Dene Michael’s bobble head on his dashboard in Still Pushing Pineapples
For Charles Hutchinson and Graham Chalmers‘ interview with Dene Michael and Kim Hopkins for the Two Big Egos In A Small Car podcast, visit: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1187561/episodes/18266909
IN a 2003 poll conducted by Q magazine, a panel of music writers voted Black Lace party anthem Agadoo as the worst song of all time. “Magnificently dreadful,” was the verdict.
What happens when you are forever associated with such a derided hit; what comes after fleeting fame, and what does it mean to grow old still chasing a dream?
Former member Dene Michael, originally from the Bradford suburb of Tong, is still singing the Yorkshire band’s 1984 number two – kept off top spot by George Michael’s Careless Whisper – across clubland UK. A story now told in Yorkshire filmmaker Kim Hopkins’s documentary Still Pushing Pineapples, her “elegy for a lost time, a lost culture, a lost Britain”, as the Telegraph deemed it.
On tour from November 28, Hopkins’s humorous, moving, warts’n’all 123-minute film for TullStories and her film company Labour Of Love will play City Screen Picturehouse on Sunday, when Hopkins, Dene Michael and producer Margareta Szabo will hold a post-screening Q&A.
Dene Michael and girlfriend Hayley, sporting her Dene tattoo, in Still Pushing Pineapples
Still Pushing Pineapples, a title taken from Agadoo’s shall-we-say-banal lyrics, is Selby-raised Hopkins’s follow-up to her award-wining portrait of a Bradford film club, A Bunch Of Amateurs, part one of a trilogy to be completed next year.
In her frank and fearless piece of affectionate social realism, Hopkins’s camera follows “former pop star” Dene Michael over two and half years as he clings to the remnants of fame he once had as a member of 1980s’ novelty pop group Black Lace, a band he joined after Alan Barton and Colin Gibb (or Routh as he was first known) had their biggest hit with Agadoo, “the high or low point of any party”.
Now, performing for a dwindling, ageing audience in some of the UK’s most deprived seaside towns and cities, Dene is keen to press on with his music career and free himself from the legacy of the Black Lace songbook to “do something a bit more credible and clever”. A decision enhanced by the management jettisoning him and his Hawaiian wardrobe for a younger Black Lace (featuring Phil Temple and 2008 Britain’s Got Talent contestant Craig Harper since 2023).
Who needs a 1980s’ throwback in a loud pineapple shirt and oversized red specs, singing a tired earworm? Apparently, many do (doo doo). Hence Still Pushing Pineapples traces the path of Dene, his spirited 89-year-old mum Anne and his sassy new girlfriend Hayley (freshly inked Dene tattoo on her arm et al) on their travels across Britain and to Benidorm in a pineapple-decorated camper van.
The poster for TullStories and Labor Of Love Films’ documentary Still Pushing Pineapples
Outwardly, they may look like three unlikely amigos to share such a trip, but those travels are suffused with love, humour and no little drama in Hopkins’s Yorkshire variation on Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris’s 2006 tragicomic American road movie Little Miss Sunshine.
En route, they navigate love, family duty and the relentless pursuit of one last chart success, as entertainment, working-class culture, human connection and the power of pop align in this idiosyncratic documentary that opened this year’s Sheffield DocFest and received a special preview screening at Bradford’s Pictureville cinema on November 14 as part of Bradford 2025 UK City of Culture.
Kim Hopkins describes herself as a “working-class, queer British filmmaker” and is one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary UK documentary film-making. A highly skilled self-shooting director, she brings a distinctive visual world and deep intimacy to her films.
She is a graduate of the National Film and Television School and co-founder of Labor Of Love Films with Margareta Szabo, producer of A Bunch Of Amateurs and Still Pushing Pineapples.
Yorkshire documentary filmmaker Kim Hopkins, Selby-educated director of Still Pushing Pineapples
“Still Pushing Pineapples is the second film in a trilogy I’m making about working-class communities, self-expression, the power of solidarity and escapism,” says Kim. “When Black Lace exploded onto Top Of The Pops with their Agadoo hit in the 1980’s I, like many, dismissed it as a junk novelty song. But every summer since, on every beach holiday, Agadoo has proved inescapable.
“Returning to my Yorkshire roots later in life, I’ve come to understand the power of escapist popular culture. Working-class people need to escape. I decided to ask my family what they thought about me making a film, this time about Black Lace and Agadoo?
“They approved of the idea. Nostalgia gleamed in their eyes. Alexa lit up with party tunes of yesteryear. They wanted to know the whole Black Lace story. Who were they, where did they end up, would it be ‘real’?”
Still Pushing Pineapples, City Screen Picturehouse, York, Sunday, December 7, 5pm. Box office: picturehouses.com/cinema/city-screen-picturehouse. To view the trailer, go to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZFfsJmGMQU.
Dene Michael dressed as a pineapple for the finale to Still Pushing Pineapples