad died, but with time on my hands during Lockdown, I decided to edit it together with new footage into what has become Father Earth.
The underlying theme is family relationships, initially between father and son, but also artists and their creations. I suppose there was a bit of a father/son thing going on between John and myself, mimicking how me and my own father were, and later between me and my own son George, who is also in the film.
Underpinning all this is the ecological disaster we seem to be sleepwalking into, and I do bang on in the film about saving water. I’m waiting for someone in the government to say, ‘stop flushing the toilet every time you have a wee, you don’t need to’. Do you realize up to 40% of our daily water usage goes down the toilet? For years, when I was a kid, I assumed that the water used for flushing wasn’t drinking water. In the film, I tried to make the church I was renovating into a rainwater harvesting system using greywater for toilet flushing etc, but I was dissuaded because of restrictions in the way I’d applied for funding. The government needs to make these things easier. At the moment, they seem to have to be dragged screaming and kicking to even mention it.
The underlying theme is family relationships, initially between father and son, but also artists and their creations.
How did you finance the film?
I knew someone once who was waiting for several years to get £4 million finance for a film. It never materialized, so the film never got made. I thought that was so sad that I vowed I’d only make films that I could finance myself. My first film, It’s Nice Up North, cost about £10,000, the follow up, Southern Softies, was about £12,000. I got the money back just through touring them, treating the film a bit like a gig with a Q&A afterwards. It was very satisfying. Father Earth cost the most; about £20,000, which is big budget for me. Most of it came from my sister Claire. It’s going to be very satisfying paying her back. My ethos is very home spun, It’s a bit like a cottage industry, so I think I’ll just carry on with my films. If someone came along with a £4 million budget, I’d take it, but I’ll tell you what – I wouldn’t wait around for it.
Last time we spoke, you were just preparing for John Shuttleworth’s Peak Cavern gig. What a story that turned into!
It certainly did. For anyone who’s not aware, the gig had to be abandoned at half time. Someone had fallen down the cliff face above the cavern entrance and was clinging onto a tree, in imminent danger of falling over 100ft to the cavern floor. The police decided it wasn’t safe to rescue him until the audience had been evacuated, so John never played the second half of his set. We got a lot of attention including tabloid headlines such as Man Plunges Into Devil’s Arse, and I even became a news story on Have I Got News for You. Thankfully it had a happy outcome when he was rescued and from a PR point of view, it was a brilliant thing to happen, but personally it has been a real headache for me and my agent getting it sorted. Hopefully it’s all done now, and everyone has been offered a free replacement ticket, although at present there are just a few tickets left for September. There will be a bucket collection for the Edale Mountain Rescue Team, and obviously the show will be slightly different from the one which had to be aborted. Hopefully we might get a bit of a story about what actually happened last time. Maybe Ken will get involved, via his phone. I’ll say no more. For anyone who can’t come, it’s going to be filmed as it will be my last Shuttleworth gig for a while.
Sheffielder Graham Fellows will be reprising his famous John Shuttleworth character for the last time in a while at Peak Cavern.
What else have you been up to?
I did Jilted John last week at the Rebellion Festival in Blackpool. It was brilliant, but it’s been stressful, learning all those songs again. It’s the same set of musicians that I used for the 2018 tour, and they all seem to love playing it. Weirdly, apart from Toyah, Jilted John was the only original singer on the day I played. It’s a curious world that all these bands like The Stranglers and The Undertones exist in, a sort of musical hinterland. They’re not cover bands, but they’re not the original bands either. Even though there are some original members, they don’t have the original singer, who for me, is the most important one. At the end of the day, fair play to them; why shouldn’t they make a living? I do find it weird, singing songs I wrote when I was 18, but I enjoy it, and we’ve been offered more dates – even a small tour in Germany – but I’m supposed to be retiring. After I become a celebrated film director, of course.
What are your plans for the future?
I’m 63 now and I want to enjoy myself and relax a bit more, so I don’t really have any. The Orkney church does give me sleepless nights. It’s so far away and I have thought about selling it. Everything there gets done ‘tomorrow’, due to the weather. I go up to do odd jobs, as I love it, but I need to live there really to make it work, and I’ve no plans to do that. I had planned to use it as a recording studio, and I did have a sound engineer who lived up there, but he left the island so there’s no-one there to do it now. There are two new Shuttleworth episodes going out on Radio 4 in November, but I’ve done John Shuttleworth since 1985, so I think we’re both due for a rest. One thing people might want to look out for is a film I did about the failed Sheffield Pop Music Museum. I’ve just discovered a copy, and I’m intending to put it on YouTube. People can see for themselves what was once in there, before it became Hallam University Students’ Union, and make their own mind up about why it closed. Although with exhibits where you could look through a peephole and see a picture of Dionne Warwick, it might not be much of a mystery why it failed.
John Shuttleworth plays the Peak Cavern on September 22nd, (tickets here), and Graham Fellows will be introducing the film Father Earth at the Leadmill on September 28th (tickets here).
For more upcoming events in Sheffield, head here.
