"Art is not an end in itself, but a means of addressing humanity." - Mussorgsky

Showbusiness!
"No-one is completely worthless - they can always serve as a bad example"

"Now if only pop (I mean POP) and politics DID mix..." - Rob Gibson reviewing Chumbawamba's "Never Mind The Ballots" LP, Sounds July 1987

"Suspended above the courtyard of the Pompidou Centre in Paris is the Genitron, an electric sign-clock flashing the number of seconds left in the twentieth century. Inaugurated in January 1987 by Francois Mitterand, the Genitron is a time machine that conducts its relentless countdown over the heads of the international fauna of Les Halles, the hustlers, punks, dealers, con men, mystics, musicians, strong-men, fireeaters, rappers, breakers, addicts, sidewalk artists, and sidewalk dwellers who seem already to represent the spectres of the apocalypse." - Elaine Showalter, from 'Sexual Anarchy - Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siecle' (1990)

FIVE OR SIX YEARS before the countdown began and Chumbawamba is being born out of that beautiful mess of street performers. Chumbawamba is the trio busking Clash and Gene Vincent songs on acoustic guitars - fired by punk logic, punk as change, hanging about in Paris during that knife-edge decision-time when rebellion turns into either part of your growing up or part of your life. Politics, or "attitude" as it's euphemistically called these days, was bound to come into it sooner or later...

Back a bit further. Legal Aid and Optical Illusion are the drummer and singer in a Barnsley punk band. Legal's grandad is taking a Polaroid. They're called 'The Threat' and their music starts and ends this record; the photograph becomes its cover. Later they'll change their names to Harry & Mave and meet up with the others in Leeds, and end up living in a huge squatted Victorian house making pop (I mean POP) records...

Alice Nutter, art school drop-out, is playing drums badly in a group called 'Ow My Hair's On Fire'. Lou Watts operating computers for Burnley Building Society, Dunstan singing Velvet Underground cover versions in a Billingham group 'Men In A Suitcase'. Teams that meet in caffs... and in the background, a woman Prime Minister running her own War in the South Atlantic, New Musical Express refusing to comment as Britian bills, maims, parades, and gloats for half of 1982. England is dreaming alright: and someone has to shout about this nightmare even if they are to be damned into obscurity for their pains. Usher in the Never-Has-Beens!

LONG BEFORE Chumbawamba releases any records of their own, they pull off a successful guerilla attack which results in their first appearance on vinyl. In response to Garry Bushell's inane patronage of Oi Punk (before Garry wrote for The Sun, he practiced his homophobic brand of tabloid sensationalism in music weekly 'Sounds'), Chumbawamba fabricate a completely bogus Oi band called 'Skin Disease', complete with press pack and four-track demo cassette. Some few weeks later and Bushell lists Skin Disease as "Burnley's premier Oi band", and letters appear in Sounds lumping Skin Disease in with "other Northern Oi bands", as proof that "good Oi music is not exclusively a London phenomenon." All this despite the fact the "band" never actually existed. Eventually, Bushell invites the band to appear on an Oi compilation single. Playing the role of Northern oiks, Skin Disease travel to London to record a specially-written song called "I'm Thick", a bog-standard punky trash with the words "I'm Thick" repeated sixty-four times. It appears on the single "Back On The Streets"...

Meanwhile, back to the twentieth-century countdown. The first Chumbawamba demo tape is recorded in Hulme, Manchester, a few days after the band's first gig in January 1982. A snippet of it ends up on a Crass compilation album "Bullshit Detector 2", alongside a song about nuclear war by Barnsley band Passion Killers. Passion Killers are what became of The Threat. (As in, "1,2,3,4, Let's Go!"). The two bands meet. Small-town punks in Leedsm with a desire to rise above the mundane, to avoid a lifetime career at the Building Society or down the pit at Barnsley Main... sidestepping the alternative of college education. But instead of just escaping those roots, it becomes more and more important as the eighties progresses to take them along, to re-write the endings of Hollywood teenage rites-of-passage movies, to balance the fine line between everyday boredom and rock n roll's petulant ignorance of real life; and to have fun doing it. Growing up to a soundtrack of punky, alienated noise - religiously watching The Fall, Wire, ATV, Clash - turns everything after into a choice of safety - with all its inbuilt insecurities and emotional cancers - and challenge. Change or go under. The bad ship Chumbawamba sets sail...

"Chumbawamba: the message is more important than the music." - Full extent of first ever live review, New Musical Express

AT THIS POINT, CHUMBAWAMBA are fast becoming unmoveable flag-burning pacifists, a reaction against Thatcher's election campaign involving nuclear stockpiling and stepping over dead bodies in the Falklands. This is the decadent 60's and 70's hangover, the Pistols' "No Future" etched across a Boy George mirror. In the early eighties, the choice seems straightforward - Britpop as complete escapism (Lady Margaret's "Me, me, me" culture) or the sub-culture of resistance that is burrowing it's way from underground. Chumbwamba play gigs at peace camps, turning up at demonstrations and rallies like they're going out of fashion (Which they are). The band's home is raided twice in under a year by ten burly drugs squad officers who ask, "You lot them Socialist Worker types, right?". No wonder the likes of the Guildford Four got banged up for fifteen years with authorities like this on the case...

The entries on the Special Branch files get longer. Raids, obstruction, breaches of the peace, even "theft by housebreaking" - twenty-six hours in the custody of the Strathclyde police in December 1983 charged with "removal of dogs, mice, and flies" from a research laboratory outside Glasgow. Benefit gigs by the bucketload; for single parents, local hospital closure campaigns, hunt saboteurs, the ALF, anti-Sizewell campaign, nurseries. Nine people, three cats, and a dog living under one roof, fledgling anarchist politics mixed with too-hefty doses of idealism and organic vegetables. The dog, Derek, appears on a couple of the early records and includes in his CV the greatest accolade bestowed upon a canine: that of biting members of the police force (forcing one to have hospital treatment)...

TWO EVENTS WHICH RE-ROUTE the agit-pop politics of Chumbawamba, both from 1984. Firstly, the Brighton bomb. Half the Cabinet covered in rubble, and suddenly political violence - of the type which defeated Hitler, freed Mandela, ended slavery, and overthrew the state communist dictatorships - blows a hole in the pacifist edge to the band's polemic. Secondly, and more importantly, the beginning of the great Miners' Strike. From early on, the Armley (Leeds) Miners Support group is twinned with Frickley pit in South Elmsall - Armley Socialist Workers make the connections and Chumbwamba supplies the van and the street collections on Saturday mornings. The band mix playing benefit gigs for the miners and traveling down to the picket lines at five and six o'clock in the morning. And during this bitter winter some of Chumbawamba pantomime for miner's kids, down to South Wales and around Yorkshire. Coming from places like Barnsley and Burnley in times when the coal mines were part of the very fabric of those towns, it doesn't take much effort to know which side of the fence you ought to be standing on; the band makes and sells a fast-selling three-track cassette for the Miners' Hardship Fund, and Sounds writes:
"The Chumbas, as they are affectionately known, are refreshing and genuine pop anarchists. And no, they won't go away..." (December 1984)

"What we're given is any old rubbish that won't upset the apple cart. The only choice we seem to be left with is to play the part of the bad apple." - from Chumbawamba's first single sleevenotes

ON JUNE 1ST, 1985, Chumbawamba are recording their first single "Revolution", whilst at the same time the Travellers' Convoy is being attacked and wrecked in a beanfield adjacent to Stonehenge. Cracked heads, massive publicity, and the start of a new era of political change: when the marginals begin to come out of the underground...

The Clash, hastily reformed in new street-cred guise with Joe Strummer passing around the music business hat to pay for his cocaine habit, play rebel chic outside Leeds University. Danbert Nobacon arms himself with a hydraulic-action paint gun and splatters band and audience before legging it. This is Chumbawamba discovering their real talent: refuting the idea that rock n roll is some huge back-slapping family business where everyone "pulls together". Putting spanners in their own works, pigheadedly refusing to lie down and become another servile record business lap-dog...

THE HOUSE IS RAIDED AGAIN, this time with sledgehammers. They're looking for "explosives and bomb-making equipment". Everyone is hauled down to the station, questioned relentlessly, kept separately, diaries and books confiscated - huge plastic bagfuls of pamphlets, posters, even song lyrics... twenty-three hours in a Leeds copshop. Meanwhile, the first single sells out...

"We haven't got a masterplan - we react to things as they come along. As anarchists, we live with the contradictions that socialism doesn't allow." - From an interview with Melody Maker, December 1986

Chumbawamba mocks up as an April Fool's SDP/Liberal Alliance pop group, calls itself The Middle, and records three tracks for a spoof demo. The Libs love it. Mike Harskin at the Liberal Whips Office in the House of Commons writes to invite the band to play at MP David Owen's birthday party at Stringfellow's in London; Chumbawamba are busy playing their own gigs. The single "Smash Clause 28" attacks the government's homophobia pushing through a law which, amongst other things, demands the teaching of hetero-only family values in schools. This single is received as "unwashed ghetto grumbling... rock n roll won't even notice" by Sounds magazine. (Shortly after, few people notice the demise of Sounds.) "Smash Clause 28" is the first of several recorded attacks on homophobia by the band, and significantly it isn't until 1994's "Homophobia" that the issue becomes "acceptable" enough to make it into the pop industry's frame of vision, along with active anti-fascism (as opposed to a general nod in the direction of anti-racism) and anti-sexism. This year's thing, last year's thing, next year's thing...

IN THE SUMMER OF 1985, Live Aid gives Sir Bob Geldof an excuse to get pissed and shout "fucking give, you bastards!" on live TV. Everyone waits to see if they'll exhume John Lennon's body and sit it in front of a white piano. Showbiz razzamatazz and displays of public generosity before McCartney sings "Let It Be". Let what be? Have a party, celebrate decadence, and send a few bob to Africa? The 80 million pounds raised amounts to a little more than half of Michael Jackson's personal fortune, or about what the world spends on arms every two hours forty minutes. And not one of those has-beens up there on the global pulpit ever mentions why there's a famine in the first place - no one asks who rips off the African crops and gives only MacCoke culture in return. Band Aid: a sticking plaster on a gaping wound. Revive those flagging careers! And U2 got their first taste of stadium rock...

Chumbawamba's response is an LP catchily titled "Pictures of Starving Children Sell Records; Starvation, Charity, and Rock n Roll - Lies and Traditions". Which says it all really. On the home front, Chumbawamba gets involved in mass pickets both locally, at the Silentnight factory in Barnoldswick, and nationally, outside Fortress Wapping in London, where Rupert Murdoch mixes upgrading production of The Sun and The Times with all-out attacks on unions. Bundles of newspapers sitting outside newspaper shops across Britain are repeatedly stolen and burnt, and several nights in Wapping end in a celebratory and almost ritual battle between cops protecting newspaper lorries and thousands of pickets and supporters. The band plays benefits for both sets of strikers in addition to gigs for Gay Switchboard, Prisoner's Support groups, Leeds Bust Fund, and even an Anti-Freemasons concert in Keswick which has to switch venues twice due to local Masonic council threats. Chumbawamba is described in the Keswick press as "the worst of the American satanic backward message bands". And a gig with arch-punks Conflict at Leeds University ends in a mini-riot, missiles, riot cops, and running battles... and Chumbawamba earns a lifetime ban from the University...

Late 1986 and Chumbawamba link up with Dutch band The Ex for a gig-to-gig relationship which is to last several years. Anarchists, squatters, and die-hard musical experimentalists, The Ex introduce Chumbawamba to demonstrations, Amsterdam-style: in a protest against NATO warships being stationed in the harbor, thousands of people create a huge party on the shores with bands playing on warehouse roof-tops and people already in crash helmets and with scarves across their faces. The Dutch riot police repeatedly charge the crowd, there's a scream, and it's an English accent. Alice Nutter is caught in the panic and has a broken leg. She completes the tour sitting on stage on a stool with her leg in plaster...

"All good clean fun, and ultimately harmless." - Chumbawamba live review, Birmingham Mermaid 1987

THE "SCAB AID" SINGLE, released under the name "The Scum" in 1987, attacks The Sun newspaper's hypocrisy and jingoism by parodying that paper's charity single "Let It Be" - where a host of pop's greying publicity-fetishists (McCartney, Boy George, etc) sing to raise money for people involved in a ferry disaster. The single, a spoken-word n' piano piece narrated by long-standing Chumbawamba sidekick Simon Lanzon (later of Credit To The Nation) makes NME's single of the week and sells out before anyone realizes it's Chumbawamba. The Sun describes the record as "sick!". And what more accolade could it get from a paper that described the drowning of hundreds of Argentine soldiers aboard ship in 1982 with the headline "Gotcha!"?

"NEVER MIND THE BALLOTS... Here's The Rest of Your Life". Another Thatcher election victory and another round of red-faced Labour politicians shifting further and further to the right. The Labour Party, sitting on the fence so long it can't work out which side it's supposed to be on. Scared to challenge the status quo, wooing big business, turning a blind eye to sexual politics, to the dismantling of the Unions, to Ireland. For some of Chumbawamba, a few days in Belfast to see a little of what's going on there. Saturday night chucking-out time, blacked-up squaddies creeping through peoples' front gardens, in armored cars in daylight asking questions, taking details at sub-machine gunpoint. And the British media's propaganda warfare, relentless in its blanket-censoring thoroughness... you can sing "Free Nelson Mandela" until the cows come home, but sing a song about Bobby Sands and see what reaction you get...
1988 and trying to cross the border between Switzerland and France. Seven hours in the no-man's-land between the two, the entire band strip-searched and questioned after being found to have some copies of "Class War". Extra plain-clothes officers "looking for guns", the band only manages to cross into France when the Swiss refuse to have them back; and after signing papers agreeing to the destruction of the confiscated magazines...

BACK IN ENGLAND, and the Centre for Policy Studies have unveiled their brand new baby for the 1990's - the Poll Tax. Contrary to its previous form, this is an attack on the whole of the British working class in one fell swoop; having excelled at picking off sections of it, this time the state proposes to reinvent a sweeping poverty tax which last failed in 1381, the time of the infamous People's Revolt. Chumbawamba reacts by releasing a collection of acapella songs dating from that revolt to the present day: "English Rebel Songs" breaks up the chain of guitar/drums pop and tells its history of trouble-makers, revolutionaries, and rebels whilst around the land anti-Poll Tax groups begin to organize and educate...

"If I can't dance to it... it's not my revolution." - Emma Goldman

PEOPLE ARE BEGINNING to get their act together - for some reason, 80's hedonism is giving way to recognition that whilst they were at the cocktail bar getting drunk the number of homeless people on the street outside has doubled. Chumbawamba takes time off to get crap jobs, record a double LP entitled "101 Songs About Sport" (under the name "Sportchestra!"), and move out of the big house. During this unplanned sabbatical they play only one gig, at Bradford's long-running (and self-run) Anarchist club the 1 in 12: playing only punk cover versions, God Save The Queen, White Riot, and the rest...

This concert aside, it wasn't until late 1989 that Chumbawamba played again, this time in Japan, as Britain's contribution to an international conference organized to raise awareness of all things political: unionized struggles, aboriginal rights, women's groups across the world. From a squat gig in Hackney almost a year earlier, to singing acapella rebel songs in a converted Catholic church in Tokyo. The conference was called "The People's Plan For the 21st Century" - and the clock outside the Pompidou Centre carries on ticking away...

THE POLL TAX is introduced in Scotland, and Thatcher suddenly realizes why the Romans built Hadrian's Wall in the first place. No way are most of the Scots going to pay - for that initial year, the fightback against the tax - demonstrations, non-payment, attacks on tax collectors - shows the rest of Britain just how we can deal with the Poll Tax (and with Thatcher) once and for all. Of course, the Tories don't even plan to introduce the tax in the Six Counties of Northern Ireland; they just wouldn't dare. And the Chumbawamba machine spins on, recording songs for benefit compilation LPs and surviving the bankruptcy of their distribution company and the general indifference of most folk to the continuing combination of pop and politics...

"As a reggae horn section kicks up dust, a duet from beyond the grave: a pseudo-Meinhof (German woman urban guerilla), insisting in a clear unsolemn voice that she's not sorry ("don't think I walked into banks to stand in the queue" - Raymond Chandler wouldn't have minded having written that); then Elvis, not pseudo but sampled (credited as a band member doubling on Quaaludes and Placydill), aiming 'Can't Help Falling In Love' right back." - Greil Marcus, March 1991

"Don't urinate on the floor - your son will have to clean it up" - graffiti carved into the wall in visitors' waiting room toilets, inside Armley Jail

YEARS ON, AND CHUMBAWAMBA still awkwardly hanging around, balancing on that knife edge between the boredom of everyday life and the ignorance of pop (knowing that when a band, smacked out or coked up, gets up to its boy's playroom antics in the hotel rooms, chucking around tellies and food and chairs and champagne... that someone's mum comes in the next morning and gets paid 3 pounds an hour to wipe up the mess on her hands 'n' knees). The turn of the decade and the pop clock began to bring politics into fashion as organized raves and warehouse parties were busted, banned, and trashed by cops throughout Britain. Just south of Leeds, the biggest mass arrest ever seen in this country as hundreds of people are shunted into cells, jails, and cop-shops around West Yorkshire during one outdoor rave. A handful of the hundreds get charged for possession - but more importantly, the authorities are putting the scare on pop culture...

Dance music, new (different) drugs, people organizing outside the established clubs: suddenly you can go for a night out without having to stand in the corner of some pick-up joint listening to daytime radio disco; the threatening, sexist, macho atmosphere connected to nightclubs is swamped by something new, exciting, and even joyous. And suddenly, thousands of people are putting together records on their own tiny labels, home computers undermining the pop/rock company stranglehold...