Watts. The band made their live debut in January 1982. Their first vinyl release was a track ("Three Years Later") on the
Crass Records compilation album Bullshit Detector 2. They were initially inspired musically by
bands as diverse as the Fall, PiL, Wire, and Adam and the Ants and politically by the anarchist stance of
Crass. Another of the band's early releases was under the name "Skin Disease", parodying the Oi!
bands of the time so successfully that they were included on Back On The Streets, an Oi! compilation EP put together by Sounds magazine journalist Garry Bushell. By the end of 1982, the band had expanded to include Alice Nutter (of Ow My Hair's on Fire), and Dunstan "Dunst" Bruce (of Men in a Suitcase) and were living in a
squat in Armley, Leeds on Carr Crofts road - the building, and surrounding buildings, have since been demolished - with Harry "Daz" Hamer and Mavis "Mave" Dillon joining soon after. Stalwarts of the cassette culture scene, the band released a number of tapes including Be Happy Despite It All and Raising Heck With
Chumbawamba, and were featured on many compilations.
Chumbawamba were at the forefront of the 1980s
anarcho-punk movement, frequently playing benefit gigs in squats and small halls for causes such as
animal rights, the
anti-war movement, and community groups. The band's collective political views are often described as anarchist. They made several songs about the UK miners'
strike, including the cassette Common Ground and a song dedicated to the pit village of Fitzwilliam, which was one of the worst cases of economic decline following the
strike.
In 1997,
Chumbawamba scored their biggest chart hit with "Tubthumping" (UK No. 2, US No. 6), which featured an audio sample of actor Pete Postlethwaite's performance in the film Brassed Off. This was followed up in early 1998 with "Amnesia", which reached No. 10 in the UK. During this period
Chumbawamba gained some notoriety over several controversial incidents, starting in August 1997 when Nutter was quoted in the British
music paper Melody Maker as
saying, "Nothing can change the fact that we like it when cops get killed." The comment was met with outrage in Britain's tabloid press and was condemned by the Police Federation of England and Wales. The band resisted pressure from EMI to issue an apology and Nutter only clarified her comment by stating, "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."
In January 1998 Nutter appeared on the
American political talk show
Politically Incorrect and advised fans of their
music who could not afford to buy their CDs to steal them from large chains such as HMV and Virgin, which prompted Virgin to remove the album from the shelves and start selling it from behind the counter. A few weeks later, provoked by the Labour
government's refusal to support the Liverpool Dockworkers'
Strike, the band performed "Tubthumping" at the 1998 BRIT Awards with the lyric changed to include "New Labour sold out the dockers, just like they'll sell out the rest of us", and vocalist Danbert Nobacon later poured a jug of water over UK Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, who was in the audience.
In the late 1990s, the band turned down $1.5 million from Nike to use the song "Tubthumping" in a World Cup advertisement. According to the band, the decision took approximately "30 seconds" to make. In the EA Sports soccer game World Cup 98, the song "Tubthumping" is one of the soundtrack titles. In 2002, General Motors paid
Chumbawamba a sum of either $70,000 or $100,000, to use the song "Pass It Along" from the WYSIWYG album, for a Pontiac Vibe television advertisement in 2002.
Chumbawamba gave the
money to the anti-corporate activist groups Indymedia and CorpWatch who used the
money to launch an information and
environmental campaign against GM.
EMI released the band's first collection album which featured a mixed bag of songs from between 1985 and 1998 under the title Uneasy Listening. Also in 1998 came a Japan-only mini album, Amnesia, consisting of country and western style versions of recent hits "Tubthumping" and "Amnesia" alongside earlier songs like "Mouthful of Shit". As a millennium present,
Chumbawamba sent out a limited edition single to everyone on their mailing list. The song was a shoop shoop style ballad, "Tony Blair", which read like a heartbroken letter to an ex-lover who had broken all his promises. The band would send another free single out two years later, this time a re-worked version of the Beatles' song "Her Majesty" to coincide with the Queen's Golden Jubilee, with lyrics denouncing royalty.
Chumbawamba released the album WYSIWYG in 2000 which included a cover of the early Bee Gees song "New York Mining Disaster". The single "She's Got All The Friends That
Money Can Buy", was backed by "Passenger List For Doomed Flight 1721", a song that listed all of
the people that the band would like to see "disappear". The list of unfortunates included Tony Blair, Ally McBeal and Bono.
Chumbawamba parted from EMI in 2001. The band later said that they got what they wanted from the deal with EMI: "we released some great records, we travelled all over the world, appeared on all these TV programmes, and we made loads of
money, a lot of which we gave away or ploughed into worthwhile causes".
To celebrate their 20 years together, the band made a documentary film based on footage that they had recorded over the past two decades. Originally intended to be simply a compilation of their videos, the result was entitled Well Done, Now Sod off. The title was taken from an early review of a
Chumbawamba record and the film included both lovers and haters of the band.
Printed in USA
