It’s been a bumper 12 months for folk music movies. Not counting any that are yet to arrive on these shores, there’s been two, which in the genre is a veritable flood. Both are certified hits in their own way. First came A Complete Unknown, in which Bob Dylan was played by Timothée Chalamet, which has become the biggest folk-flick ever. Now having debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in January to a standing ovation comes The Ballad of Wallis Island.
The British film follows Nell Mortimer and Herb McGwyer – or, as they were known in their mid-2000s heyday, McGwyer Mortimer. Years after their romantic split, they attempt a reunion show on the island of the title, a short but damp boat ride somewhere off the coast of Wales.
Just as Chalamet became Dylan in his movie, Tom Basden became Herb McGwyer. It’s a performance that can make you stop and think: he really looks a lot like Herb McGwyer. He sounds just like him, too. Likewise, the depiction of Nell Mortimer by Carey Mulligan – who has form in folk music movies with the Coen brothers’ 2013 Inside Llewyn Davis –is something else. In real life, Mulligan is married to folk-rocker Marcus Mumford of Mumford & Sons.
Let us come clean. The film might have delivered an album of very nice songs by McGwyer Mortimer, but they are written by Basden and sung by him and Mulligan. McGwyer Mortimer are the invention of Basden and his long-time comedy offsider Tim Key who, in the film, plays eccentric millionaire Charles, an obsessive fan who hopes to reunite the duo for an intimate show on the island where he lives alone, mostly, in a large house that is as welcoming, rambling and slightly wonky as he is.
Basden is possibly best known here as the brother-in-law of the grieving Ricky Gervais in After Life. Or as a character in the domestic mockumentary Here We Go, which he created (the third season has just arrived). Basden and Key created the short film The One and Only Herb McGwyer Plays Wallis Island back in 2007. It was effectively a demo tape for the feature, which has added Mulligan’s character, among other things.
The Ballad of Wallis Island was not only the best folk music movie at the New Zealand International Film Festival, where it screened ahead of its general release, but possibly the sweetest, funniest film in the programme. The Listener got in touch with Basden’s agent requesting a chat. Twenty-four hours or so later, Basden was on Zoom from London and being very sporting about initial attempts to treat McGwyer Mortimer as a real thing …
So, you’ve played Herb Dwyer in a movie. Have you met the real Herb Dwyer?
Ha ha. I don’t think I have, really. The character of Herb is sort of pieced together from what I know about a lot of musicians who I like – these sorts of grumpy, quite abrasive figures like Bob Dylan and Van Morrison and Ryan Adams. These kinds of quite antisocial men.
It seems to go with the territory.
It really does seem to go with the territory. They put all this wonderful music in the world and then don’t really want to enjoy any of the fan appreciation. Herb is my sort of patchwork version of those artists. I mean, I’d love to meet these people, but …
I’m guessing having Carey Mulligan in your film gave it a different level of attention.
I guess so. When we found out that Carey wanted to do it, it gave us such confidence about it. She is someone who is being offered a lot of things and only really wants to do things that she thinks are really good – and she wants to make our film. And it just gave us a lot of belief because this is not a world that we’re used to. We do expect that maybe at some point people are going to say, “You don’t really belong here. You are TV writers and TV actors, and you shouldn’t really be doing this.” The fact that Carey really responded to the script, really wanted to work with us, was just such a massive boost for everyone.
As well as the film, you wrote an album’s worth of songs. Are they by you or are they by Herb?
They’re a mixture, really. The lyrics are all from the character. Some of the melodies are songs I’ve written over the years. I’ve liked writing and playing music for a very long time, but I never thought I’d do anything with it. Some of those have ended up in the film, which is a very pleasing thing. But I have to tell myself that they’re all from the point of view of the character because that’s sort of the only way I can get over the embarrassment.
Presumably at some point you had to give Carey Mulligan the songs, who possibly had a second opinion readily available?
That was quite terrifying. There was a point where Carey had signed up to be in the film but hadn’t heard any of the music. I just had to send them all to her, kind of knowing that Marcus Mumford might well have an opinion. That was a very scary 72 hours, just waiting for her to respond. I was thinking that I might just get an email direct from Marcus going ,“It’s okay. I’ll write the songs.”
Which might have blown the budget?
Yeah, but they were both just so supportive. Marcus, in particular, was just so lovely, being really encouraging but giving us space to be ourselves to work it out together and not coming in to help.
McGwyer Mortimer would seem to be part of the British nu-folk thing spearheaded by Mumford & Sons in the late noughties. In your mind, were the duo actually tied to that?
It wasn’t like I modelled them on a particular band, or even a particular sort of dynamic. In some ways, I was probably thinking a bit more of American acts, like Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings.
But as a former couple on a Welsh island.
A little bit. It was interesting, seeing that Bob Dylan film, and seeing Dylan and Joan Baez, you know, performing together in their youth. Those kinds of romantic, musical relationships are such a big part of music and for the folk-rock thing I was drawing on quite a lot of different sources.
The movie’s songs could suggest you’ve been hiding your musical talent under a bushel.
I don’t necessarily think I have hidden it. I don’t feel like I’m a good enough musician to be a musician and properly put my music out there. My first two stand-up shows were musical comedy, and I did a lot of songs in those shows. I’ve liked the kind of the slight separation that playing music gives you – there’s something to hide behind. I remember seeing Flight of the Conchords in Edinburgh and around the same time I saw Tim Minchin and realised my enormous shortcomings.
Here, your face will be most familiar to people who watched After Life. It occurs to me that both Mackenzie Crook who was in The Office and created The Detectorists, and you, with this show, have now made gentle, pastoral, folksy comedies since. This might be seen as a reaction to the Gervais’ abrasiveness?
I don’t think so. Tim and I started doing comedy in about 2003, and at that point The Office was so influential. What Ricky and Stephen Merchant managed to do with that show, which, by turns, was gentle and at other times absolutely heartbreaking and hilarious and ridiculous, I’m sure it influenced an era of comedy. Ricky obviously wasn’t the first person to do it, but what he did so brilliantly was capture the sense of the tragic about these otherwise quite happy-go-lucky people. And that’s obviously what you can see at work in Tim’s character.
As opposed to your many sitcoms, this film isn’t an out-and-out comedy. You’ve written songs for it. You’re in it with Tim Key. Presumably, that all makes it quite personal.
In a way. When we first saw the film in front of an audience at Sundance at the start of the year, Tim and I – this was partly the jetlag and partly the altitude, but it’s also the nature of seeing your film in front of people – we were crying quite a lot. We were quite teary. It’s partly because we couldn’t believe we got to do it and had got to the point where people were seeing it at a festival. But it was like a testament to our friendship and our working relationship. It comes completely from the pair of us. Therefore, it is really personal. But it’s a particular kind of personal where it’s not about me baring my soul. It’s us putting our friendship and partnership on screen. It feels really personal, but in a lovely way, not in an exposing way.
And eight months after Sundance you are talking to some guy in New Zealand about it.
It’s really out of our wheelhouse. It’s not something Tim and I have done before. While the film’s been playing in the UK, Tim and I have been getting in touch with cinemas and asking if they want us to come and do Q&As, because we just really love talking to people about this film and we’ve just really enjoyed audiences’ reactions to it. Timothée Chalamet is probably not emailing his local cinema asking if they would like it if he came in for a chat.
The Ballad of Wallis Island is at selected cinemas now. All three seasons of Here We Go are on TVNZ+