Pedigree Chumba

You keep me waiting,
I keep on shouting . . . Shouting (from Swinging With Raymond)

They get knocked down. But they get up again there s just no holding Chumbawamba down.
We scuff stylishly in the Victoria Arcade, waiting for Alice to arrive. In the record store display behind us there s a promo for the Diana-Aid album. As we wait for Alice to show we debate the ethics of benefits, and speculate. Of course, Elton John is an embarrassing stain on the underpants of pop history. And the Queen Mother of Schmaltz s song about dead blondes can t even really be considered a proper CD at all. It s more a commemorative mug. A collectable plate to hang on the wall. It s nothing to do with music. The real chart went on beneath it regardless. And of course, the de facto no.1 s for September/ October 1997 were The Verve, Oasis . . . and oh, frabjous day, Chumbawamba s Tubthumping too!
It s got to be the most unlikely pop triumph of the year. Suddenly these party political animals from the Leeds low-rent low-prestige Armley-district had gone from the equivalent of Channel 5 to Chanel No.5, from low-profile exposure to coming up smelling of Top Of The Pops success. Love, happiness and air-conditioning, at a stroke, even if that stroke did involve signing up to major league EMI, and conspicuously censoring out the pissing the night away lyric for the tender sensibilities of TV viewers. We ll be singing, when we re winning . . . indeed!
Everyone s accusing us of selling out, Alice Nutter protested to The Observer. But there s more chance of Prince Charles managing Barnsley FC than there is of us going along with that rags-to-riches line. We d never have signed to EMI if they hadn t sold off their Thorn Arms Division a few years back. And as it is, we went with EMI Germany after the British company had knocked us back.
And yes, and yes . . . they did follow up a live Top Of The Pops ( We came off stage and tried to get Marilyn Manson to sign a panty pad: Go on, sign it, I ll wear it forever! ) with a solidarity benefit at London s Kentish Town Forum for the year-long striking Liverpool dockers. A continuity, for the Chumbas, of previous benefits such as contributing to Cooking Vinyl s anti-Criminal Justice Act LP The Disagreements Of The People, with the likes of Andy White, the Pogues, and Billy Bragg. That s before we get onto the hunt saboteurs, striking miners, gay rights etc. As devil s advocate, how is it possible to decide which cause to support and which to demonise?
I m still dubious about charity, Alice admits now. I m even dubious when we take part in it. You can be aware of what s happening, and want to help, without thinking if only Oasis would come along and save people . We go with our gut-policy on contributing to things. For example, nobody else will contribute to abortion rights films. They are never going to get funding. Old ladies on the street won t put money into that. So we ve always said that if we fund anything then it has to be because it s so unpopular with liberals y know? I don t like dogs and cats charities. I ve got to be honest, I wouldn t fund those causes anymore because they don t need it. They re also single-issue things where the people who do them think they re the most important thing in the world. Whereas to us they re just a small part of a big whole.
I ve regretted some things we ve done, to be honest. It s like, I would never let the ANL (Anti-Nazi League) use our name, because of their status as a front for the Socialist Workers Party. They d go will you do this? And we d go no, we won t actually . And they think you re a bastard! But we don t care that much about what people think about us that we ll stick our name on anything.
Alice Nutter. You ve seen a lot of her on TV recently, up there with Danbert Nobacon. He s the Jean-Luc Picard lookalike with a Bacofoil fixation. Then there s Lou with the sweet folk harmonies, Jude the new trumpet player, Boff, Dunstan (who features prominently in the video for Tubthumping ), Paul, and, er, Harry, the guy dressed up as a brick-wall. Alice crosses her 7 s in Continental style. She once claimed to be a fan of Raquel, the blonde air-head barmaid from Coronation Street. And if you thought Scary Spice was scary, you obviously ain t seen Scary Alice on stage dancing like she has some private understanding with the law of gravity! But now she s here talking sense with a casual air of extreme reality. She s used to facing off interviewers, detouring conversational cul-de-sacs and outright damn-fool questions.
One of the reasons they quit One Little Indian, she says, is because one of the blokes at One Little Indian came up to me and said I listened to your last single , and I knew he hadn t. He goes what s it called? And I said Wake Up Boo . And he went that s it yeah! Such a good song, yeah, Wake Up Boo . And I just thought, bastard! That s par for the course. He thinks we re the fucking Boo Radleys!
But she has secret uncertainties too. She was born Anne. When she was 17 she decided she didn t want to be called Anne anymore. She grins. I decided I wanted to be called Nutty-Slack (a name for cheap low-grade coal). That weren t because I were wacky. It s because I thought it was such a fucking cool name. But I didn t have the guts to go round and say to people call me Nutty Slack . A careful pause to reflect adolescent uncertainty. So I never did it.
So, through a momentary loss of nerve, she became Alice.

Nothing ever burns down by itself,
every fire needs a little bit of help . . . Give The Anarchist A Cigarette from Anarchy
So, waiting for Alice Nutter to show up in Leeds Victoria Quarter Shopping Mall today, not knowing quite what to expect, I feel a bit like a cat in a bag waiting to drown.
Let s re-run the itinerary. Chumbawamba were conceived out of outrage, Thatcher s deliberate mass unemployment, the miners strike, sado-monetarism, Bob Geldof s Live Aid, stuff like that. And when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro (as Hunter S. Thompson would say). So what happens when things stop getting weird? Thatcher is gone, dead, embalmed. Tub-Thumping goes Top 5 in America! We got Cyber-pets, CGI-SFX, the Lottery and Tony Blair.
Yeah, it s difficult to visualise that a whole generation of people grew up never knowing anything but Tory governments and Thatcherism, Alice amicably agrees. But it doesn t really make that much difference, cos I knew the previous Labour government and that was shite as well. You ve got this sort of mental lineage of England and the way things have altered. Well, for some people things haven t altered. It s just a continual thumbscrew tightening up.
And Chumbawamba? I m getting chaos, I m getting anarchy, I m getting subversion, I m getting . . . chart hits? By all logics, surely their political dialectic should have ended the moment the Chumbas appeared on Top Of The Pops in the blinding incandescent detonation of matter meeting anti-matter. Isn t the whole idea of the Chumbas-as-pop-stars weird, or and perhaps this is an even stranger thought still perhaps it isn t weird any more?
We ve been talking about anarchism, drugs, sex, revolution and the Liverpool Dock workers for a million years now, but suddenly with a hit single, people are saying our Pop has a relevant context, Alice told The Guardian in August. In fact pop music always has/had a context but it s usually the context of ignorant, irrelevant, fantasy-orientated ego-massage.
So, no sell-outs. But certainly there s a higher level of focusing. A more smoothly sophisticated savagery, with integral dissension and killer dynamics? And hey, expecting the Chumbas to inspire armed insurrection on the street with every release is a little like Richard Ashcroft suing his dealer under the Trades Description Act because his Drugs Don t Work. Isn t it? And try thinking of this as subversion from the inside.
But we ve heard all that stuff before too; Pop s already passed by this particular stunt and very rapidly been bought out by celebrity. So let s consider earlier generations of Rock n Roll Protest. Let s think Bob Dylan. On Anarchy, still my favourite Chumbas album, they do a the times they are a-changing, but he just forgets line about the some-time protest singer on a track called Give The Anarchist A Cigarette , itself a reference lifted from a scene in a Dylan movie. But when he started out he was fuelled by anger too. Yes, but no, Alice begins. You say when he started out , but even then he lost his grip on reality pretty fast. If you watch his Don t Look Back tour movie, from the lyrical context he seems like a rebel, but from a life-style context he s already the Classic Pop Star-in-a-bubble. He doesn t even have to light his own cigarette! I d be really surprised if Bob Dylan knew his neighbours in 1966. I d be really surprised if he had any idea about what was actually going on in the area he lived in.
Perhaps Dylan playing for the Pope is conclusive proof that long-term drug-abuse does cause brain damage?
Bob Dylan probably started off with a good heart. But just because you ve got good intentions and a good heart doesn t mean that you re equipped to philosophise on the essential nature of war, know what I mean? If you re truly political then you know what s happening in your own area.
Punk also started out fuelled on hate, but quickly wound up as mere performance. How is it possible to maintain your hostility level?
Yeah-yeah. Yeah-yeah, she cuts in, impatient to get in her retaliation. But, right, I only need to read the Sunday supplement to get my anger sharp seriously. I pick them up, and I cannot believe what I am reading. Every Sunday they supposedly deliver an educated view of the world, but they re written by people who are completely and absolutely clueless. It s always looking down. It s always Poverty Tourism . If they catch onto a trend, it s already gone. It s always a really safe middle-class view of the world. That s probably why the educated middle-class think everything is alright they get it from reading the Sunday supplements! They re meant to provide, y know, a tolerant view but in actual fact it s complete misinformation.
Here we re talking The Guardian and The Observer?
Yeah yeah, her speed of reaction quickening. Yes. There s no point reading the Sun to get mad. Because it s so stupid. You know you re gonna get mad reading the Sun. The Daily Express is quite good for that too. Because that pretends to be reasonable, but it s actually very bigoted. You don t have to try to maintain hate because there s stuff that happens all the time. It stays. It s like every time governments come up with the idea of penalising single mothers again. All I have to do is think about my friend. She s 22 and she s got a four-year old boy. She s struggling now. She s really struggling. She runs out of money each Tuesday. She can never get through to the end of the week. She never has anything. Then you think about politicians penalising single mothers and you know what s going to happen to her. And you re instantly mad! In fact when they were discussing it on TV I was sat there with her brother, and he goes if this comes in then there s no way I m not going out to punch a Tory! If you re not removed from it then you ve got no choice but to be angry. So no, I don t think it s hard to maintain anger. It s only hard to maintain if you re somebody who is actually removed from people. The problem is that pop stars imagine misery. It s not that they know it.

You think you re god s gift, you re a liar
I wouldn t piss on you, if you were on fire . . . Can t Hear You Cos Your Mouth s Full Of Shit from Anarchy

Sometimes ordinary itself can be a matter of perception. There are some people like, say, Mark E Smith, who considers himself to be an ordinary bloke. But he s been in a reasonably successful band for 20 years, and to people who buy his records, that makes him a pop star even though he might not consider himself part of the Star System.
But he is a total pop star, Alice insistently retorts. The bus driver who tours with us used to be Mark E Smith s tour driver, until he said I m not having him in me bus anymore! Because he s a tosser. Maybe he s changed, but the number of stories you hear about Mark E Smith s tantrums! So, if you hate being a pop star, don t ever throw a tantrum! I know I m slagging off people in the music industry but it s like there is this pretence that everybody in the music industry is best mates. There s this myth that in some way we all know each other. That Blur and Oasis are all down the pub Thursday night having a drink together. But most bands hate each other! They re as jealous as anything! If somebody s two places higher than them in the charts, or one place higher up the bill like Suede and Bob Dylan fighting over the billing at Phoenix. They all want their nappies changing . . .
But wasn t it actually quite magnanimous of Dylan to eventually accept the lower placing, and go on at Phoenix beneath Suede?
Well, yes. It was great that. I remember when Bob finished and Suede came on, it started raining. It poured down and everybody in the audience had to run for shelter. I could imagine Bob, like, going (thumbs up to the sky) thanks . . .
So much for earlier generations of rock n roll protest. But in a recent Rock N Reel interview Alice explained how Chumbawamba, who quote Ulrike Meinhof, Bernadette Devlin and Noam Chomsky on their album sleeves, side-step strict dogma in favour of a more flexible Situationist ethic. We ve stopped thinking in political language, she divulged, all that s become really old-fashioned and feminism has become a dirty word, but individually we re still political .
So what went wrong with feminism?
What happened to the women s movement is that the Right were determined to ruin it, and the Left were determined to ruin it, she says now. The Left by claiming that all women are certain things, in the same way that the Right wing turned out to be just the opposite side of the coin. The Right tend to talk about differences, the differences in gender, while the Left decided that that hadn t worked, emphasising instead that we re all equal and blah blah blah. They say maybe it ll work if we say we re different, and if we respect our differences and part of that difference is that supposedly we are somehow innately peace-loving, and men are bastards.
It was just a really silly argument. But it was one that took off because it was taking it all back to that middle-class Victorian idea of women as, like, the goddess. Pedestalled. Gentle. And it was mad. All that we are good, men are bad , it s really silly. The middle-class ruined feminism. Absolutely ruined it completely. And celebrity ruined it too, I think the feminist leaders wanted to be adored, more than they cared about the rights of other women . . .
I always had time for Germaine Greer. She s less dogmatic than most and saw beyond that two-balls-bad two-tits-good thing.
Yeah, she concedes. I used to have a lot of respect for her. But I wish she hadn t done that bloody awful book a couple of years ago all about how maybe feminism has robbed us of the right to motherhood. It totally fits in with the Right. It s not feminism that s robbed us of the right to motherhood, it s the fact that the economic climate doesn t allow us to be, like, single and have children. It s not feminism. It s the fact that the odds are stacked against us. Germaine Greer, she s just gone back on it, back to that we are all gentle nurturing things . It s fucking stupid. I m not naove. And I hate that idea that if you show a peace sign to somebody, then your wonderful intrinsically good nature is somehow going to swamp them and they re gonna become a nicer person. Somewhere along the way women have had all these definitions of what they should be foisted on them. And it s rubbish. Absolute rubbish. People are sick of the Right slagging women off, and they re sick of the Left slagging women off. But I think we re fighting back now. I think now is quite a healthy time.
Haven t men also been subject to imposed role shifts?
Yeah. But you aren t saddled with it the way we are. And I have to say I actually think as a bunch of people go, I think men behave more badly. I can t stand men when they get together. I hate men in pubs. The number of times you see men behaving badly at parties. But that s not because it s biological. It s because you re socialised to get away with it. Whereas we re socialised to know that if we behave badly then nobody ll fucking love us . . .

Just look at me now, both feet on the ground,
my sights are fixed on the horizon,
look at me now, I can take on the world and win . . . Fingerprints from Singin With Raymond

Back to the band and another perspective: Chumbawamba have spent their entire career (count em, eight albums prior to this) trying to knock down the walls of the Establishment. And then they get invited in through the front door courtesy of a deal with EMI . . . have they sold out, or are they planning some sort of intricate internal coup? That was Nick Kelly in Hot Press dated 17th September 1997. So hey all you Hipsters, Flipsters and Finger-Poppin Daddies out there in Pop-Land, what do you think so far?
At a guess I d say the Chumbas might have plugged something new into their equipment, but they still write what Alice once called, Sweet Subversive Melodies . Remember the CD re-issue of the first two Chumbawamba albums (as First Two)? It includes a humorous translation section of Leeds-Yorkshire terminology into mainstream English. But now the Chumbas have an altogether more difficult translation to make. Subversion from the inside? We ve heard all that stuff before. But this time you end up thinking that yeah, it s a crazy plan, but it might just work.
And with the year s end shaping up to be a commercial feeding frenzy between Teletubbies and Spicy Tele-Totties, in battles fought out not in your local HMV or Virgin Megastore, but in the aisles of Toyz-R-Uz, this time it s worth voting for a slightly more inspired madness, and putting Tubthumper and/or its spin-off singles on your Gift Token list. n
Tuibthumper' is out now on EMI Records.