“We’ve been so incredibly lucky to get roles in this amazing, fascinating film”, says Harry. “But we keep getting asked the same questions we’ve been asked since we were five.”
“Are you telepathic?” offers Luke.
“How do people tell you apart?” continues Harry.
“Do you have the same dreams?” laughs Luke.
Oh well. At least they’ve had practise at answering such inane questions. As the stars of the brilliantly individual mockumentary Brothers Of The Head, there’ll be plenty more daft enquiries where those came from. The film, as hip regular readers of Pitchfork and other US alt.zines will already know, charts the rise and fall of a proto-punk conjoined twins act during the seventies. Though based on a characteristically wild flight of fancy by the august second wave sci-fi author Brian Aldiss, one would hard pressed to identify the events on screen as fiction. Directors Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe, who made the Terry Gilliam/Don Quixote doc Lost in La Mancha have done a splendid job of recreating the weird omnisexual English setting of Performance and the doomed grunginess of Last Days.
Like the latter film, Brothers Of The Head is delineated by a good deal of shuffling around a big old house. Purchased in the manner of a freakshow concession, the twins’ sinister new owner, Zak Bedderwick, a former vaudeville child star, cloisters them in an isolated mansion. There, they find themselves bullied by merciless rock manager Nick Sidney as he builds post-glam sensation Bang Bang around them. For some months, they are the Next Big Thing, until a lady journalist (Laura Ashworth) yokos onto the scene and comes between them.
More Cronenberg than DiBergi, this eerie curio is told through a series of reminiscing talking heads and footage supposedly shot by an American cinéma vérité filmmaker and protégé of D. A. Pennebaker. Fulton and Pepe cleverly maintain the illusion of historical document by the inclusion of such odd plausible details. Later, Ken Russell pops up as the director of Two Way Romeo, an unfinished film about the twins. The songs, written by Clive Langer, a guitarist in the real-life mid-70’s band Deaf School and later a successful new-wave producer, are uncannily credible and decent enough to have inspired talk of the Treadaway brothers going on tour for real.
Naturally, the boys are delighted. Growing up in Devon, as teenagers they formed their own band with both Harry and Luke on guitar. For Brothers Of The Head though, they had to get used to performing while joined by at the chest.
“We’ve always been performing together since we were little kids”, Harry tells me. “We’d get up on our mum’s bed and dance and put on plays and we’re very used to being around one another. But it was like a neverending sack race. We had to practise to get in synch for this because you’re sleeping together, eating together, going for a shower together, having sex together – well, not together...”
Ah, but there is that moment when, standing on a stage, looking like the androgynous mutant offspring of David Bowie and Iggy Pop, the brothers were required to kiss.
“It wasn’t as weird as you’d think”, explains Luke. “It sounds a bit wanky, but we really did think that it was just the characters doing it, not us.”
Their dedication to their art seems to be paying dividends. Since filming Brothers of the Head, Harry Treadaway has appeared in an episode of Miss Marple: Sleeping Murder for ITV Television and landed the role of Stephen Morris, the Joy Division drummer for Control – Ian Curtis biography feature. Luke meanwhile, is playing a law student in The Innocence Project for BBC television. In America, where Brothers Of The Head received rave notices from such esteemed publications as The Austin Chronicle and The Village Voice, the lads have been branded the anti-Olsens.
“We couldn’t believe it when the script came our way”, says Luke. “We hadn’t even graduated from LAMBA (London Academy Of Music and Dramatic Arts) and suddenly it’s like – Oh, so that’s what we’ll be doing with our summer holidays.”