Brothers of the Head

Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe, UK, 2005, 93 minutes

Reductive summarised and synopsised as This is Spinal Tap meets meets Velvet Goldmine with a welcome soupçon of Hedwig and the Angry , The Brothers of the Head is your typical mock-doc portrait of a band's rapid rise and fall, here set against the backdrop of the proto-punk / glam rock scene of the early-mid 1970s, but elevated through one brilliant high-concept idea / gimmick courtesy of Brian Aldiss's source novel.

The titular brothers, singer Barry and guitarist Tom (Luke and Harry Treadaway) are not just brothers, nor twins but conjoined twins – or, to use the non-PC parlance of the day, Siamese twins; “freaks of nature” with an obvious unique selling point to be exploited in the name of show-business.

The question that emerges is who is really being exploited: the twins; the traditional working-class music-hall impresario who finds and first develops the twins as a novelty act before himself being sidelined by a younger, hipper Malcolm McLaren-styled figure; the diegetic audience who go see their shows having bought into this Svengali's new schtick of packaged rebellion and polymorphous perversity (the twins' new band is suggestively named The Bang Bang, while their most famous song is entitled Two Way Romeo); or the non-diegetic spectator who believes the whole thing to be real and wouldn't have bothered stumping up his or her hard-earned without that unique selling proposition.

While film-makers Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe, hitherto best known for their documentary Lost in Mancha, certainly exploit us in terms of the last – Ken Russell is also on hand, contributing retrospective commentary on a purportedly abandoned film on the brothers dating from the same period as Tommy and Lisztomania – their film happily overcomes being just another (Great Rock and Roll) swindle perpetrated on a gullible public through its relentless multi-layered, self-awareness; in addition to all the above, the obligatory romantic element comes in the form of a sociologist intending to write a study on the exploitation of the handicapped only to end up contributing to The Bang Bang's demise via representing the obligatory groupie element providing the sex to go along with the drugs and rock and roll.

More importantly, for those who don't care about double-domed detournements and deconstructions – thanks to Joe Carducci's non-fiction, must-read Pop and the Rock Narcotic for that one – the simple fact is that the film is very well made and acted, with one never for a moment doubting the illusion of reality produced by all involved, except for those moments when they invite us to.

In other words, it rocks. All the way up top eleven...

Review by Michel Gentil
Written for EUFS Programme Autumn 2007