In this brief mini-sode, we begin a whirlwind crash-course exploration of the Chumbawamba chronology, from their earliest recordings up until their 7th album—you know, the one right before the one you've heard of. Covering their early years, Pictures of Starving Children Sell Records, Never Mind The Ballots, English Rebel Songs, Slap!, Shhh, Anarchy, and Swingin' With Raymond.
For a full list of episodes, and to subscribe to the RSS feed, please visit musicthreat.podbean.com
[Start of transcript]
Hi there. Welcome to The Music's Not A Threat, a podcast about history, culture, and an anarchist pop band called Chumbawamba.
Now that we're a couple of episodes in, I've started to think that since the episodes aren't really going in chronological order, it might be a good idea to establish just a basic Chumbawamba timeline so it's easier to sort of place the songs in context.
So, just really quickly, let's talk about the history of Chumbawamba, through a quick rundown of their 14 studio albums. (Fair warning, this is going to be a two-parter. There's a lot to cover here.)
The first group of people calling themselves Chumbawamba called themselves that sometime around 1982. In those early days, band membership was a little bit flexible, often connected to who was living in their shared, squatted house.
Fairly early on, they stood out for their extremely theatrical live show, with costumes and characters emphasizing their ideological points.
Another unique quality was their willingness and to play soft, sweet, and quiet sometimes, which could really stand out among the loud, angry, screaming.
[♫: "Too much watching to realize
That this is a smokescreen
And this is why people die..."]"More Whitewashing" from Pictures of Starving Children, adapted from earlier "Flickering Pictures Hypnotize".
The other thing that stands out, even in their early days, was a certain sense of humor. They released parody charity singles mocking the spectacles of Band Aid and Ferry Aid, at one point they posed so successfully as a skinhead/Oi! punk band [calling themselves "Skin Disease" --ed.] that they got themselves on a genuine Oi! compilation with a song consisting of nothing but the phrase "I'm Thick!" shouted over and over 60-some times.
[♫: "I'm thick! I'm thick! I'm thick! I'm thick!
I'm thick! I'm thick! I'm thick! I'm thick!
I'm thick! I'm thick! I'm thick! I'm thick!
I'm thick! I'm thick! I'm thick! I'm thick!"]The compilation was called the "Back On The Streets" EP, and the song was also re-released later on two other compilations: Oi Oi That's Yer Lot! and Secret - The Punk Singles Collection Vol. 2.
The Revolution record that I talked about in the first episode was released in 1985, focusing on the need for different factions of punks and other would-be revolutionaries to work together despite their differences, and also critiquing supposedly rebellious rock & roll for not truly pushing revolutionary ideas.
The thing about early Chumbawamba, though, is that they were constantly changing. Their theatrical live show and their songs were constantly being re-done and rewritten, so any given Chumbawamba recording said maybe less about them as a whole, and more about what was on their minds that week.
So while cheesy, simplistic charity singles and supposedly rebellious rockstars had been on their minds, the decision to theme their entire first album around it seems to have been made fairly last minute, in response to the then-current circus around the massive charity concert Live Aid.
Pictures of Starving Children Sell Records: Lies & Traditions: Starvation, Charity And Rock & Roll was their first album, released in 1986, and as you might guess from the title, Pictures of Starving Children Sell Records takes a very cynical view of celebrity charity work and Live Aid in particular, accusing them of being more concerned with rock spectacle and good publicity for the artists than with actually understanding and addressing the root causes of poverty and hunger in the world—reducing it down to the simple message of "buy records = save the world!" without asking people to really think about why the world needed saving in the first place.
[♫: "I'm the boss... of the company...
and I've got hunger... working for me!"]Danbert's "Boss" character, from "How To Get Your Band On Television", the first track off Pictures.
Of course, Chumbawamba did plenty of charity gigs and recordings themselves. The scene was all about those compilation tapes and benefit gigs, raising money and awareness for various causes, from animal rights activism to funds for jailed protestors. What's the difference between that and Live Aid? That's a question for future episodes.
A year later in 1987, their next record was also a concept album, written and recorded fairly quickly in response to then-current events, namely the UK General Election.
The album is called Never Mind The Ballots... Here's The Rest Of Your Life, an obvious pun on the Sex Pistols album Never Mind The Bollocks, Here's The Sex Pistols.
The theatricality and the characters are back, including two political candidates who appear on the first and last tracks seeming to debate, but ultimately being more similar than different:
[♫:
Candidate A: "Nationalisation, with one big boss!"
Candidate B: "No! Privitisation, with lots of little bosses!"
Both: "But someone in control, of course! Either way, there must be soeone giving orders!"]That's Alice and Danbert as the two characters on "The Candidates Find Common Ground".
The album art is a riff on posters from the May 1968 Paris uprisings, including the slogan: "The vote changes nothing, the struggle continues!"Original French: "La vote ne change rien le lutte continue", but an English version is used in the album itself.
Just like Pictures of Starving Children took a cynical look at Live Aid, this album has a cynical take on elections—and for pretty much the same reasons: that they're over-hyped media circuses offering overly simplistic solutions, and that however well intended the participants (in this case the voters) might be, that real social change requires more effort than one vote every few years.For Americans (and others) who might not be familiar with the particulars of UK Elections (such as "putting your cross in the box"), there's a great series of funny and informative videos by Jay Foreman called Politics Unboringed that I highly recommend. Try "Whom should I vote for?" or "Is there a good reason for NOT voting?"
Hence the second half of the title. It's not anti-voting per se, it' just more about what you do with the rest of your life.The album itself goes back and forth between critiquing the idea that voting is all one needs to do to declaring voting to be an intrisinically a worthless activity. See this interview with Dunstan on Democracy Now for a later perspective on the idea.
And what did Chumbawamba do with the rest of their lives? Well, the next year, in 1988, they did something completely different:
English Rebel Songs 1381-1914 was not a total departure for the band. Still, it was a little surprising when the next Chumbawamba album was entirely made up of acappella and acoustic English folk songs.
Of course, not just any folk songs, of course: these are songs celebrating protest and rebellion throughout English history.
[♫: "Your houses they pull down to fright your men in town,
But the gentry must come down and the poor shall wear the crown:
Stand up now, Diggers all!"]From "The Diggers Song".
The band's basic intention was to remind people that punk didn't invent the idea of rebellious music, and that rebellion didn't have to sound any one way.
It was a good message to be putting out there—Chumbawamba themselves were about to start sounding very different. There was a fair amount of discussion about whether this was really a punk record, or whether it should be covered by punk publications—an interesting discussion that highlights a lot of different issues around the meaning of "punk", but for now we'll ignore it and move on to...
Their next album, released in 1990. It's still got some punk edge, but the general tone is kind of... funky.
[♫: Funky instrumental intro from "Ulrike"]
The opening track is all bass and wah-wah guitars and trumpets. The dance-y, upbeat songs are all about the Red Army Faction, Tiananmen Square, American racism, and the Holocaust—as blatantly political as ever—but the lyrics have got a little more opaque and poetic.
On their first two albums, the meaning is almost totally transparent. It'd be hard to misunderstand the basic meaning of any of the songs on Pictures or Never Mind The Ballots. This is the point where, at least to my ears, the songs start actually needing some level of explanation to really know what they're about, let alone the specific point they're trying to make about those topics.
I've seen a few punk critics say that this was the point where Chumbawamba started to go downhill, where their music got less political. But in my (admittedly limited) experience, the clarity of Chumbawamba's lyrics on those first two albums was the exception rather than the rule in punk, because (1) they were very clear about what they meant, and (2) you could actually understand the words they were singing. There are very few punk bands who don't fall down on one or both of those counts.
All this to say, yes, from here on out, their lyrics trend towards the less transparently political and their sound trends hard away from "punk". I personally don't count either of those things as a strike against them per se, it's just a point worth noting.
Now, Chumbawamba had never shied away from using samples in their music—Slap! includes a sample of Elvis' "I Can't Help Falling In Love With You", and an early track called "The Police Have Been Wonderful" credits UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher on vocals, via a sample—but by this point (1992), the band was getting into the UK rave scene, explaining some of their dance influences, and they planned an ambitious, sample-heavy album called Jesus H. Christ...
...which was promptly shut down when they were flatly denied permission to use many of the songs.I say samples, most of the tracks would actually be interpolations, with Chumbawamba playing the bits of the "sampled" songs. You'd think this would be as simple as licencing a cover version, which in the US at least is extremely easy, but permissions for "derivative works" (i.e. any use beyond a straight cover version) is... more complicated, legally. Copyright law happens to be a hobby of mine. I geek out about this stuff. So, they went back to the studio, took the bits and pieces they could salvage of the tracks from Jesus H. Christ and instead released the album Shhh (that's 'S' followed by three 'h's) focusing on copyright, censorship, and social taboos, in honor of their thwarted plans.
[♫: "Big mouth! Big mouth! Big mouth strikes again!
Big mouth! Big mouth! Big mouth strikes again!"]From (surprise) "Big Mouth Stikes Again".
You can still find bootlegs of the original Jesus H. Christ recordings. They're fine, but I don't think we've really suffered any great loss, Shhh makes a perfectly good album without the sampled bits.
A review from the zine Flipside, one of the last punk publications I can find who still reviewed their records at this point, admitted that their politics were still right on, but couldn't stand the record, complaining that it sounded like something you could hear on the radio.Al's review from Flipside #79 (July/August 1992), 105. Found via Archive.org.
Good politics and a sounds where people who don't love punk screaming could get into it? I struggle to see the problem, but I definitely get why Chumbawamba had a hard time sticking with the punk scene at this point.
Next album came out in 1994. It was called Anarchy and the cover is a very graphic photo of a baby being born, taken from a medical textbook. Apparently a number of record stores either refused to sell it or sold it from behind the counter.From the old Chumba.com FAQ page, now available via Archive.org.
But for all that the cover is offensive, musically, here, it's pretty pop-y. A mix of 90's pop rock, 50's pop, still some hard edges here and there, and a weird mix of overt politics on songs like "Homophobia", and "Enough Is Enough", and barely-discernible politics in songs like "Georgina" and "Timebomb", a modest radio hit in the UK. It's a song about a time bomb, sure, but it's so sweet the it's being sung, you'd be forgiven for not realizing they might be talking literally.
[♫: "I am a timebomb, a ticking, ticking, ticking timebomb...
I am a timebomb, a ticking, ticking, ticking timebomb..."]
At this point in their career they also released the live album Showbusiness! both on its own, and as a double-disc release called For A Free Humanity: For Anarchy where the second disc is a talk by social critic Noam Chomsky.
Because why not.
Next up is 1995's Swingin' With Raymond. Raymond is apparently a real guy (his picture's on the cover) with "LOVE" tattooed on the knuckles of one hand, and "HATE" tatooed on the other.
The album is split down the middle, with the first half being relatively soft, pop-y "LOVE" songs, and the second half being loud, bombastic "HATE" songs; this album has some of the loudest—
[♫: "(Ugh!) Your ugly (Ugh!) your ugly
(Ugh!) Your ugly houses look so (Ugh!)"]From "Ugh! Your Ugly Houses".
—and some of the quietest stuff they'd done up to this point:
[♫: "Love can knock you over..."]From "Love Can Knock You Over".
Being conflicted between love and hate is a recurring theme for the band. The love/hate relationship with pop culture is especially prominent: being fascinated by it and repulsed by it at the same time.This comes up in a number of places, most succinctly in their FAQ from 1997: "...the one thing we [the members of Chumbawamba] have in common is a love/hate of pop culture."
And if you understand that, you'll understand exactly what happened to them next:
[♫: "I get knocked down!"]From "Tubthumping".
But that's a story... for another time.
We've gotten seven albums deep into the 14 that they made, so there's a lot more where that came from. I guess maybe not a lot more, but the same amount again... more.
Anyway... transcripts, footnotes, and sources for this episode at MusicThreat.net, and contact information if you want to get in touch. Just whatever you do, please, cite your sources.
Thanks for listening.
[End of transcript]