Chumbawamba

Everybody knows the chorus. The one that says he gets knocked down and gets up again, chanted in stadiums, at weddings and at every party that makes it to three in the morning. For almost everyone it is the most contagious drinking anthem of the nineties. What almost nobody knows is that behind it there was an anarchist collective with fifteen years of activism behind them, and that this collective did rather stranger and more uncomfortable things with its minute of fame than what is usually told. Including the ones that do not leave it looking good.

Fifteen years before the hit

Chumbawamba formed in 1982, in Burnley, in the north of England. The communal house in Armley, in Leeds, which they are always identified with, came later. They lived together, shared the money, decided things in assembly and made militant punk about anti-fascism, labour rights, animal rights and class struggle. They were not a band with a message: they were activists who also played.

Out of that stage comes the fact you need to hand in order to understand everything else. In 1989 they took part in a compilation record titled Fuck EMI, devoted to attacking the multinational label for its links to the arms industry. Write it down, because it comes back.

The hit, and the label they had insulted

"Tubthumping" came out in 1997 and pulled them out of the underground all at once: number two in the United Kingdom, number six on the Billboard Hot 100, some 880,000 copies sold in British territory alone. An anarchist collective from Leeds on the radio all over the planet.

And here is the episode the heroic account tends to skip. That album, Tubthumper, came out on EMI. The band signed in 1997 with the very company to which it had dedicated an insulting compilation eight years earlier. They defended it as a tactical decision — reaching more people, using the enemy's money — and a good part of their audience read it as exactly the opposite. You do not have to pick a side to tell it: it has to be told, because it is the point where their own thesis was put to the test.

The jug of iced water

On 9 February 1998, at the BRIT Awards, with the industry and the British political class seated at the same tables, Danbert Nobacon walked up to John Prescott, the Labour deputy prime minister, and emptied a jug of iced water over him. It was not a bucket, even if the bucket is the version that has settled into the myth.

The gesture was for the Liverpool dockers, and here too it is worth being precise. It was not a strike: it was a mass dismissal. Some five hundred workers thrown out by the Mersey Docks and Harbour Company from September 1995, in a dispute the Labour government did not want to touch. And the detail that makes it harder, not weaker: that dispute had already collapsed in January 1998, weeks earlier. Nobacon soaked the deputy prime minister for a cause that had just been lost. It was an act of memory, not of pressure. The reaction, moreover, was not unanimous applause: Billy Bragg and Jarvis Cocker, who are hardly conservatives, criticised him publicly as an opportunist. The version that says "it was exactly what they wanted" leaves out the fact that half of the British left thought it had been a piece of clowning.

General Motors' money

Of all their decisions, the one that best sums up their aim is a single one, and it is almost always told in the plural, which ruins it. Chumbawamba did not license songs to advertising as a routine: their rule was to refuse. The best-known occasion was Nike, which offered a million and a half dollars for "Tubthumping" for a 1998 World Cup commercial. They said no, and said afterwards that the decision took them thirty seconds.

The exception came in 2002. General Motors paid them between seventy thousand and a hundred thousand dollars to use "Pass It Along" in an advert for the Pontiac Vibe. They accepted, and handed over the entire sum: half to CorpWatch, half to Indymedia. Both organisations used it in campaigns against General Motors, over its labour and environmental practices. In other words: they charged a carmaker in order to fund the people investigating it. Told in the plural, as a habit, that turns into an anecdote about a cheeky band. Told as what it was — a single operation, done once, with a declared destination — it is an act of marksmanship.

What to remember

Chumbawamba hid fifteen years of activism inside a song the whole world chanted without suspecting a thing, and then used that platform with a precision almost no pop band has had: the jug in the deputy prime minister's face, a carmaker's money diverted to the people fighting it, the no to Nike settled in half a minute. They dissolved in 2012, after thirty years and without much noise.

The usual moral says you can play inside the system without selling it your soul. That is too clean a conclusion for them. They signed with EMI after putting their name on a record titled Fuck EMI, and that cost them a part of their people. The real story is more interesting than the moral: a group that spent its life arguing about where the line was, that moved it when it suited them and that even so did more with its fame than almost anyone does.

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Sources

Chumbawamba was a British musical collective of anarchist orientation formed in 1982 in Burnley, Lancashire; its members later lived together in a communal house in the Armley district of Leeds. In 1989 they took part in the compilation record "Fuck EMI", criticising that record company. In 1997 they signed with EMI, which released the album "Tubthumper". The single "Tubthumping" reached number two on the British chart and number six on the Billboard Hot 100, and sold around 880,000 copies in the United Kingdom alone. On 9 February 1998, during the BRIT Awards ceremony, the member Danbert Nobacon poured a jug of iced water over the British deputy prime minister John Prescott in solidarity with the Liverpool dockers: some five hundred workers dismissed by the Mersey Docks and Harbour Company from September 1995, whose dispute had been given up as lost in January 1998. The musicians Billy Bragg and Jarvis Cocker publicly criticised the gesture. The band turned down an offer of a million and a half dollars from Nike for the use of "Tubthumping" in advertising. In 2002 it accepted a payment from General Motors, estimated at between seventy thousand and a hundred thousand dollars, for the use of "Pass It Along" in an advert for the Pontiac Vibe, and gave the money in equal parts to the organisations CorpWatch and Indymedia, which used it in campaigns against General Motors itself. The group dissolved in 2012. Profile compiled for Rebobinados with fact-checking; interpretations of the meaning of the work are offered as the author's reading. No song lyrics are reproduced, for copyright reasons. Information drawn from The Guardian, BBC News, Billboard, Official Charts Company, Wikipedia and other coverage.