Cool People Who Did Cool StuffCZM Rewind: Part One: Chumbawamba: How to Sell Out, But in a Good Way
Margaret talks with Max Collins of Eve 6 about the squatting, organizing, and robin hood antics of Chumbawamba, the one hit wonders with a thirty year career.
Original Air Date: 9.5.22
Cool Zone Media.
Hello and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff rerun edition. That's right, it's the holidays, and that means that I am going to run reruns. And I thought, what's better to get us in the holiday spirit than that holiday band. I've decided their holiday band the history of everyone's favorite an arcopop band, Chumbawamba. It's probably not a Christmas band. In fact, they might be annoyed if I call them that. Well, it's too bad because it's my podcast and this is a history of Chumbawamba. We'll be back next week with a non rerun whatever you call it a run, a regular run. Anyway, Here it is Hello and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, the podcast about all the cool people in history who did cool stuff. I'm your host, Killjoy and with me today is the one and only Max Collins, who might not be the only Max Collins. There's probably a bunch of Max Collins's.
There's probably a few.
Okay, are you are you aware of any other Max Collins? Is it like a Highlander thing?
I'm not, but my my dad's name is Michael Collins and sellouts. Yeah, yeah, he was for a while there he was like getting stopped and flagged on flights because like people thought that, you know, I don't know that name. Yeah yeah, uh, that.
He was the IRA musicians.
Yeah exactly, so he would have to be pulled aside and made sure he wasn't you know an IRA guy?
Yeah yeah, who just is a lich and still alive?
Yeah exactly.
Okay, Well, for anyone who's listening, you might know Max Collins as the son of the revolutionary IRA leader Michael. No, you can't know Max Collins as the from the band Eve six, or you might know him from a ship post on Twitter. Max. How are you doing today?
I'm doing well. Thank you, thanks for having me on.
Yeah. We also have Sophie on the call. Who's our producer, Sophie. How are you doing?
I'm doing a well, Margaret, Thank you for asking.
Holl Right, No one ever asks me how I'm doing.
So how are you, Margaret?
I'm good. I'm really excited to top I had a whole twenty minute conversation with you off Mike. I know how you are, that's true, Margaret's well. Okay, listeners, I'm doing so good today that I get to talk about I'm literally wearing the shirt of today's topic.
So today wearing you're wearing the merch to the show, so to speak.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, So today we're going to talk about a one hit wonder from the nineties. This is not normally a music podcast, but I hope you all will indulge me. It's gonna be worth it. Max. Have you ever heard of a band called Jumbo Lumba?
Sure have yep?
So okay, completely have you have you ever like played with them or anything like that? Am I talking about like your friends? I have no idea what you know about?
No, I've never I've never met them. I know the singer whose name I'm blanking on now, a.
Lot of singers Boff Whaley, Bruce. Well nope. Now I'm going to be really embarrassed that I don't remember the name of the people that I'm going to be talking about because I can't remember names.
Well, I mean, yeah, I can't either, but yeah, the main dude. After I did, I was interviewed for Mel piece written by Magdalen forgetting her last name now l I P. Mel. I think that's no longer a magazine, but yeah, and spoke about you know, Chumble Womba for for the piece, and apparently he liked it, was asked for my email and stuff, was going to reach out, but I never got an email from the man who I'm disrespecting by not being able to remember him. Right.
It's more embarrassing for me because this is literally a script about him, and I just am capable. For anyone who's like, wow, Margaret sure knows all these dates and all this history, it's because I write it down when I researched things, and then it escapes me. But for anyone who success to Dunstan Bruce, yes, yes, that name that I also remembered, Dunstan Bruce. For anyone who was either too young or successfully lived under a rock. During the late nineties, there was this song called tub Thumping and it's about drinking and falling over and then not being falling over anymore. And it was fucking everywhere and I fucking hated it. I was in high school and I was busy setting myself up as someone who hated everything that was popular, and that was my original introduction to Chumba Womba.
Then okay, can I ask you a quick question, Huh did you did you legitimately hate the song like did it make you bristle with antagonism when you heard it, if you were like alone in your car.
Or something like that, or did the version of yourself that you wanted to enjoy and present to the world did that you know, did that person not like Chumble Womba? Because I know with radio rock of the nineties, you know, like if tub Thumping or like Hey Jealousy or even some of those live hits came on when I was in my car alone, I would enjoy the shit out of them. I would be totally moved by them and stuff. Yeah, definitely, I definitely wasn't telling my friends, you know. Yeah, that's interesting, sort of embarrassing.
Yeah, No, I I genuinely don't know the answer to that question because I've like rewritten my own script in my head.
You know.
I think I tended not to like anything that was happy in the late nineties, and so I think the tub Thumping. But on the other hand, it is just so like now I love this song, right, Yeah, And actually Hey Jealousy, I actually always liked Hey Jealousy, But I think it's because it was like just before I got too cool for everything, right. I don't know if I could go back. I whatever, I'm not mad at my younger self, even though it was affectatious that I refused everything that was like on I listened to the radio. What am I doing listening to radio if I'm claiming to hate everything on it? I don't know.
I know what you mean, though. Yeah.
So I started learning more about the band, and they'd been around for almost twenty years before that song came out. They were in an arcopunk collective. Selling out was this calculated move to reach more people, sustain themselves, and just give a fuck ton of money away to political projects working to destroy capitalism. I found out that they started out as working class kids who wanted to be in a band but couldn't play any instruments and to know how to sing. They lasted for thirty years. They toured the world, They pranked everyone, They got arrested again and again. They squatted a house. They work collectively. They took in runaways, they raised kids, and along the way they learned how to make really fucking good music. And so I will present to you my hypothesis that Chumbawamba is the single punkst thing to have ever happened, and no offense to me and no offense to you, Max, But that is my hypothesis that I'm working off of.
I'm with it cool.
I wonder if Crass is going to come and yell at me, But you know, whatever't.
Isn't there a crossover there? I feel like maybe there's an ex member of Crass who was in Tumbawamba or something like that.
I know that they heavily influenced, well, Crass heavily influenced Chumbawamba. I don't know about vice versa, because they like came out just a few years after Crass kind of came on the scene. But I don't know whether or not. I'm sure that they all know each other now. And so today the story I want to present is the story of a band that's sold out, but in a good way, the Chumbowamba story. Yeah, and I'm how I'm glad I got over myself. That's the subtext, Margaret herself. We start our story in Burnley, somewhere, some nowhere town in northern England, population ninety one thousand people, and it's in the northern England. I didn't know this growing up, so maybe other Americans didn't know this. It's the poorer part of England, the place you're supposed to make fun of everyone who's from for being like backwards and provincial. The Northern accent gets compared to the Southern accent, or maybe the Appalachian accent in terms of its social impact is the best I've ever heard it described. And Burnley, where they start, is this sort of town where all the factory jobs had gone overseas and the town is quietly dying, just familiar to you know, many people who might be listening to this. Most of the band is from there. Born in the sixties. Off Whaley, the guitarist. He's the one who he got tasked with writing the book about Chumbo Wamba at some point. So I know more about his childhood than anyone else's because he wrote a book about it and I read the book. But he's not the protagonist or the lead singer or in charge of Chumbawamba. They were all very aggressively a collective at all times. But he's one of the founders, and so he wrote the book, so we're going to talk about him. He was a Mormon as a teenager, his mom had converted. He was a believer. He was raised poor, thankfully estranged from a shitty birth dad, and he had a pretty cool stepdad. Well probably I didn't know.
I didn't know that there were British Mormons.
Well, so he's the only one who started off Mormon that I'm aware of. Maybe the other ones did. I think that.
I'm just saying in general, I thought Mormonism was a distinctly American.
Oh, I see what you're saying.
Yeah, you know religious phenomenon.
Yeah, that was yeah. They I don't know exactly how it hit the sixties in England, but I was reading about that and I had kind of a similar reaction, being like, this thing has gotten out of Salt Lake City. Yea, someone should do something about that. I mean, yeah, yeah, And so so Boff. He's raised in this family, seems like a reasonably happy family childhood or he's not the type to talk shit about his family in an autobiography. And he's really into football, British football, soccer, whatever, and he's really shit at it. And in nineteen seventy six, I think he's about fifteen years old, maybe fourteen, he sees the sex pistols on TV and singing anarchy in the UK. He sees Johnny Rotten, and he's like, this is it. I'm in I'm going to be a punk, which is way more original than me deciding I'm going to be a punk in like you know, the early ots, early nineties or whatever. His best friend Midge is into punk too, and Midge's dad is upset with saving electricity to save money. So it's this house, like imagine a house where like all of the light bulbs are forty watt light bulbs and everything's dark all the time. And his dad would yell at you if you rang the doorbell too many times because you're wasting his electricity. And Midge wore pants so tight, and this is the opposite of my experience of being a teenager in the nineties. He wore pants so tight that he had to cut slits in the bottom for his feet to go through. And again direct opposition also to the style of the time, which was flared jeans.
Yeah no, that's amazing because we would cut slits in our pants too, But I mean we were buying like size forty waist, yeah, pants from like Ross Dress for less and then cutting triangles in the bottom and adding a piece of fabric under it to make them even bigger because the goal was you wanted your adida's shelters to be completely covered, completely shrouded by pant Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, I love my elephant leg pants. In the nineties, I used to walk around barefoot underneath them because because no one knew I was, No one knew yeah, and I felt very you know, I would. I would end up in like cities. I would take public transit to like other cities and just feel very like edgy that I had successfully gone without. Okay, anyway, so we have the opposite of the So Boff and Midge. They're going to shows whenever they can. It's the late seventies, and one day in nineteen seventy seven they're at a bus stop and they see a kid across the street who's wearing a straight jacket, a homemade straight jacket that he made for himself out of a parkap and that he needed his mom's help to get into. And they're like, oh, we got to be friends with that guy. So they go and meet that guy. His name is Dan. He's going to be in Chumble one but two. Boff says in his autobiography that he hated school. He never did his homework and shit, and this might have been true, but he also like got into Oxford and Cambridge, So I wonder how much this is, how accurate this is. I don't know enough about British but he says that the main reason he went to school is that him and his friend were selling bootleg records. They would take a bus to another town and they meet this like sketchy, grown ass adult with food in his beard who would sell these kids illegally copied classic rock on vinyl. And then they would go back and be like, hey, do you want to buy a record? You know, hey, do you want to buy pink Floyd or whatever? To the other kids in school, And the same bootlegger later pays for a bunch of the local punks to record their albums, which I think is fucking cool. I like this weird, random, sketchy bootlegger guy. He loses religion soon enough. He starts looking at his options, you know, he's like looking around. He's like, I don't know if I want to be religious. A punk girl takes him home after a UK sub show and fox him, and he's like, nah no, this is it the sex rock and roll punk rock fuck Mormonism, and so they start a band and they have a problem. None of them know how to play any instruments. So they add more friends, presumably to get more of a chance to learn how to play instruments. But they're other friends they had also don't know how to play any instruments. One of them who did not end up in Chumba one because he moved away. His name was high Jumping the Deem. He's a South Asian immigrant who I sent up for the high jump and then jumped into the pole because it was funny. And then they had Bootleg Phil. Everyone has cool names when they're teenagers, you know, Bootleg Phil was the bootlegging partner.
I don't know.
This is this is how your band started to write none of you all could do anything. I actually, I actually don't know much about the orgin of your band, and so I'm curious.
Yeah, I think I think a lot of bands start that way. You know, our story was just a lot less illustrious, interesting and cool.
Well, if you wrote the book on it, you could probably figure out a way to do it.
Yeah, figure out a way to sort of dress it up. But uh, but yeah, I think I think that's a fairly common tale, but it's sounds like, I mean, with us, we could sort of make our way, you know, uh, through some chords and stuff like that. It sounds like maybe tumble Lumba was like, you know, really quite literally coming at this with you know, absolutely zero Yeah, musical education or proficiency.
Yeah, although it's interesting because I do wonder a little bit. I've watched some of their older videos. They had this band I'm about to get to you called Chimpet's Banana and there, and the book is like, oh, we didn't know anything, we didn't know how to tune our instruments. But it's actually like passable punk rock. Like I've seen videos of them playing and I'm like, no, I would have a good time at this show, you know, and so.
And it see it seems like they're you know, there's maybe a little bit of a theme developing here where you know, in some sense they're writing their own lore a little bit. Yeah, yeah, which is fine, you know, which is great, But it sounds like, yeah, maybe one dude was like a little bit more academically inclined than he yets on. Yeah, yeah, maybe they were a little bit more talented than they're letting on. But yeah, it's all good. I'm here for the story.
Yeah yeah, And I actually I really appreciate that they're participate in mythologizing, you know, yeah, I think that's great.
I do too.
And so they formed this band called Chimpeats Banana and basically they're like at this thing where this promoter is like, oh, if you're in a band, write down the name of your band on this slip of paper. And so they write down Chimpeats Banana, even though they're not a band, and he calls them up and he's like, hey, you got a gig, And so they go and play shows, and they play a couple dozen shows. I believe it's Chimpeats Banana. And they theme each one differently, and they're already art weirdos from the very beginning. Like one of them is like, Okay, this one we dress in pajamas, this one we lie around in lounge chairs. They do whatever they want, and they you know, again, they claim they're terrible. I've seen footage and yeah, I would go yeah, and they're still in high school or whatever the fuck British people call high school. You think I would know because British people make better high school TV than Americans do, but I don't know what they call it. So they're punk's in high school and they spend their time like getting in trouble and they enjoyed. They get you know, they adorn their jackets with safety pins and get called into the administrator's office for that, and they like spit on adults. And they also are really into football and being football fans, which is not in the normal punk narrative. And I find it really interesting. I don't know, are you I know Sophie is a big sports player.
Well, I do, remember, I do remember. How should I introduce him? You know, punk pravocateur, you know, infamous lead singer of Screeching Weasel Ben Weasel Penning. I think he maybe even had a column in maximum rocking role where he would talk about baseball all the time. He was like a massive, massive baseball fan. Yeah, and yeah, I always like it when punk rockers like play against type like that.
Yeah, Sophie, I went and found you punks who liked sports. That was my sole purpose. That was not my sole purpose. But so so Boff graduates and goes off and he gets offered to go to Cambridge or Oxford, and he's like, no, fuck all that. He goes to a local school, like a local trade school for a minute, and then he goes off to art school near London, and at one point he gets arrested for being a punk, like it's the first time he's arrested, and they accused him of having stolen his own camera, and he's wearing a shirt that says, I don't want to go to art school, so I don't know whatever. He arresticated, goes to art school for wearing a shirt sause I don't go to art I don't want to go to art school. Fair enough.
Fair enough.
He drops out because he was true to his shirt. He drops out, and he buys a twenty pound guitar, which is not a weight but instead of a unit of ye measurement of price, So it's a once stone six pounds guitar.
Right, it wasn't a less Paul.
Yeah, And so he goes back home and all the punks are hanging out in this new spot railway workers club that some guy named Spider was renting out once a week, And it was Spider who introduced bof to the works of dead nineteenth century anarchists like Melatesta and Bakunin. It was Spider and Bob's new girlfriend Lou who ends up in Chumbawampa. Literally, she gets dragged into the band because she's the only person who knows how to sing, and they're like, we have shows, will you come sing for us if we don't know how to sing. Boff gets a job as a postal carrier. He is a dead end job. He doesn't like it. He doesn't want an office life. They all spend half their time skipping work and hitchhiking around the country to go to punk shows, and they sleep and bus shelters and they just are punks in the late seventies, which actually sounds really nice. It sounds like a really it's time to be allowed to be real.
Yeah.
Around this time high Jumping, the Deem moves with this family to Tampa, Florida, and a few months later, the rest of the heroes. They give up on sleepy Burnley and they move to the big city of Leeds, which is an hour east of Burnley. And so Chimp Eats Banana is done and now Chumbawamba is the new thing. They're both terrible names. They don't improve upon their name as far as I'm concerned, The four of them they rent a place there like and they go to college, and then they drop out of college, and then they try and figure out how to actually have a band, and they start just swapping instruments constantly and just spending all of their time. They build a practice space with like egg cartons on the wall and just like, try to have a fucking band. Summer of nineteen eighty one, they say fuck it. Four of them with one acoustic guitar and one snare drum. They hitchhike to Paris. They start squatting a stadium like they just it wasn't an abandoned stadium. They just sneak in at night and sleep in the stands and then try to slink off unnoticed in the morning, off to go busk all day in the big fancy city, making enough money for food and beer, basically being twenty eighth year old punks. And that's how they start Chumbawamba. And their name was picked to mean nothing. Every time they tell the story of how they got the name, they tell a different lie. The most prevalent story, which reporters now report is fact, but bof Whaley says this is a lie when he recounts it in his book. So who fucking knows? Is that while they were busking in Paris they got hellic outclassed by a bunch of drummers from Africa who were chanting something that to them sounded like chum chumba whalen. And if so, this is the biggest thing that they did that doesn't look very good in retrospect, you know, being like, oh, that sounds like nonsense. Let's take it, you know, but who knows? Who fucking knows? They also claim that they got it from some pub where there were two genders on the bathroom and one was Chumba and one was Wumba. However got the name. They played their first show on January eighth, nineteen eighty two, which before I'd done so much as be born. They're way ahead of me, Chumba Womba. I'm pretty bitter about this. I have a lot of catching up to do. Like the rest of their shows, at this time, everyone ignores them, and they just did weird shit and called it punk. They film projected behind them of everyone wearing dresses and hanging out in a graveyard. They oh, they're weird fucking punk kids. I like them, I clearly like them. I am recording a podcast that was about it. Thank you everyone listen to me talking about his band as I think is cool. Their second show was in Tampa, Florida. They flew to Tampa to visit their friend Na Deem, and they played a show where everyone ignored them and they got kicked out of Nadem's house by his mom forgetting the carpets.
Gross. Can you imagine this iteration of this anarcho communist band playing in Tampa, Florida in the early nineteen eighties like that that you could not, you know, dream up a more hostile environment for them. Totally, totally.
So. So back in England they pick up Dunstan Bruce, whose name I obviously remember this whole time. I'm sorry, Dunstan if you ever listened to this, I just don't remember names. Who put up a bandmate's wanted sign in a shop. And he's the guy who ends up the male lead singing the male lead on top thumping. We'll get to top pumping. He after he meets the punks, he drops out of architecture school and moves into their shitty apartment. He gets disowned by his high society dad for doing all of this, which I think makes him like the rich kid of the band compared to everyone else's, like these small town punks. But obviously this gets really messy when you throw in disowned, right, Like, I don't know what that looked like. You know, I have a friend of mine who like grew up southern society rich, right, but he got kicked out of the house when he was sixteen for being trans Like does he have class privilege? I don't know. It's a fucking me. He's fucking homeless kid when he was sixteen, you know.
Yeah. No, these are class traders, yeah yeah.
And speaking of class traders, in the opposite direction, this show is supported by advertisers. This is pointing out that, well, actually here we'll have good advertisers this time. So so this show, whenever possible, we try to be sponsored by very positive things. Like my favorite perennial is well it's actually it's a season, it's a it's an annual crop. But potatoes, the concept of potatoes is what I like to be sponsored by because I think potatoes are very good. We've also had other sponsors such as Sleeping Dogs, Sophie, what are some of the what are our what are some of our repeating are.
Really good calm drinkable tap water, a pillow that always stays cool.
Oh I like that one.
Yeah that's good.
Yeah. So is there anyone that you would like to be sponsored by in this and for this show, like something that's just you feel good about?
Yeah, I'd like to be sponsored word by Conceptual Kindness and Aspirational Love.
All right, So this show is sponsored only by Conceptual Kindness, Aspirational Love and Sleeping Dogs. And if there's any other advertisers that you hear, that is a problem, and you should write to Sophie on Twitter at I write, okay and complain and we are back from those ads are ray? Okay? So so as important to the music that they're around at this time, the things that are inspiring them is also the radical politics at the time. They're involved in the anti nuclear movement, this like peace movement against the Falkland Wars, which I literally only know about because of eighties punk. You know, the American education system wasn't like really big on the wars of the twentieth century of England. And Margaret Thatcher is coming to power, who again I only know about through punk, but it was a safe yeah, not a popular person in the punk scene in Yeah. Basically, Margaret Thatcher is this right wing asshle who gives Margaret's a bad name everywhere and was prime Minister the whole of the eighties. And then there's Crass And if I ever become a music podcast then Crass will end up on it. But unlike some other like kind of would be radicals at the time who would like quote the situationist but not really mean it, Crass like was the opposite. They like, they meant it about politics, specifically like anarchist pacifism, and they there are this collective of ex hippies and punks who redefined punk music for better and worse Musically, politically, I think they're fucking great, although I'm not pacifist, but whatever, But like you know, they change punk punk's direction in a lot of ways, and they tied it into direct action in the peace movement. And the point of me bringing up Crass is so I can tell you, and I guess accidentally the audience the most embarrassing punk thing I've ever done, oh good, which was that one time me and two of my friends started an acoustic crass cover band with cello, accordion and guitar, and we were so we were so let's say good. We were so good at this that not only did we get kicked out of the bar that we were playing that we had been booked to play, the entire convention that booked us to play this bar got kicked out of the bar. They were like, you know what, we don't want you here anymore, even though you paid to be here.
And that's fantastic.
Yeah, And actually the cellist of that is the person who did our theme music on Woman. She's actually very good cellist in his my fault that the band was terrible anyway, very proud of this. Have you, uh you have any worst terrible things that you've managed to do in this vein curious.
Let me think for a second year, I mean in terms of like mortifying moments on stage. Sure, yeah, one leaps to mind, which is going to be really funny contextually here, because but we did My band EVE six did a co headlining tour with the band gold Finger in the year two thousand or two thousand and one. And you know, Goldfinger by comparison to EP six, which is you know, a radio run the bands too public perception. You know, Goldfinger was a punk and so we would go on every night usually like a handful of middle fingers or like you know, like gold Finger, who's a real punk band and you're six and you know your radio rock you suck. And you know, this was in my drinking days, so you know, I was I was hitting the stage you know, with anywhere between like sort of a buzz to being like pretty substantially loaded. And so this one night, I think we were actually in Salt Lake City, and this one dude just wasn't putting his middle finger down and it was really and it was really grinding my gears. So I was like I kind of beckoned him up to the front of the stage. I like, come here, and so he did. He came up to the front of the stage and I had like three quarters of behind agn that was like next to my microphone, and I dumped it on his head. I just emptied the entire thing. And this guy said, and and that want some people over, you know.
Yeah, because now you're real punks, right, Because now I'm real punk, I like.
You know, and and then so like I sauntered back to center stage. We had a bass player out with us at the time, so I was just being like douchebag singer guy. And you know, we start a song and I put my foot on the wedge like a rock god and promptly slipped because like I got some of the beer on either the wedge or the bottom of my foot, so super slippery, and I slipped and ate shit, like I fell all the way down to the ground. It was the most like instantaneous karmic retribution I've ever experienced.
That is perfect.
Yeah, yeah, it sucked, but you know it also felt kind of deserved, so it was like, you know, I'll take this one on the chin.
Yeah, I mean like both things are perfectly good, you know, like both things just make a better story.
Like both things are fine.
Everyone who went was like two crazy things happened tonight, you know. Yeah, so fuck yeah.
Yeah.
So in nineteen eighty two, some some of Tumbawamba by a school bus with a few older punks, like mid twenties punks, and they make the decision to buy the bus pretty much because the guy selling it had six six six in his phone number, and they fix up the bus they head off to Europe to bum around in a bus, and they busk enough money for food and fuel. They park every night at the outskirts of town. They had bonfires and argued about politics. They played impromptu shows to people who did not give a shit at all, Like they would just like show up at a cafe and like pull instruments out of the bus and play and everyone's like, what the fuck is happening?
This sucks.
Sometimes they would just put on a cassette recording of music and pretend to play along on tennis rackets like as guitars, and all the people on the bus took on ridiculous punk names like Don Quixote and Matt Hatter and Legal Aid.
It's awesome. I love the conversience here of like hippie aesthetics with punk ones. You know, yeah exactly, you got the reappropriated bus. Yeah, you know, bonfires and stuff it, you know, almost distinctions without difference when you compare them to yeah.
Yeah, no totally, and like the whole thing just sounds like everything I dreamed of doing when I was a teenager, you know, totally. But the ten people crammed into the bus, they start to lose their minds. One of them decides he's Jesus. Fun arguments turn into not fun arguments. The bus keeps breaking down and they have to hustle like hell for spare parts and gas. One one guy gets off the bus in France and literally no one has ever seen him again. One by one everyone was.
It the guy. I wonder if it was the guy who decided he was Jeesus.
That seems the most likely. Yeah, although don Quixote and Mad Hatter are fully up there as.
Born also born travelers.
Yeah yeah, And you know, one by one everyone leaves, and to be honest, this sounds like most of the times I've done. Basically this like travel around in a bus where people are like, Wow, we're gonna have this great communal experience. Then one by one everyone's like, I want my own life. Thigh yeah, yeah, yeah. So the three lads of Chumbawamba, who are on the bus at this point, they go and they pick and I they go pick grapes in the south of France, and they decide they're not getting paid enough and they're young anarchists, so they go on strike. So they get fired, and then they go home to England and four of them move into a squat in Leeds and it's called the South View House. And it's this huge Victorian red brick almost mansion in a state of near collapse. It was falling apart when they moved in. It had been squatted on and off for a long time. There's an overturned black Volkswagen Beetle in the middle of the garden. Scavengers have been all over it. They've stolen everything worth stealing, down to the doorknobs. And the floorboards have been stolen out of this house. It has never occurred to me that floorboards have value value. Yeah, and the banisters they steal the banisters and the furniture. Not Chumbawamba whoever had been there before.
Yeah.
The guy actually who had been the most immediately previous squatter had just moved out and so they decided it was free to move in. Was a guy who only ate avocados and wore a loincloth and followed a religion called Life Wave, which I tried to learn more. Yeah, I try to learn more about Life Wave, but unfortunately not available through Google. So usually when I say that, Sophie looks something up in about thirty seconds and then schools me on it. So they move in and they start fixing everything up. They dump all their money and time into the house. They learn electrical and plumbing and all of that shit in the process. They although by the end they're in this house for like ten or ten years or more by the end there.
And it's it's no small feat at that time to learn electrical and plumbing. It's not like you're going to YouTube videos. No, that's a good pot checking out books from a library.
Yeah, and finding some old guy who kind of hates you because you're a hippie and being like, hey, can you teach me how to fix this thing?
Yeah? Totally. Yeah.
No, that's a good point because I'm like, oh, I can do a lot of that stuff. And I'm like I watch YouTube every night. I like, this is what I do to decompress, is I watch people rewire things and say I rewire things now. Yeah, so far, so good. By the end, they claim that the house is held together by the yellow paint on the walls, like the cracks they just paint over with yellow paint, over and over. Within a year, there's nine of them living there, including a bunch of their old punk friends, from Burnley, Alice Nutter and Lou who end up in Chumbawamba pretty much its whole thirty year run as an actual band, and Alice Nutter she's named after a woman who'd been murdered for witchcraft in I believe Northern England hundreds of years earlier. They live communally, They pull their money, they shoplift what they need. They pay off Alice's crime debt because when she first moved in, she had committed a bunch of felony level fraud and they had to pay it all off collectively, which is very nice of everyone.
I think it's awesome.
Alice later refers to this house as the first place that she ever felt secure, the first home that she had, you know, and I doubt she was the only one who felt that way. I just found her quote about it. Not everyone in the house joins the house band Shumbawamba, but most of them did. And it's kind of interesting, right because this is now I'm totally off script, but it's it's kind of interesting right because, like on the bus, it's this classic hippie dream and it kind of just seems like it goes terribly but this house, they pull it off. You know, it doesn't last forever. Nothing lasts forever, but they they do pull this off. Everyone cooks, everyone cleans. Everyone sort of collectively gave gardening a shot, but then failed to grow potatoes. That's not even me making a potato joke like it usually is. They tried to grow potatoes and they got blight, and everyone was like, you know, it's actually easier to buy bulk food. Let's just buy bulk. They run a printing press, I believe in their basement, start publishing anarchist pamphlets. They rescue a dog and make him their mascot. They went vegan to various levels of strictness. Again, this is the early eighties for a brief and terrible moment. This is me making a potato reference for no good reason. For a brief and terrible moment. One of them, Dan goes on a strict diet that precludes potatoes because he got mashed And now I'm he got mashed potatoes in his ear from a food fight and he had to go to the doctor and I got really sick from this, like infected.
I love these people so much. I am sane. My heart is swelling there, I know.
And so he gets he goes on this like super strict all natural diet, and then eventually he gives up and goes back to whatever else he was eating, And they start watching their neighbors kids after school, and years later, still in the squatted house, two of them have kids of their own. Two fifteen year old runaway punks move in and Lou and bof have to go down and meet their parents and basically be like, hey, uh, your kids run away from home and they're in our house and you should let them stay. We're not a cult, totally not a cult. We promise you we're not a cult. And it works, the kids stay, They join Shambawamba. At least one of them wrote that shit all the way up to fucking world tour, you know, number two in the pop charts, fucking which which fucking's so awesome. Yeah, like that is that is the fifteen I mean, it's unfortunately fifteen year old runaways dream, you know. Yeah, And so they're they're all already I mean, they're punks and they're punk band, but they're already going art and pop and theater directions with their music. And Alice is opening the shows by reading feminist poetry. And one of the first pranks that they run is they start a skinhead band to make fun of the right wing skinhead scene, and they call themselves skin Disease, and.
I remember reading. Yeah, it's one of the most incredible trolls. Yeah, of all the time. They they fight a brave and a brave one too, because you're talking about like a pretty violent, you know opposition here.
No, that's a really good point. Yeah, like walking in especially as a bunch of like at this point, they're still pacifists walking into this scene that really likes fighting people and making fun of them.
Yeah.
And so they tell this OI compilation to record their song, and their song is called I'm Thick and the lyrics is they just say I'm thick sixty.
And over and over.
Yeah, yeah, and it appears on the compilation along with all these like right wing patriotic songs. It's not like a Nazi compilation. It's a like go England, we beat the Falkland War whatever, like yeah, yeah, you know back when you used to have right wingers who were't Nazis in the Western world. Yeah, yeah, no, okay, and so and so at this point there's still pacifists because the anarchist scene in the early eighties in England and probably because of Krass. And then in nineteen eighty four they play a benefit for the minor strike that was going on alongside the York's Old Punk band, and Nazis show up and attack and they end the show by stabbing people right Jesus and basically apparently make fun of everyone for being too pacifist to fight back, and then sort of home in leads someone a right wing person like smashes up their van while it's in the driveway to like get the Commis or whatever, and so Chumba one was like, all right, you know what, we're not pacifists anymore, this which makes sense to me. I mean, it's like part of why I'm not pacifists. I'm like, well, Nazis, Nazis. That's that's the end of the argument. It's Nazis.
Yeah.
So they get a baseball bat and when the van smasher came back, they swarmed him. They held him down and basically were like, hey, if you fucking come near us again, you're leaving an ambulance. And he didn't come around to fuck with them anymore, but you know what will fuck with you? Are products and services that support this podcast, Sophie. Are they pacifists or are they violence us? I can't remember. Are we supported by both sides of that argument?
We are supported by both sides of that argument for sure.
Capitalism very good at playing both sides of that particular argument. Violence for them, peace for their opposition. I think that's the yeah post, here's some ads. Okay, we're back. And so they've now changed their attitude, and they did more than play benefit shows for the minor strike. They print up posters, they organized, they joined pickets. And one of the things that I like about this part of the story is that, like they were punks, and so they weren't necessarily culturally the same as the miners that they were working in solidarity with. But they're from the same towns, right, Like they are not this like totally distinct like rich, not everyone who clearly not everyone who lives in cities is rich, but like they're not like coming in from outside and being like, oh, you poor miners, let us like look down upon you. These are people from these areas, you know.
Yeah, they're from the same class. They're just people who gravitated to make an art.
Yeah, exactly, and it's not bad when other people show up to help, but like working class solidarity fucking rules. So one time, one of while they're on a picket because they say on instead of in whatever it's in the snow And Tumbawamba does not take credit for this action. They describe it in detail in their book. But there are several things that happened that are illegal that Tumbawamba simply describes as things that happened that they were around. And one of them is that there's a one of those you know, those concrete posts to keep cars from running off the road, and they build a snowman over it and they put a picket hat on it, and the cops get really mad about this snowman, so they drive it over, they try to drive it over and smash up their own cop car. And I feel like that's a good way to have a weird picket, is to watch cops smash up their own cars. Yeah, Like, and they have all of these What a weird coincidence? We are randomly at dozens of made riots and numerous countries that just happen to coincide with our tour, and I don't know what the statute of limitations is for rioting across Europe in the eighties, nineties, and two thousands, So I'm going to go with coincidence. It was just a weird coincidence.
It was just a coincidence.
Yeah, the miner's loss despite the pluckiness of the pickets in nineteen eighty five, And it's this whole big deal that I haven't fully wrapped my head around, right. I'm not a huge nineteen eighties labor history England person yet, although through this podcast I will eventually get to all of it. It really changes things in England. Industry closes, scabs and cops pretty much need to move out of the towns they're living in because everyone fucking hates them, and so just think it divides these communities. But for Shumbawamba, this was a big political awakening. They've been politically involved this whole time. But what they realize is that by being in solidarity with people who weren't like, culturally aligned with them, they realized how basically naval gazing, an insular and obsessively diy punk was not all the punk but aspects of it, and had all these weird and specific rules. From their point of view, all these like cultural rules. This is going to be totally unfamiliar to anyone who's involved with leptism today. There's no way that we would ever police our own over increasingly complicated systems of rules.
Yeah unthinkable.
Yeah, it wouldn't make any sense. It actually would. And so Bof at least is reminded of his Mormon upbringing, or points out that he's reminded of this. And so they released their first DP called Revolution, and it basically is making fun of that kind of elitism. They're not mocking the idea of revolution, they're mocking the weird rules that everyone has. Basically, they're like, we gotta be fucking better because we're not trying to have a scene, we're trying to fucking different society. And and they're really politically savvy, right, Like I had kind of when I found out that Chumbawamba was like into radical politics, I'd kind of been like, oh, that's cool, but I hadn't realized quite that the they were like in it, like it was there as much a part of what they did. Alice Nutter in the late nineties, I think in the tub thumping era told a fanzine about single issue politics. Single issues half the time, This is me quoting Alice Nutter. Single issues half the time end up being welfare groups for social misfits, all the sad bastards that don't have a life to join single issues. I refuse to be guilt tripped saying that any one thing is the most important. The problem is we don't have an overview of what's happened to us politically. It's really hard to step back and look over the last fifteen years. Capitalism has come on in leaps and bounds. Why ain't we Instead people go, well, I've done this, and I've done that. We've been really stupid. We've not responded to what capitalism's done. Instead, we've been too busy policing each other. I've changed the way OH about things. Yeah right, I've changed the way I go about things because I've had to, because I want to live in the real world. That's the quote.
Brilliant, yeah, and and incredibly relevant.
I know, twenty five years later from even then, and it's like, I think about it because I got into politics twenty years later than them, and I had to have all these epiphanies all over again, you know totally. Their EP Revolution is a hit, at least by their standards at the time, it gets radio play. I think it's their first radio play. It charts on the indie charts, and so they put out next to a full length called Pictures of Starving Children Sell Records, which is basically a whole album making fun of live aid a charity concert happening at the time that costs millions of dollars to stage. And because they're weird, annoying art punks, they pressure one of their own bandmates, I think Dan, to make himself puke so that they could record the sound for the end of the record. And I watched at one point an interview with the sound producer and it was like the first time he met them, and he's like, I met this band and the first thing they made me do is like record one of them throwing up.
This is great, I'm doing amazing.
I've made good decisions in my life, thought the sound producer. And to fuck with the sort of standards that they feel like they're being held to, they would do shit like release an album of like punk pop and then followed up with an a cappella album. They would they opened for Motorhead by singing a cappella. They started in speaking of opening for someone and getting their middle fingers thrown at you.
Oh my god. Yeah, just go.
And sing seventeenth century workers songs to people who are at a festival in Europe to see Motorhead. Uh. And they start incorporating dance music and house music into their music, and it's not a cynical thing. They just like going to raves and doing ecstasy, so they're like, fuck it, let's do rave music. And they also wrote an album about how much they love sports because they're working class British kids at the end of the day.
Uh. And that reminds me of you. Are you familiar with Viagra Boys?
I am not. Please tell me about Viagra Boys? Actually no, yeah, go ahead, okay, yeah.
Fantastic, fantastic punk that I discovered via Sleaford Mods, who definitely have some crass influence in their sound. But they have a song Biagera Boys has a song called Sports and you just gotta look up the video and watch it for yourselves. It's it's fantastic. Okay.
Yeah. I love the tension around things like sports in the subculture because you have all these people being like, no, we're too cool for everything that's cool, and then other people are like, yeah, but it's really fun. Have you all tried playing sports? It's really fun.
Yeah. Yeah.
And so they tour constantly and this is the only way they can make any money because they're not selling enough records to sustain themselves. And they also have this permanent shoplifting competition because of course they do, which is who can steal the most expensive and ridiculous ship before their shows. One time they get banned from a venue in Dublin because they throw packages of co into the audience, which is condoms were barely legal in Ireland at the time. You had to be eighteen. You could only buy them at certain places. It didn't help that Alice Nutter was dressed up like a nun drinking out of a bottle of whiskey while she's breaking this law. And then Boff Wayley gets into fell running, which I believe is best I can tell his British for trail running, and how it happens is well, first he goes and sees some fell runners with his dad, and he sees one of them with a pink mohawk and He's like, huh, and I think the guy wins, but I'm not sure he and Chumbawamba opens for Conflict, and Conflict is this punk band that at the time they always carry baseball bats to their shows because their show's always turned into riots. So the show turns into a riot and the cops come to arrest everybody, and the punks start fighting back, and Boff meets this punk in the crowd who was the champion fell runner he had seen, and he watches this fell runner out run six cops. Six cops take off chut chasing him, and the runner takes off, and basically Boff is like, I think I'm going to get into fell running. That sounds cool. And most of the books he writes now are about how awesome a fell running is. And they keep being activists as they start touring constantly and stuff. Their house gets raided by cops three times. The first two times cops are basically like, we've seen those people, there's probably drugs there, and so the cops raid and there weren't any drugs at the times of the raid, or maybe they didn't keep drugs at home because they were responsible people who had children in the house that actually act. I don't know the answer, but that's my actual guest based on everything I've heard about these people. And then the third time, the cops battering rammed down the door to search the place for explosives because someone presumably tied to the anti apartheid movement which all the punks were part of, had set off a bomb somewhere that didn't hurt anybody. And they're like, oh, well, we know where some you know punks are, so let's go kick down their door. They get arrested, they get kept in cells for twenty four hours, they get strip searched, the whole houses trashed, all their literatures taken. And so what they did once they got out is they took the name of the cop who had interrogated them, and they put it on their electric bill until they figured out how to make their electric bill run backwards, and then they just stopped paying for electricity. They get pulled over and strip searched by cops who were looking for drugs all the time at borders. One time they get pulled over on tour and strip searched, and they don't like that. There's hundreds of copies of anarchist magazines in their van, so they get turned away from countries fairly often and they have to change their tours around as a result of all this. And one thing that they tried to do one punk classic they tried and fail. That actually is they tried to siphon gas for their tour, but they got caught really quickly and they were like, this is not worth it. It is not worth it for us to safeon gas. We should just pay for our gas. They get arrested a lot. To quote Boff again, for a few years in the eighties, Dan and Alice were king and Queen of getting arrested. It didn't matter if they'd been somewhere else at the time. If there was trouble, they'd get arrested. It became a liability to stand near them on demonstrations. One minute, you're watching Jill Scott Heron in a sun soaked hide park with two hundred thousand other nuclear disarmament campaigners. The next thing, you're trying to pull Alice out of the back of a police van surrounded by baton wielding cops. And if one got arrested, the other would get jealous and fling themselves into the arms of eager policemen, and later Alice was like, you know, eventually we figured out that the point of protest wasn't to get arrested, and that not getting caught has its own merits. Which if I were to add an additional sponsor to this show, Sophie, could you reach out to not getting caught and an advocation, I mean, I would give up potatoes for that. I think, Okay, okay, yeah, not getting caught has its own merits. So and in nineteen eighty six, Alice has her leg broken by Dutch cops at an anti NATO rally and still managed to stay on for the rest of the tour. But that's where we're going to leave it for today. They're in their pre celebrity heyday. They're running around getting into trouble every chance they get, including getting into trouble with the punk scene. And when we come back, they're going to get into way more trouble with the mainstream world and the punk scene both. But Max, first, let's hear about the trouble that you're getting in or the stuff that you're up to that people can check out.
Oh excellent. Well, Eve six has a new album coming out, our first full length record in like ten years. I forget the date of that, but I think it's sometime next month. We just put out the first single from it. It's called Mister Darkseide, and you know it's in all the likely places. You can find us on Twitter at eve six and I post a lot, probably too much on there.
It works.
And I also recently started doing an advice column for Input magazine and I'm really enjoying doing that, and yeah, that comes out twice a month, so yeah, if you follow me on Twitter you'll see that too. But that's sort of what we got going on.
Okay, and Sophie with trouble, have you been what legally actionable trouble? Have you been getting it?
Oh? Just go to cool zonemdi dot com all the things. And Margaret, you have a book coming out, don't you.
I do. It's available for pre order now. It's called We Won't Be Here Tomorrow. It's available from Akpress, and if you pre order it you get an art print of like teens riding around on bikes past graffiti that says the Devil Lives here, and all the fun little short science fiction and fantasy stories that your heart could possibly desire awesome, We'll see you on Wednesday.
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