Gateway To Geekery: Chumbawamba
Oct 22, 2014 9:11:44 GMT -5
Post-Lupin, ganews, and 3 more like this
Post by Prole Hole on Oct 22, 2014 9:11:44 GMT -5
Geek Obsession - Chumbawamba:
Thirty years of political activism. Thirty years of direct action. Thirty years of social campaigning. Thirty years of trying to make a difference. And what happens? You become known as a one-hit wonder with a catchy novelty song that’s largely mis-interpreted anyway. That’s been the fate of Chumbawamba, the anarchist bank from Leeds, England who came together in the early 80s to build an impressive reputation for uncompromising political stances delivered through music. Politics lies at the core of Chumbawamba but one thing which the success of “Tubthumping” at least telegraphs is that, despite the very serious-minded approach to politics the band has always had there’s something else that’s key to the success of Chumbawamba – fun. Reading about the band in music papers or on-line makes them sound terribly serious and po-faced, but actually listening to the music or seeing them live what comes across is just how entertaining their music is, and also how self-aware they are - the best-of compilation Uneasy Listening rather charmingly self-describes them as “umpteen years of one-legged men at arse-kicking parties” and the sleeve also quotes early 20th Century anarchist Emma Goldman: “it’s not my revolution if I can’t dance to it”. The personal, the political and the music all collide in Chumbawamba to produce a collage – indeed there approach to music owes much to collage, assembling songs from a variety of sources including but not limited to sampling (the over-use of which resulted in them having to re-record the album Jesus H Christ! as Shhh! because of clearance issues) and a cut-and-paste approach to popular culture which has resulted in some of their finest works. Despite the globe-spanning success of “Tubthumping” and its accompanying album Tubthumber Chumbawamba have mostly been a relatively small-scale operation, initially releasing on their own Agit-Prop label before moving to indie One Little Indian (home to the likes of Bjork) then eventually making the jump to EMI and the all the commercial success that came with it. But the commercial success of that album never kept Chumbawamba at the top of the charts and they went back to doing what they do best – making politically-engaged music in their own unique way. The band called it quits in 2012 and leave behind a legacy of activism and albums that stands as a testament to the bands beliefs and their commitment to the idea that change can be brought about through politics and music together.
Why It’s Daunting:
Well, the politics. Chumbawamba have always been described as anarchists which hasn’t exactly led them to a wide mainstream audience, and disagreement with their political stances can make the material difficult to engage with. And the band has many, many detractors, both from either end of the political spectrum and from the the anarco-punk roots they grew out of who screamed “sell-out” the moment the ink on the EMI contract dried. This has scared up a public image of the band that can make them difficult to approach. As mentioned earlier the standard image of the band – self-serious, self-important – doesn’t jibe with the experience of listening to the actual music, which while frequently angry is also frequently full of joy and (crucially) humour, both at the pleasure of making a point and the sheer pleasure of making music itself. Chumawamba released fourteen “official” albums (not including compilations or live albums, and not including Jesus H Christ or 1984’s Another Year Of The Same Old Shit), starting in 1986 with the marvelously-named Pictures of Starving Children Sell Records (a reaction to Live Aid) and finishing in 2010 with ABCDEFG, and some are certainly better than others. There’s a lot of material to wade through and the variable quality of some of it certainly presents a barrier, but at their best Chumbawamba’s blend of the political, personal and musical results in some true gems that show a band who deserve to be remembered for a lot more than one novelty single.
Potential Gateway: Shhh!
Released in 1992 Shhh! is easily the best of Chumbawamba’s early material, coming off a run of albums which have their highlights but were all a little…linear. Blending a whole host of musical styles from pub sing-alongs (“Nothing That’s New”) to faux Hari Krishna chants (“Happiness Is Just A Chant Away”), from the Beatles (“Stitch That!”) to sound collages (“Snip, Snip, Snip”), the album integrates its diverse influences perfectly. The band originally recorded the album as Jesus H Christ! which was extremely sample-heavy and which many of the artists who had been sampled objected to (amongst them Paul McCartney and Kylie Minogue, and excerpts of the letters received from their record companies demanding the removal of the samples are amusingly included as part of the Shhh! liner notes). This inevitably forced a re-write to make the album releasable. Though the original Jesus H Christ! - which is widely available from less-that-salubrious corners of the internet - was strong, the re-write gave the album a whole new focus, strongly criticizing censorship in music and defending the freedom of artists. Listening to Jesus H Christ! now, when sampling has become such an engrained part of musical culture, it’s hard to see what the fuss was about but at the time this kind of sampling was at the cutting edge of a newly-developing musical style and though Shhh! has most of the samples removed the legacy remains (the track “Big Mouth Strikes Again” isn’t a cover of the Smiths song of the same name, and “Snip, Snip, Snip” carries its three-words-and-commas over from that songs original name, “Money, Money, Money”, as in Abba). The new focus on censorship and artistic freedom marked a bit of a shift from the big-P politics of earlier albums but also finds the band stretching out to work in new musical styles and the variety lends much to Shhh!’s appeal. Of particular note is “Big Mouth Strikes Again”, a bassline-driven song about Lenny Bruce with spoken-word lyrics from Danbert Nobacon , a sing-shouted chorus featuring the whole band, movie soundtrack sampling, and the most perfect delivery of “bullshit motherfuker bullshit” ever committed to record, sweetly delivered by Alice Nutter. It’s a track full of shifting styles which never becomes self-indulgent and it is technically sophisticated in a way the band had never been up to this point. This technical proficiency – using the studio to help shape tracks in a more developed way than just standing and playing – is evident elsewhere on the album (the title track and “You Can’t Trust Anyone Nowadays”), but there’s still a terrific sense of fun shot through much of the material, especially the impish “Sometimes Plunder” and the fuck-you to domestic violence of “Stitch That” which concludes the album on a reverse Sgt Pepper. All of these elements combine to make a compelling, direct album that uses its influences to full effect.
Next Steps:
The follow-up to Shhh!, 1994’s Anarchy sees more of a return to more of the big-p politics of the bands earlier albums, and provides an easy, enjoyable way into the bigger-picture issues the band tackle while also showing off the lessons learned from Shhh! Sequenced and produced as if the listener were tuning through a radio (complete with occasional bursts of static and free-form samples as links between the individual tracks) Anarchy also showed the first small glimmerings of commercial success for the band, with killer single “Enough Is Enough” reaching number 56 in the UK charts. While not a massive success (at least, not next to ”Tubthumping”) it did at least demonstrate the band was beginning to have some traction outside its own relatively small music scene and as a single it’s blistering – an anti-fascist screed featuring Credit To The Nation rapper MC Fusion, it’s an absolutely furious, unforgiving condemnation, yet before the final chorus it also quotes the Pet Shop Boys song “I Want To Wake Up” which slots in seamlessly and shows just how well those lessons from Shhh! and Jesus H Christ! have been learned. Re-contextualizing a Pet Shop Boys song into an anti-fascist rant so effortlessly just wouldn’t have been something the band would have been able to do earlier in their career and it works wonderfully. The album was mildly controversial at the time for its cover art (a remarkably pissed-off looking baby emerging from a vagina) which certainly helped to garner a little extra publicity on its release but now Anarchy stands as probably the best example of the band doing out-and-out politics. Released in 2004 (on the other side of the big Tubthumper success) Un shows a shift in style from the early predominantly guitar-based music and shows Chumbawamba combining folk (always a part of their musical tradition), electronica and world music, while still featuring the sampling, guitars and all-in-it-together recording style that’s always been one of the bands hallmarks. The subjects the album covers – everything from using right-wing rhetoric to advance your career (“Just Desserts”) to items looted during the Iraq war turning up on Ebay (terrific single “On Ebay”), to a song in praise of the operating system Linux (“Rebel Code”) - remain diverse and slot in with the continuing musical diversification. That sense of fun isn’t lost in the process either – “Everything You Know Is Wrong” is a playful take on conspiracy theories and a real stand-out, and demonstrates that there’s always a place for something lighter in amongst all the point-making. It’s a coherent, focused album that’s accessible without being especially mainstream and is well worth spending time with to see just how far from their stand-up-and-thrash roots the band has come without losing the core of their identity. Also worth taking the time for: perpetually under-appreciated WYSIWYG, the most fragmentary of their albums, which combines generally shorter tracks with yet more stylistic developments - country and western noodlings on “Celebration: Florida”, and an unexpected Bee-Gee’s cover with an a capella version of “New York Mining Disaster 1941”. However two tracks stand head-and-shoulders above the rest, “Pass It Along” and the album closer “Dumbing Down”, the latter of which acts as a remarkably succinct take on the whole of the album. But the album is, despite its fragmentary nature, coherent and focused, even as it’s riddled with sound bites, samples and other bits of flotsam from popular culture. It wasn’t a big commercial success but that shouldn’t detract from the album’s very real achievements.
Where Not To Start:
The band’s first three albums, Pictures Of Starving Children Sell Records, Never Mind The Ballots…Here’s The Rest Of Your Life and Slap! all have moments (Slap! is probably the best of the three, containing as it does the excellent “That’s How Grateful We Are”, which alone makes it worth checking out) but they’re fairly same-y and lack much of the diversity that makes later albums such a pleasure. Often polemic where something more subtle might have been a better approach they stand as a testament to how confrontational 80s politics were but don’t make for an especially great entry point in exploring the bands back catalogue. And I suppose we have to drag over Tubthumper at some point, so here it is. It’s actually not a bad album but it has a very distorting effect on the bands run of albums. Taken in isolation a lot of the familiar Chumbawamba traits are here – there’s plenty of sampling, then-contemporary musical styles like jungle sit alongside the bands more traditional material, and the “scanning through the radio” framework of Anarchy is expanded upon to include all media broadcasts (the albums most successful conceit). Ignoring the obvious hit there’s a few stand-out tracks here – “Amnesia” was released as the second single from the album, peaked at number 10 in the UK charts (which technically means they’re not a one-hit wonder), and is a hugely enjoyable and smartly-written criticism of New Labour, equating their convenient abandoning of principals with the amnesia of the title. And on the first half of the album both “The Good Ship Lifestyle” and “The Big Issue” are more than worth spending time over. The album itself loses some of its momentum in the second half and begins to feel a bit tired - though “Mary Mary” is good-if-over-produced fun, as is “I Want More” - but it never quite adds up to more than the sum of its parts. Seeing the album as part of a run between the conceptual bifurcation of Swingin’ With Raymond and the (noticeably superior) WYSIWYG however and Tubthumber looks like a bit of an oddity, a playing around with a different style that the band eventually decided not to follow up on (a lot of the typical humour is absent as well, which is not the album’s benefit). Despite containing their best known track it’s not really representative of the bands output and not really the best entry point. Oh and of course there’s two live albums, Showbusiness! and Get On With It. Live albums don’t tend to prove the best entry point and here this is as true as ever – they’re both entertaining enough (Showbusiness! is probably the better of the two and has a certain ramshackle charm to it) but better appreciated when you’re already familiar with the material.
Potential Gateway Playlist:
Give The Anarchist A Cigarette (Anarchy)
Hey! You! Outside Now! (Swingin’ With Raymond)
The Good Ship Lifestyle (Tubthumper)
A Man Walks Into A Bar (Un)
That’s How Grateful We Are (Slap!)
Amnesia (Tubthumper)
The Day The Nazi Died (Uneasy Listening)
Love Can Knock You Over (Swingin’ With Raymond)
Silly Love Songs (Jesus H Christ!)
I Wish That They’d Sack Me (The Boy Bands Have Won)
On Ebay (Un)
Never Do What You Are Told (Anarchy)
Pop Star Kidnap (Shhh!)
Enough Is Enough (Anarchy)
Everything You Know Is Wrong (Un)
Celebration, Florida (WYSIWYG)
Home With Me (Readymades)
Pass It Along (WYSIWYG)
Add Me (The Boy Bands Have Won)
Morality Play In Three Acts (Uneasy Listening)
Rage (Anarchy)
Stitch That (Shhh!)
Thirty years of political activism. Thirty years of direct action. Thirty years of social campaigning. Thirty years of trying to make a difference. And what happens? You become known as a one-hit wonder with a catchy novelty song that’s largely mis-interpreted anyway. That’s been the fate of Chumbawamba, the anarchist bank from Leeds, England who came together in the early 80s to build an impressive reputation for uncompromising political stances delivered through music. Politics lies at the core of Chumbawamba but one thing which the success of “Tubthumping” at least telegraphs is that, despite the very serious-minded approach to politics the band has always had there’s something else that’s key to the success of Chumbawamba – fun. Reading about the band in music papers or on-line makes them sound terribly serious and po-faced, but actually listening to the music or seeing them live what comes across is just how entertaining their music is, and also how self-aware they are - the best-of compilation Uneasy Listening rather charmingly self-describes them as “umpteen years of one-legged men at arse-kicking parties” and the sleeve also quotes early 20th Century anarchist Emma Goldman: “it’s not my revolution if I can’t dance to it”. The personal, the political and the music all collide in Chumbawamba to produce a collage – indeed there approach to music owes much to collage, assembling songs from a variety of sources including but not limited to sampling (the over-use of which resulted in them having to re-record the album Jesus H Christ! as Shhh! because of clearance issues) and a cut-and-paste approach to popular culture which has resulted in some of their finest works. Despite the globe-spanning success of “Tubthumping” and its accompanying album Tubthumber Chumbawamba have mostly been a relatively small-scale operation, initially releasing on their own Agit-Prop label before moving to indie One Little Indian (home to the likes of Bjork) then eventually making the jump to EMI and the all the commercial success that came with it. But the commercial success of that album never kept Chumbawamba at the top of the charts and they went back to doing what they do best – making politically-engaged music in their own unique way. The band called it quits in 2012 and leave behind a legacy of activism and albums that stands as a testament to the bands beliefs and their commitment to the idea that change can be brought about through politics and music together.
Why It’s Daunting:
Well, the politics. Chumbawamba have always been described as anarchists which hasn’t exactly led them to a wide mainstream audience, and disagreement with their political stances can make the material difficult to engage with. And the band has many, many detractors, both from either end of the political spectrum and from the the anarco-punk roots they grew out of who screamed “sell-out” the moment the ink on the EMI contract dried. This has scared up a public image of the band that can make them difficult to approach. As mentioned earlier the standard image of the band – self-serious, self-important – doesn’t jibe with the experience of listening to the actual music, which while frequently angry is also frequently full of joy and (crucially) humour, both at the pleasure of making a point and the sheer pleasure of making music itself. Chumawamba released fourteen “official” albums (not including compilations or live albums, and not including Jesus H Christ or 1984’s Another Year Of The Same Old Shit), starting in 1986 with the marvelously-named Pictures of Starving Children Sell Records (a reaction to Live Aid) and finishing in 2010 with ABCDEFG, and some are certainly better than others. There’s a lot of material to wade through and the variable quality of some of it certainly presents a barrier, but at their best Chumbawamba’s blend of the political, personal and musical results in some true gems that show a band who deserve to be remembered for a lot more than one novelty single.
Potential Gateway: Shhh!
Released in 1992 Shhh! is easily the best of Chumbawamba’s early material, coming off a run of albums which have their highlights but were all a little…linear. Blending a whole host of musical styles from pub sing-alongs (“Nothing That’s New”) to faux Hari Krishna chants (“Happiness Is Just A Chant Away”), from the Beatles (“Stitch That!”) to sound collages (“Snip, Snip, Snip”), the album integrates its diverse influences perfectly. The band originally recorded the album as Jesus H Christ! which was extremely sample-heavy and which many of the artists who had been sampled objected to (amongst them Paul McCartney and Kylie Minogue, and excerpts of the letters received from their record companies demanding the removal of the samples are amusingly included as part of the Shhh! liner notes). This inevitably forced a re-write to make the album releasable. Though the original Jesus H Christ! - which is widely available from less-that-salubrious corners of the internet - was strong, the re-write gave the album a whole new focus, strongly criticizing censorship in music and defending the freedom of artists. Listening to Jesus H Christ! now, when sampling has become such an engrained part of musical culture, it’s hard to see what the fuss was about but at the time this kind of sampling was at the cutting edge of a newly-developing musical style and though Shhh! has most of the samples removed the legacy remains (the track “Big Mouth Strikes Again” isn’t a cover of the Smiths song of the same name, and “Snip, Snip, Snip” carries its three-words-and-commas over from that songs original name, “Money, Money, Money”, as in Abba). The new focus on censorship and artistic freedom marked a bit of a shift from the big-P politics of earlier albums but also finds the band stretching out to work in new musical styles and the variety lends much to Shhh!’s appeal. Of particular note is “Big Mouth Strikes Again”, a bassline-driven song about Lenny Bruce with spoken-word lyrics from Danbert Nobacon , a sing-shouted chorus featuring the whole band, movie soundtrack sampling, and the most perfect delivery of “bullshit motherfuker bullshit” ever committed to record, sweetly delivered by Alice Nutter. It’s a track full of shifting styles which never becomes self-indulgent and it is technically sophisticated in a way the band had never been up to this point. This technical proficiency – using the studio to help shape tracks in a more developed way than just standing and playing – is evident elsewhere on the album (the title track and “You Can’t Trust Anyone Nowadays”), but there’s still a terrific sense of fun shot through much of the material, especially the impish “Sometimes Plunder” and the fuck-you to domestic violence of “Stitch That” which concludes the album on a reverse Sgt Pepper. All of these elements combine to make a compelling, direct album that uses its influences to full effect.
Next Steps:
The follow-up to Shhh!, 1994’s Anarchy sees more of a return to more of the big-p politics of the bands earlier albums, and provides an easy, enjoyable way into the bigger-picture issues the band tackle while also showing off the lessons learned from Shhh! Sequenced and produced as if the listener were tuning through a radio (complete with occasional bursts of static and free-form samples as links between the individual tracks) Anarchy also showed the first small glimmerings of commercial success for the band, with killer single “Enough Is Enough” reaching number 56 in the UK charts. While not a massive success (at least, not next to ”Tubthumping”) it did at least demonstrate the band was beginning to have some traction outside its own relatively small music scene and as a single it’s blistering – an anti-fascist screed featuring Credit To The Nation rapper MC Fusion, it’s an absolutely furious, unforgiving condemnation, yet before the final chorus it also quotes the Pet Shop Boys song “I Want To Wake Up” which slots in seamlessly and shows just how well those lessons from Shhh! and Jesus H Christ! have been learned. Re-contextualizing a Pet Shop Boys song into an anti-fascist rant so effortlessly just wouldn’t have been something the band would have been able to do earlier in their career and it works wonderfully. The album was mildly controversial at the time for its cover art (a remarkably pissed-off looking baby emerging from a vagina) which certainly helped to garner a little extra publicity on its release but now Anarchy stands as probably the best example of the band doing out-and-out politics. Released in 2004 (on the other side of the big Tubthumper success) Un shows a shift in style from the early predominantly guitar-based music and shows Chumbawamba combining folk (always a part of their musical tradition), electronica and world music, while still featuring the sampling, guitars and all-in-it-together recording style that’s always been one of the bands hallmarks. The subjects the album covers – everything from using right-wing rhetoric to advance your career (“Just Desserts”) to items looted during the Iraq war turning up on Ebay (terrific single “On Ebay”), to a song in praise of the operating system Linux (“Rebel Code”) - remain diverse and slot in with the continuing musical diversification. That sense of fun isn’t lost in the process either – “Everything You Know Is Wrong” is a playful take on conspiracy theories and a real stand-out, and demonstrates that there’s always a place for something lighter in amongst all the point-making. It’s a coherent, focused album that’s accessible without being especially mainstream and is well worth spending time with to see just how far from their stand-up-and-thrash roots the band has come without losing the core of their identity. Also worth taking the time for: perpetually under-appreciated WYSIWYG, the most fragmentary of their albums, which combines generally shorter tracks with yet more stylistic developments - country and western noodlings on “Celebration: Florida”, and an unexpected Bee-Gee’s cover with an a capella version of “New York Mining Disaster 1941”. However two tracks stand head-and-shoulders above the rest, “Pass It Along” and the album closer “Dumbing Down”, the latter of which acts as a remarkably succinct take on the whole of the album. But the album is, despite its fragmentary nature, coherent and focused, even as it’s riddled with sound bites, samples and other bits of flotsam from popular culture. It wasn’t a big commercial success but that shouldn’t detract from the album’s very real achievements.
Where Not To Start:
The band’s first three albums, Pictures Of Starving Children Sell Records, Never Mind The Ballots…Here’s The Rest Of Your Life and Slap! all have moments (Slap! is probably the best of the three, containing as it does the excellent “That’s How Grateful We Are”, which alone makes it worth checking out) but they’re fairly same-y and lack much of the diversity that makes later albums such a pleasure. Often polemic where something more subtle might have been a better approach they stand as a testament to how confrontational 80s politics were but don’t make for an especially great entry point in exploring the bands back catalogue. And I suppose we have to drag over Tubthumper at some point, so here it is. It’s actually not a bad album but it has a very distorting effect on the bands run of albums. Taken in isolation a lot of the familiar Chumbawamba traits are here – there’s plenty of sampling, then-contemporary musical styles like jungle sit alongside the bands more traditional material, and the “scanning through the radio” framework of Anarchy is expanded upon to include all media broadcasts (the albums most successful conceit). Ignoring the obvious hit there’s a few stand-out tracks here – “Amnesia” was released as the second single from the album, peaked at number 10 in the UK charts (which technically means they’re not a one-hit wonder), and is a hugely enjoyable and smartly-written criticism of New Labour, equating their convenient abandoning of principals with the amnesia of the title. And on the first half of the album both “The Good Ship Lifestyle” and “The Big Issue” are more than worth spending time over. The album itself loses some of its momentum in the second half and begins to feel a bit tired - though “Mary Mary” is good-if-over-produced fun, as is “I Want More” - but it never quite adds up to more than the sum of its parts. Seeing the album as part of a run between the conceptual bifurcation of Swingin’ With Raymond and the (noticeably superior) WYSIWYG however and Tubthumber looks like a bit of an oddity, a playing around with a different style that the band eventually decided not to follow up on (a lot of the typical humour is absent as well, which is not the album’s benefit). Despite containing their best known track it’s not really representative of the bands output and not really the best entry point. Oh and of course there’s two live albums, Showbusiness! and Get On With It. Live albums don’t tend to prove the best entry point and here this is as true as ever – they’re both entertaining enough (Showbusiness! is probably the better of the two and has a certain ramshackle charm to it) but better appreciated when you’re already familiar with the material.
Potential Gateway Playlist:
Give The Anarchist A Cigarette (Anarchy)
Hey! You! Outside Now! (Swingin’ With Raymond)
The Good Ship Lifestyle (Tubthumper)
A Man Walks Into A Bar (Un)
That’s How Grateful We Are (Slap!)
Amnesia (Tubthumper)
The Day The Nazi Died (Uneasy Listening)
Love Can Knock You Over (Swingin’ With Raymond)
Silly Love Songs (Jesus H Christ!)
I Wish That They’d Sack Me (The Boy Bands Have Won)
On Ebay (Un)
Never Do What You Are Told (Anarchy)
Pop Star Kidnap (Shhh!)
Enough Is Enough (Anarchy)
Everything You Know Is Wrong (Un)
Celebration, Florida (WYSIWYG)
Home With Me (Readymades)
Pass It Along (WYSIWYG)
Add Me (The Boy Bands Have Won)
Morality Play In Three Acts (Uneasy Listening)
Rage (Anarchy)
Stitch That (Shhh!)
