chumbawamba

I kind of can't believe there isn't a thread on Chumbawamba on ILM of all places so here is one that I am creating, for a band I don't really care about, just to post this:

"I Get Knocked Down
I GET KNOCKED DOWN is the untold story of Leeds-based anarcho-pop band Chumbawamba. Founding band-member Dunstan Bruce is 59, and he is struggling with the fact that the world seems to be going to hell in a handcart. Twenty years after his fall from grace, Bruce is angry and frustrated, but how does a retired middle-aged radical get back up again? In this punk version of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, Dunstan is visited by the antagonistic ghost of his anarchist past – his alter ego, ‘Babyhead’ – who forces him to question his own life, sending him on a search for his long-lost anarchist mojo. Following Bruce’s personal voyage of rediscovery, redemption, and reawakening, I GET KNOCKED DOWN acts as a call to arms to those who think activism is best undertaken by someone else."

https://sfdocfest2022.eventive.org/films/625713a4326dc4004592546f

I think this is the closest we have: Was anyone’s politics changed by “Tubthumping”?

bah, I swear searching earlier did not bring that up. Well now there are two I suppose.

Have been listening a bit to them again after Rob Harvilla’s wonderful podcast episode: https://www.theringer.com/2023/6/21/23767743/chumbawamba-tubthumping-history-podcast

Obviously they’re a polarizing band; most people want their politics and their music in separate boxes, or at least less stridently political. But I’ve always been a sucker for polemical songs with a hook — Billy Bragg, Dead Kennedys — and so I can dig these folks just fine. Showbusiness is an excellent entry-point into their catalogue although I usually don’t much dig live albums. I’d have loved to have seen them in the mid-90s, they must have been a killer live act.

some days I think this is the best band in the world

excuse me while I blow up this thread over the course of the week, but how did I miss this?!?!

I’d have loved to have seen them in the mid-90s, they must have been a killer live act.

I saw them on the Slap tour less than a month after I moved to the west coast, they played at an art gallery/venue in Portland called The Blue Gallery that Zoviet France also played at (sadly I missed that one). Eve Libertine opened, playing with her son doing jazzy guitar/vocal stuff. I played pinball with her after her set and did my absolute best not to be a tongue tied superfan (which I was). she was taking nips off a little flask, which shocked me at the time! also she cursed a lot which was (somehow) also surprising.

Chumbawamba came on doing "Come On Baby" with Danbert and Alice singing, dollar bills taped over their mouths. lots of props, I remember them destroying some records during another Starving Children song.

one of the best shows I have ever seen in my life, top ten easy

this woulda been September 1990

I feel like this is a better thread than the other one to talk about how FUCKING AWESOME this band was as a band qua band, politics aside

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRTuVqRqHaM

"There are hundreds of songs like this, songs that feel as if they belong to us all. When we sing Fairytale of New York at Christmas, the let’s-all-join-in spirit of it isn’t the sole property of Shane, Kirsty and the Pogues – it’s our song, too.
But there’s a problem with these universal songs – they can be hijacked by people who clearly don’t understand the spirit in which they were written, and want to use them to aggrandise themselves, or to sell ideas that aren’t universal at all. It’s like baking a cake and declaring to the room: “Here, have a slice, the cake is for all of us!” And some greedy bastard grabs five or six slices and scurries off into a dark corner, sniggering. And to stretch that analogy, the greedy bastard is the person that, noticeably, never turns up with his own cake for everyone to share.
Because that’s the thing with songs, with literature, with art, theatre, cinema, with most of the beautiful, creative, cultural things we love – they are very rarely created by those on the political right. The bigots don’t have any good songs of their own."

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/mar/22/my-band-hit-tubthumping-is-the-latest-working-class-anthem-to-be-co-opted-by-populist-politicians