"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:
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:
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