Does Rock ‘N’ Roll Kill Braincells?! – Chumbawamba’s Dunstan Bruce

In 1982, Chumbawamba (under the pseudonym Skin Disease) recorded an Oi! band pisstake called ‘I’m Thick’, which ended up on a compilation called ‘Back On The Streets’. Name any other Oi! group on the EP.

“[Laughs] That’s evil! I’ve no idea who else was on it.”

WRONG. The others were: Venom (with the ditty ‘Where’s Dock Green?’), East End Badoes (‘The Way It’s Got To Be’), The Strike (‘Victim’) and Angela Rippon’s Bum (‘Fight For Your Lives’).

“We hated Oi!, which was largely created by Sounds journalist Garry Bushell, and had a nasty right-wing fascist element to it. We couldn’t think what we could possibly do about it other than create our own Oi! band, and had our hair cut to appear like a skinhead band, went down to a London studio and were produced by Cockney Rejects’ Mick Geggus. We pretended ‘I’m Thick’ was a comment on how Oi! was misrepresented in the music press, and ended up on the EP.”

“Years later, we also pretended to be a band that supported the Liberal Party called The Middle and did an EP for them [a collection of songs about the joys of sitting on the fence in 1988] and got as far as being invited to play their party conference before being rumbled!”

“Then we made out we were putting out a charity tribute single to Princess Di called ‘Never Say Di’ [in 1992]. We didn’t even have to record a song for that one, just issue a press release and it garnered all this interest. That came back to bite us because the week [Chumbawamba’s 1997 Number Two single] ‘Tubthumping’ was Number One in the midweek chart, Princess Di died in a car crash and everybody stopped playing it.”

“There’s a scene at the beginning of the first episode recent series of The Crown where Princess Di and Prince Harry are singing ‘Tubthumping’ and it’s just bizarre!”

Which Leeds indie band covered ‘Tubthumping’ at a homecoming gig in May 2022?

“Ah, that was Yard Act!”

CORRECT. They were joined by CMAT and comedians Phill Jupitus and Nish Kumar for the rendition.

“Yay! I saw loads of videos of that and some of Chumbawamba were at that gig. I love Yard Act and how they did that song – although I was pretty peeved that they never invited one of us to get up and do it with them! [Laughs]”

How do you look back on ‘Tubthumping’?

“I have a good relationship with the song. It’s never been an albatross and has enabled me to do other stuff. Last year, I performed it with Peter Crouch at Crouchfest – 12,500 drunken men at Wembley Arena were going berserk to it! Twenty-seven years on, and ‘Tubthumping’ still resonates.”

‘Tubthumping’ was a hit in America, and led to unusual scenes like the band performing it on The Rosie O’Donnell Show with the titular comedian in a ‘Anarkist [sic]’ shirt. What were the most surreal moments?

“Probably meeting Dolly Parton backstage on The View, before [Chumbawamba members] Alice [Nutter] and Boff [Whalley] went on to be interviewed by the host Barbara Walters about being anarchists. Part of what we were doing was to get our politics out there, and moments like that was where we felt it was working in a surreal way.”

For a bonus half-point: The Simpsons is the only time Chumbawamba have ever allowed the lyrics of ‘Tubthumping’ to be changed. What does Homer alter them to?

“Erm… ’I take a whisky drink/I take a chocolate drink/And when I have to pee, I use the kitchen sink/I sing the songs that remind me I’m a urinating guy’.”

CORRECT. From the 2002 episode ‘Little Girl in the Big Ten’.

“That was funny. Loads of people wanted to change the words. The weirdest one was Dustin the Turkey – an Irish puppet character from the makers of Zig and Zag – once wanted to change the words to being about digging up the roads and tarmacking them over again.”

Upon hearing the news of Chumbawamba’s split in 2012 via NME’s Twitter account, which Labour politician tweeted: ‘Chumbawho? ‪#currentlyresidinginthewherearetheynowfile’?

“John Prescott?”

CORRECT.

“He also tweeted that he was planning to go out and buy our “greatest hit album”. Boom! I thought that was really funny of him.”

Chumbawamba member Danbert Nobacon famously doused the former Labour deputy prime minister with an ice water bucket at the 1998 BRIT Awards, in solidarity with the striking dockers in Liverpool.

“I’ve got a photo of me and John Prescott from years later at a Labour party conference event in Brighton, where I live, and he’s absolutely hammered and has no idea it’s me. [Laughs] I just look so happy in that picture.”

Were any pop stars shaking your hands after the stunt?

“No. It was divisive, because a lot of people on the left were still celebrating that there was a Labour government and happy the Tories weren’t in. We were happy the Tories weren’t in, but we weren’t necessarily fans of Tony Blair – he began that demise of Labour being a traditionally working-class organisation. We felt he was starting to destroy that and turn it into some middle-class apologist movement. So when the ice bucket thing happened, Billy Bragg was pissed off and accused us of attacking the only working-class member of the cabinet. Even Jarvis Cocker criticised us – which we thought was totally bizarre considering what he’d done at the BRITs two years earlier. He said if we didn’t like being in the music industry, we should go and do something else instead.”

“The reason we’d taken the dockers to give a speech if we won British Single of the Year and threw the water over John Prescott was because he could have resolved that dispute and he refused to even though it was a union that he used to be a part of. It was that hypocrisy of people on the left once they get into positions of power and they immediately turn their back on the people who got them there.”

Could you see any chart acts now taking similar direct action?

“I can’t imagine anybody attacking Keir Starmer with an ice bucket. In the late ‘90s, we thought there was the possibility of an alternative way of doing things. You got a brief glimpse of that when Jeremy Corbyn became leader of the Labour party, and seemed to mobilise a lot of young people. Plus, we were drunk and we weren’t careerists, so we didn’t give a shit when the BRITs backlash happened. I suppose the equivalent to that now is the brilliant Greta Thunberg getting arrested here, there and everywhere – she reminds me of us.”

Which pop star features on the t-shirt Chumbawamba gave away with their 1992 ‘(Someone’s Always Telling You How To) Behave” single?

“[Laughs] Jason Donovan.”

CORRECT. He’s mocked up wearing a ‘Queer as Fuck’ T-shirt.

“I don’t know if Jason ever found out about those T-shirts! We did it because he sued The Face magazine because they’d questioned his sexuality, which seemed outdated.”

In the single’s liner notes, you called out stars such as Shaun Ryder for past homophobic remarks..

“We were never afraid of that. We even got into a massive argument with The Prodigy when they released ‘Smack My Bitch Up’. We had a problem with it promoting domestic violence. As a prank, we said we were releasing a song called ‘Smack My Keith Up’, and The Prodigy’s Liam [Howlett] was pissed off and released a statement saying: ‘I’ve got more talent in one of my cymbal-clashes than Chumbawamba have in all their 15 years of making music’. [Laughs] We put that quote on the back of one of our T-shirts!”

Chumbawamba’s 2008 LP ‘The Boy Bands Have Won…’ holds the Guinness World Record for the longest album title. How many words is it?

“No idea, because that album was after I’d left the band [in 2004], when Chumbawamba changed from being an electronic to an acoustic folky outfit. We were losing money, so we made the decision to do one more electric album and if it didn’t sell, we’d knock it on the head and me, Danbert, Alice and Harry [Hamer] would leave and the band would carry on as a smaller, acoustic outfit – which they did for another eight years.”

WRONG. It’s 165 words. The full – deep breath! – title is: ‘The Boy Bands Have Won, and All the Copyists and the Tribute Bands and the TV Talent Show Producers Have Won, If We Allow Our Culture to Be Shaped by Mimicry, Whether from Lack of Ideas or from Exaggerated Respect. You Should Never Try to Freeze Culture. What You Can Do Is Recycle That Culture. Take Your Older Brother’s Hand-Me-Down Jacket and Re-Style It, Re-Fashion It to the Point Where It Becomes Your Own. But Don’t Just Regurgitate Creative History, or Hold Art and Music and Literature as Fixed, Untouchable and Kept Under Glass. The People Who Try to ‘Guard’ Any Particular Form of Music Are, Like the Copyists and Manufactured Bands, Doing It the Worst Disservice, Because the Only Thing That You Can Do to Music That Will Damage It Is Not Change It, Not Make It Your Own. Because Then It Dies, Then It’s Over, Then It’s Done, and the Boy Bands Have Won’. 

Which Welsh indie icon once ranged of Chumbawamba: ‘The worst group that has ever been created. If you’re going to wear a skirt, at least make an effort to look like a woman! You can’t just put on a fucking bit of rag on and look like an ugly bloke at a stag night!’?

“That could be absolutely anyone! [Laughs] Nicky Wire?”

CORRECT. The Manic Street Preachers bassist also added: “Put it this way, if Richey [Edwards] was here and someone said: ‘’Chumbawamba are trying to be like you’, he’d probably cut his whole forearm off on the spot!’ Ouch!

“[Raucous laughter] Oh my God! You’d think the Manic Street Preachers, whose subject matter was concerned with the state of the world and were from industrial working class towns, would have lots in common with us, but they hated us. They once did guest singles reviews for the NME as well, and really slagged us off in that as well. Although we did used to have a song called [1994’s] ‘Mouthful of Shit’ and one of the verses is about the Manic Street Preachers, so in saying that out loud, I realise it’s totally justified that they hated us! [Laughs]”

Afterwards, in 2000, you listed Nicky Wire among the ‘Passenger List for Doomed Flight #1721′, listing the irritating public figures you hoped would perish in a plane clash…

“That was definitely after. Not that we hold a grudge or anything!”

Which band name did Chumbawamba adopt for your 1987 Ferry Aid parody single ‘Let It Be’?

“Shit! I can’t remember!”

WRONG. It was (The Scum’s) Scab Aid.

“Of course! We had a massive thing about charity not being the solution to the worlds ills, and back then, it seemed weird that pop stars were getting behind the The Sun‘s Ferry Aid. We were trying to make a political point about how fucked-up the world was, and that we didn’t think a charity event was going to change the world.”

In a 2012 sketch on the US late night chat show Jimmy Kimmel Live!, which comedy actor hosts his own Chumbawamba Show?

“No idea! Not Eugene Levy?”

WRONG. Adorned in Chumbawamba gig lanyards, donning a boxing glove, and solicitously offering his guest a ‘whisky drink, a vodka drink, a lager drink, and a Smirnoff Ice…just kidding, a cider drink’, it was the late Fred Willard.

“I didn’t see that. Brilliant! God, these questions are hard!”

In 2015, which US police force were reportedly found to have edited Chumbawamba’s Wikipedia page to list its officers as band members?

“I’d never heard of this. Was it the NYPD?”

CORRECT. A NYPD computer is reported to have added three NYPD officer names – Danny Levine, Paul Law, and Mark Kraljevic – to Chumbawamba’s band members. Ironic, considering Chumbawamba’s views on the police – which included changing the lyrics of a 1997 Late Show With David Letterman live performance of ‘Tubthumping’ to call for the release of Mumia Abu-Jamal who had been imprisoned a few years before that for a crime he says he was unfairly convicted of, killing a police officer.

“Alice used to do all our chatshow appearances and every time she went on something, and tried to say something more outrageous each time. Once, she said [to UK music weekly Melody Maker] ‘We laugh every time a cop gets killed’. When she said that, she knew she’d taken it as far as she could – she didn’t even think that. Our record label, EMI, told us to apologise. They’d already apologised on our behalf to John Prescott for the BRITs award ice bucket-drenching – which pissed us off. After the cop-killing remark, we pretended to kick Alice out of the band and drafted a press release. But EMI realised: ‘You’ve just made this up, haven’t you?’. She had to reign it in after that.”

In 2019, which Tory politician branded himself, without irony, as “the Chumbawamba kid”?

“Is that Michael Gove?”

CORRECT. Rather than share any of the band’s anti-establishment views, the current Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities said it was because er, he gets knocked down and gets up again. 

“He was probably coked up to the eyeballs when he said that! [Laughs] Various right-wing American and Australian politicians have used ‘Tubthumping’ and we’ve had to issue cease-and-desist letters. When we turned down money [£30,000] for the song to be used on a Jeremy Clarkson TV series trailer, you realise they have no idea about us. No offence, but he should have been on the ‘Passenger List for Doomed Flight #1721” as well! That Nigel Farage dared to start using the song at UKIP conferences [in 2011] was irritating, but it explains why it’s such a big hit – it has a universal message of resilience that can be applied to people on both the left and right. We’ve always been grateful for is that Trump has never latched onto it!”

The verdict: 6.5/10

“That’s more than I thought I was going to get!”

Dunstan Bruce’s documentary ‘I Get Knocked Down‘, is available on streaming platforms Amazon, Google and Apple from January 15

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