We'll be singing when we're winning
We'll be singing when we're winning
Reconsidering Chumbawamba, the most underrated band of the 90's
There’s a scene in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia where the Gang is playing a drinking game they invented (“CharDee MacDennis”):
Dennis: Okay. First card is trivia. Dee, answer this question correctly, we get the card. If not, they get a chance to steal. What is the greatest band in the world?
Dee: Chumbawamba.
Dennis: Oh! Correct! Nice!
Frank: What? That’s not trivia. That doesn’t make sense!
Dennis: Well we made up all these questions Frank, so there’s gonna be a lot of opinion.
Dee: Yeah, really it’s more of a memory game than anything else, but drink.
Yes: it’s Always Sunny, so the answer is played for a laugh. But’s also the correct answer. Chumbawamba was at the very least the most underrated band of the 90’s, and, I would argue, is a contender for the best band of the decade.
Hang with me for a second.
I get knocked down
Like 99% of the planet, until recently, I only knew about Chumbawamba as the band behind the 1997 song “Tubthumping,” which, if you don’t immediately know, you will remember by it’s main lyrics:
I get knocked down!
But I get up again!
You’re never gonna keep me down!
(Repeat 700 times)
“Tubthumping” was on the radio when I was 11 years old, and as such, is part of the soundtrack to my adolescence, which, of all the eras of your life, is the soundtrack that evokes the most feelings decades later: Smashing Pumpkins’ “1979,” Savage Garden’s “I Want You” and K-Ci & Jojo’s “All My Life” are also on that particular playlist, and all of those songs immediately put me back at a very specific time and place in my life. So “Tubthumping” was always going to hold a special place in my heart.
But a few years back, as I became more interested in anarchism, I started looking into anarchist bands on Wikipedia. The list (predictably) has a lot of punk bands on it, as well as a few unsurprising rock bands like Rage Against the Machine, but the band on the list that stood out was Chumbawamba, just because of how little it jibed with my memory of the song, which effectively placed it on a Jock Jams mixtape.
The band was formed in 1982 in a squat in Leeds, a city in the north of England. The squatters were attempting to live off of anarchist principles, and were at the forefront of the anarcho-punk movement that was exploding in the country in the early Thatcher years.
For the first decade and a half, they operated without actually selling-out, and most of their music was intensely political. Their first album was 1986’s Pictures of Starving Children Sell Records, which absolutely eviscerated the music industry of the Live Aid era: the first song on that album, “How to Get Your Band on TV” contained the lyrics:
Paul McCartney - come on down
With crocodile tears to irrigate this ground
Make of Ethiopia a fertile paradise
Where everyone sings Beatles songs and buys shares in EMI
Charity, starvation, and rock and roll
Let it be, eh Paulie?
They spent the next decade making explicitly political albums, the best of which was 1994’s Anarchy, which was released by a small independent anarchist label. The best song on that album, “Give the Anarchist a Cigarette,”1 is recognizably the Chumbawamba that would become world famous a few years later, and contains the lyrics that have remained an anarchist credo ever since:
Nothing ever burns down by itself!
Every fire needs a little bit of help!
(More recently, the anarchist illustrator N.O. Bonzo made a lovely little zine in the style of a children’s tale with this quote as its title, read that here.)
Another song on Anarchy, “Homophobia,” repeated the following as its chorus:
Homophobia
The worst disease
You can't love who you want to love in times like these
This is hardly radical now, but 1994 was still the thick of the AIDS crisis, and even liberal governments had another decade to go before becoming openly pro-gay.
At the time, they were beloved among a hardcore group of mostly local fans, but their insistence on working for small, independent, radical record labels naturally prevented them from reaching a much larger audience.
And after 15 years, Chumbawamba was losing momentum as a band. So they decided to make a change. In spite of explicitly bashing EMI in literally the first song on their first album, they signed to EMI.
Naturally, they were immediately shunned by the anarchist community as sell-outs, which was literally the worst thing you could be in the 90’s (and doubly so if you were an anarchist). The band argued that they’d made the decision because all labels, big and small, operated off of capitalist principles, and pretending otherwise was delusional. They also believed this would allow them to get their message to a wider audience.
And it did!
But I get up again
The first album the band released with EMI was Tubthumping. The title track became one of the biggest hits of 1997 and was completely inescapable even in distant Cincinnati, Ohio, where we’d barely even heard of anarchism.
Tubthumping was still a political album, it just wasn’t quite as overt as in their previous music. The name of the album and title track literally means “a loud and vociferous supporter of a cause,” and what’s more, the title song literally begins with a pro-labor sample.
The sample is from a monologue by the English character actor Peter Postlethwaite in the movie Brassed Off, which was about the yearlong coal miner’s strike in England in the mid-1980’s. That strike ended up being the biggest victory of Margaret Thatcher’s years in office — she basically hired police to beat the shit out of the strikers, and then employed divide and conquer tactics to wait the strikers out. When the strike ended, it effectively broke the back of England’s labor movement. The movie is about a brass band comprised entirely of coal miners trying to stave off depression and suicide as their livelihood is ripped from underneath them. They commit to trying to win a national competition, but in the rousing climax, Postlethwaite, the conductor, gives a passionate speech rejecting the trophy:
Truth is, I thought it mattered; I thought that music mattered. But does it? Bollocks! Not compared to how people matter.
Did any of us know this background? No! Do we know what comes next? Yes!
We’ll be singing! When we’re winning! We’ll be singing!
I GET KNOCKED DOWN
The song sold millions of copies globally and made Chumbawamba an enormous amount of money. And to some people, sure: they will always be sell outs. But they actually did some pretty cool shit with the money.
Rather than drastically improving their lifestyle or leveraging the song’s success into superstardom, they did what any good anarchist does — they burned the whole thing down to the ground.
You’re never gonna keep me down
The first thing they did is they started raising hell. An international hit means an international tour, and an enormous amount of press. When they went on Letterman to sing “Tubthumping,” they altered the lyrics a little bit:
I get knocked down!
But I get up again!
Free Mumia Abu-Jamal!2
At the end of the show, Letterman made a point of tagging on a disclaimer: “Views of the performers do not represent David Letterman.”
The member of the band who caused the most trouble was Alice Nutter. Nutter changed her name to a woman who was tried and hanged in the 17th century when a nine-year-old accused her of witchcraft3.
Nutter’s first offense was when she told the press, and I quote, “Nothing can change the fact that we like it when cops get killed.”
It caused an immediate outcry from conservative British press, and EMI freaked out, demanding that Nutter offer an apology. Nutter, always aware of the role police had played in breaking up labor strikes, didn’t apologize, and instead clarified.
If you're working class they won't protect you. When you hear about them, it's in the context of them abusing people, y'know, miscarriages of justice. We don't have a party when cops die, you know we don't.
Nutter’s next offense was in going on Bill Maher’s 1990’s TV show, Politically Incorrect, and giving her opinion that anyone who couldn’t afford her band’s albums should just go ahead and steal it from large record chains like Richard Branson’s Virgin. In response, Virgin removed Chumbawamba from the shelves and kept their records behind the counter.
And the biggest problem came when “Tubthumping” was nominated for the Brit Award for “Best British Single.”
The Brit Awards was not the type of thing that Chumbawamba wanted to attend, but they were talked into it, seeing as they’d be able to have a platform to do something political.4
So they planned something — if they won, they were going to bring up some members of the Liverpool dockworkers union to accept the award in their stead. The year before, the Labour Party under Tony Blair had finally come into power, and leftists had hoped that the change in government might mean a return of pro-labor politics. But the “New Labour” under Tony Blair abandoned the workers, instead adopting centrist politics in the style of the American Democratic party5. Which meant that the dockworkers were hung out to dry.
And then, they didn’t win. So band member Dunstan Bruce explained what happened next to Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!:
And they spotted—somebody spotted [Deputy Prime Minister] John Prescott had turned up at this award, because at that point New Labour were trying to cozy up with people, musicians and artists. You know, they wanted to have like Oasis turning up at Downing Street for, you know—and it was all like just for—just for press, publicity sort of stuff. But the dockers we were with said that Prescott had deliberately shunned them. He’d been a member of the union that they were involved in, and he hadn’t—he refused to help them resolve this dispute.
And so, it was one of those occasions where, you know, there was—we had all been drinking. We can’t—I can’t deny that we’d all—you know, we’d all had a bit to drink, and we’d all cajoled Danbert [Nobacon] and Alice into doing something about the fact that Prescott had turned up. And so they went and threw some iced water over John Prescott and said, “This is for the Liverpool dockers.”
Perhaps their best stunt was when General Motors asked if they could buy the rights to their song, “Pass it Along” for the use in a Pontiac commercial. GM apparently didn’t look too closely at the song — its lyrical content is pro-Napster and explicitly pro-stealing — but they thought it sounded hip. (It’s worth noting — this is because it’s a good song!)
So GM paid them $70,000 for the rights, later admitting that all they knew was that the band was “quite political” back in England.
Chumbawamba took the money, turned around, and gave half of the money to CorpWatch, an organization which then used the money to document GM’s environmental and social abuses. The other half they gave to IndyWatch, a global independent media network that had arisen out of the Carnival Against Capital.
This was hardly the only time they did this — they funneled money from a Ford ad in South Africa to South African anti-capitalists, and gave money from Renault to local pirate radio stations. Guitarist Boff Whalley shrugged off the usual selling out claims:
We pass the moral buck, let someone else justify the decision, and in turn know that some people will vilify us for it. We'd discovered through all the years of having no money just how powerful it can be if it's in the right hands.
This was characteristic of the band: ad stunts aside, Chumbawamba funneled a huge amount of the money they made into leftist causes. One of the causes they funded was a May Day conference that ended up snowballing into the 1999 Carnival Against Capital, one of the events, along with the infamous Battle in Seattle, that is now seen as the culmination of the anti-globalization movement, and one of the direct precursors of the Occupy Movement.
They were also supporters of Reclaim the Streets, a British movement aligned with the rave scene in which people would create “Temporary Autonomous Zones” in British cities by shutting down streets and throwing spontaneous parties. Part of the idea was disruption of the daily humdrum life in capitalist cities, part of it was creating brief moments of freedom in increasingly oppressive cities. Reclaim the Streets also developed in conjunction with Guerrilla Gardening, a practice in which people plant food crops in disused lots or vacant city blocks as a way of giving food to the food-insecure. Guerrilla gardening, particularly of pollinator plants and native plants, is increasingly seen as one of the best ways to combat the ecosystem collapse that often comes with climate change.
Their habit of continually biting the hand that fed them meant that their time in the corporate music world was not going to last long: EMI parted ways with Chumbawamba in 2001. They would remain together for another 11 years.
He sings the songs that remind him of the good times
In their last decade, Chumbawamba moved away from their pop and punk roots and focused more on folk rock. In 2003, they re-released an album comprised entirely of old English protest songs dating back to 1381, mostly done acapella. Acapella worked well for them, and they returned to it several times in their last few albums, including in a lovely cover of The Clash’s “Bankrobber,” and a cover of the classic Italian anti-fascist song, “Bella Ciao.”
My favorite of the acapella songs, however, comes from their second to last album, which holds the record for having the longest record name of all time6. The album’s shortened title is The Boy Bands Have Won, and the song is a retelling of the story of Wenceslao Moguel, better known as “El Fusilado.”
That name — which translates from Spanish as “The Shot One”— refers to the fact that in 1915, Moguel, who was fighting for Pancho Villa, was caught by the Constitutionalist forces, and was sentenced to death without trial. Moguel was shot 9 times, and then the officer in charge of the firing squad came over and shot him once more in the head.
Moguel survived, and when the soldiers left, he crawled to safety. He lived another 61 years, dying in 1976 at the age of 86, forever carrying with him a bullet-pockmarked body and face.
In spite of the deeply disturbing subject matter, the song is upbeat and unbelievably catchy, and single-handedly managed to get me interested in the Mexican Revolution.
The Boy Bands Have Won also has a song called “Add Me,” an anti-social media song which basically predicts the alt-right 8 years before it came to prominence:
I'm a wound-up whiner with a fetish for guns
I'm almost 50 and I live with my Mum
I hope my nude picture doesn't offend
Would you like to add me as a friend?
Chumbawamba had reached the end, though — Nutter, Bruce, and Nobacon left in 2004, and by 2012, the only remaining original members were singer Lou Watts and guitarist Boff Whalley. They all went their own ways, and broke up “with neither a whimper, a bang or a reunion.”
He sings the songs that remind him of the better times
A few years back, former member Dunstan Bruce ran a Kickstarter for a film: I Get Knocked Down: The Untold Story of Chumbawamba. It was fully funded, and was finally released on a limited scale last year, making it last month to the 2022 SXSW roster.
It’s possible that with this documentary, Chumbawamba will get their due. But in most people’s minds, they will forever be remembered as one-hit wonders.
And yet! I would argue their legacy as a band is vastly underrated. First (and perhaps most important): Their music is good! Like, really good! “Tubthumping,” “Amnesia,” and “Pass it Along,” are all zeitgeisty 90’s bops that got a solid amount of radio play, and should serve as an adequate rejoinder to the “one-hit” label: They were at least three-hit wonders.
Their earlier, more radical punk-y stuff (“Unilever,” “Enough is Enough,” “Mouthful of Shit”) is always lyrically savage, often prophetic and, on occasion (“Give the Anarchist a Cigarette”) just as catchy as their world-conquering pop stuff. Their strange little folk turn at the end of their run somehow manages to be a total 180° turn while simultaneously making perfect narrative sense for them as a band. This latter era also produced some truly great songs, whether they were covers of classics (“Bankrobber,” “Bella Ciao”) or originals (“El Fusilado” “Torturing James Hetfield”7 “I Wish They Would Sack Me”8).
Solid music aside: what recent band has done a better job at testing the ability of music to actually change things for the better? Kurt Vonnegut once said of art’s ability to make a difference:
“During the Vietnam War, every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high.”
Orwell once said9 “All art is propaganda,” and propaganda — i.e. framing people’s thinking about social issues in a certain direction — is vital for creating any sort of social change.
But the left took the first half of the 20th century on the chin — first, they were systematically exterminated by the fascists, then leftist dissent was quashed by totalitarians like Stalin and Mao in the East, and by capitalist nationalists like McCarthy in the West. After these successive poundings, the more free-thinking, libertarian strand of leftism decided that if they couldn’t win in politics, they’d win over the culture.
And culture is important! You can’t create a new world without imagining it first. But at some point, you must start building the new world and destroying the old, and dissenting culture since WWII has been absolute dogshit in this regard, with its emphasis on “awareness raising,” it’s alliance with electoral liberalism, and its overall insistence on working within the system. Live Aid made for a great concert, but you don’t fix African poverty without addressing the legacy of colonialism. “Born in the U.S.A.” is one of the all-time greatest rock songs, but what good is condemning the American war machine if you end up doing a podcast with Barack Obama, who presided over a ballooning of the military industrial complex and an expansion of America’s dirty wars?
In this regard, in action, Chumbawamba stands out. They may have been sellouts in some sense — they could’ve remained an ideologically pure anarchist band, but then no one outside of the radical music scene in the North of England would ever have heard of them. And sellouts don’t bite the hands that feed them quite as hard and as often as Chumbawamba did, by funneling ad and label money into anti-corporate activism and radical direct action movements.
On top of that, the movements they financed all had a fairly major impact, and can be seen as direct predecessors of groups like Occupy, Extinction Rebellion, and the Rolling Jubilee. Where is the modern movement for a Green New Deal, for debt abolition, for universal healthcare, for defunding police without those older movements? Where are Greta Thunberg and AOC and Bernie Sanders without those previously radical ideas bursting finally bursting into the mainstream?
Political movements are complex things with millions of moving parts, so it would be ridiculous to say, “It all started with Chumbawamba.” But Chumbawamba, along with a handful of other radical bands of the era, like Rage Against the Machine or the Riot Grrrl bands Bikini Kill and Sleater-Kinney, did more than their fair share of the heavy lifting in getting the word out, and Chumbawamba did perhaps the best job of all of them in subverting the corporate music world’s money for radical ends.
So while I think it would be safe to say bands like Nirvana, Radiohead, and Pearl Jam made better music overall, I would ask: was anyone better at making art that made an actual political difference than Chumbawamba?
If you are not convinced, then at the very least, listen to the Chumbawamba songs linked in this profile, and tell me there’s a 90’s band more prophetic and relevant to today.
It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia got it right, even if they meant it as a joke. Long live Chumbawamba, “the greatest band of all time.”
The title “Give the Anarchist a Cigarette” actually comes from Bob Dylan. Dylan’s manager, Albert Grossman, said to him one day, “They’re calling you an anarchist now,” to which Dylan replied, “Give the anarchist a cigarette.” In that context, it’s way less of the anarchist call to arms that has resulted in cool graffiti and radical zines, and much more a song that’s just angry about Bob Dylan being Bob Dylan.
Mumia Abu-Jamal, for those who don’t know, is a former Black Panther and radical journalist who spent decades on death row for the alleged murder of a Philadelphia police officer. Mumia is no longer on death row, but is doing life in prison. His defenders, which include Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, claim that, regardless of his innocence, his trial was not the impartial one he was owed by the US justice system.
Don’t fuck with 9-year-olds, man.
The Brit Awards soaked up controversy, like the Grammy’s or the Oscars do today — if you want to read more about one of the best instances of Brit Award shenanigans, might I suggest John Higgs’ amazing book The KLF: Chaos, Magic, and the Band that Burned a Million Pounds?
Chumbawamba’s second biggest hit, “Amnesia,” with it’s catchy refrain, “Do you suffer from long-term memory loss?” is actually about Blair and Clinton, who ran on liberal and even left-sounding platforms, and yet governed from the right, apparently forgetting their campaign promises.
Full title: The Boy Bands Have Won, and All the Copyists and the Tribute Bands and the TV Talent Show Producers Have Won, If We Allow Our Culture to Be Shaped by Mimicry, Whether from Lack of Ideas or from Exaggerated Respect. You Should Never Try to Freeze Culture. What You Can Do Is Recycle That Culture. Take Your Older Brother's Hand-Me-Down Jacket and Re-Style It, Re-Fashion It to the Point Where It Becomes Your Own. But Don't Just Regurgitate Creative History, or Hold Art and Music and Literature as Fixed, Untouchable and Kept Under Glass. The People Who Try to 'Guard' Any Particular Form of Music Are, Like the Copyists and Manufactured Bands, Doing It the Worst Disservice, Because the Only Thing That You Can Do to Music That Will Damage It Is Not Change It, Not Make It Your Own. Because Then It Dies, Then It's Over, Then It's Done, and the Boy Bands Have Won.
So named because Metallica singer James Hetfield supported the use of his music in the torture of Guantanamo Bay detainees.
With a chorus that could be the tagline of the Great Resignation Era:
Six in the morning don't want to wake
Sun laying low and the world sleeping late
Hate like the river runs heavy and deep
Oh I wish that they'd sack me and leave me to sleep
Full quote: “But every writer, especially every novelist, has a ‘message’, whether he admits it or not, and the minutest details of his work are influenced by it. All art is propaganda. Neither Dickens himself nor the majority of Victorian novelists would have thought of denying this. On the other hand, not all propaganda is art.”