Bodies, p.23
Bodies, page 23
‘It’s gonna be fucking great,’ he tells me.
‘Lively, I’d imagine.’
Fifteen seconds and ten yards later, I say his name for the final time.
‘Dude, what?’
‘Don’t die.’
A smile at so much trifling nonsense. ‘Ah, you know me,’ he says.
Yes. Yes I do.
‘Rock ’n’ roll.’
NOTES
1 That’s some catch, that Catch-22: Joseph Heller, Catch 22, Simon & Schuster, 1961
2 He’s the most tip top – Top Cat!: ‘Top Cat’, Hoyt Curtin, 1962, Colpix Records
3 Move over for a damage case: ‘Damage Case’, Motörhead, written by Ian Fraser Kilmister, Eddie Clarke, Phil Taylor, 1979, Bronze
4 I feel the apocalypse is within my sight: ‘The Jackson Whites’, written by The Wildhearts, Ginger Wildheart, 2009, Backstage Alliance
9: TRIPLE STAGE DARKNESS
If you passed him on the streets of his adopted home city of Brighton, there’s every chance you might no longer recognise Dunstan Bruce. But as one of the singers in the English anarchist punk collective Chumbawamba, he once captured the ears and the mood of a vast international audience. ‘I get knocked down, but I get up again,’ he sang. See, you do know him. Released in the summer of 1997, the song ‘Tubthumping’ sold more than six hundred thousand copies in the United Kingdom alone. Nestled in the top ten for eleven weeks, only Will Smith was able to keep it from the summit of the domestic singles chart. In the United States, the track’s parent album, Tubthumper, found its way into the homes of more than three million listeners. That’s triple platinum, that is. In the last quarter of a century, only one guitar-based LP from a British group – A Rush of Blood to the Head by Coldplay – has fared better at the American box office. And even then, not by much.
I know this because I wrote about it for the Telegraph. Already apprised of the story’s wider details, digging deeper I was struck by a sense of genuine surprise. Oh my God, I’ve only gone and found one. A band who played for high stakes and beat the system. I’ve actually found one. For eighteen hectic months Chumbawamba rode the wildest ride in the theme park that is the music industry. When it at last screeched to a halt, they walked away without a scratch. Honestly, I’ve seen people die doing what they did. That they accomplished this feat with a monster of a song makes the story even sweeter. Far better than almost all of the brittle class-based anthems of the adjacent Britpop movement, these days I tend to think of ‘Tubthumping’ as being a companion piece to ‘Common People’ by Pulp. Save for one crucial difference, that is. While Jarvis Cocker’s watertight study of an English obsession is told through the prism of a wealthy student at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London, Chumbawamba allowed the ‘lower orders’ to sing their own song. It sounded magnificent.
‘We had no concept of a song being a hit, or what that meant, or what success meant,’ Dunstan Bruce tells me. ‘What did success mean to us? It was funny to us, I suppose, because everyone hated Chumbawamba. The music press hated us. We were derided constantly … So we had thick skins. We had really thick skins. When we got told that [“Tubthumping”] was going to be a hit, we were, like, “Okay, sure, we’ll be in the charts for one week and that’ll be it.” We never really understood the scale of what was about to happen to us. So we had no idea what to expect.’
If there’s a more remarkable success story of the past twenty-five years, I honestly can’t think of it. Hang on – what? – Chumbawamba are in the charts? All over the world? There’s been some kind of mistake, surely. Formed in 1982, this was the kind of subversive group that took enormous pleasure in antagonising polite society. They did not want to live by its rules. Sharing a squat in Leeds, the eight members shared dole money and, sometimes, each other’s bodies. They were known to the police. Throughout my teenage years I remember seeing their name on the bill of forthcoming attractions at the kind of venues at which a tetanus shot was administered at the door. Flattened in the slam pit at the Mermaid in Birmingham, or Counterpoint in Milton Keynes, it was always Chumbawamba who were due to play in the next week or two. ‘What a strange name for a band,’ I’d think. ‘I wonder what they sound like.’ Today I could find out in the time it takes me to reach the end of this sentence. Back then, the answer to my question cost at least a fiver. What am I, made of money? Reliably determined to knock out nine quid at Shades Records in London for shitty import albums by Circle Jerks and Dirty Rotten Imbeciles, Crumbsuckers and Crime, when it came to domestic players I remained resolutely sniffy. For this reason, Chumbawamba and I remained perfect strangers until the first time I heard them on the wireless. ‘I get knocked down, but I get up again …’1 What the fuck is this?
Built like a tank, the band were an exception to the truism that all groups require at least one leader. By careful design, some members wrote music while others were responsible for the lyrics; those who played no part in the songwriting process had other jobs essential to the efficient running of a gigging band. In a manner both democratic and Unitarian, internal disputes were discarded in favour of presenting a truly united front. For this genuinely radical ideology, the group received nothing but brickbats. ‘[Chumbawamba are] a collection of … anarchist bores who have been banging on since shortly after the Peasants’ Revolt about how if only people would listen to their records then we would bring down the global capitalist system,’2 was how the music writer Andrew Mueller described them. Almost without exception the ‘respectable’ end of the British music press loathed Chumbawamba. For this reason alone, I should have paid closer attention.
‘We acted collectively and we policed each other as well,’ Dunstan tells me. ‘The band has always been a collective in which people have an equal say. I think that’s why we were able to function through all this [success]. All eight members received exactly the same amount of money; no matter what your role was in the band, you got an eighth – or a tenth because of the managers’ [cut]. Everybody got the same, so everybody’s role was equally valued in the band … There was never anybody who was the songwriter, or who were the musicians. If you turned up at a meeting and you hadn’t done what you said you were going to do, you kind of got into trouble.’ He emits a laugh. ‘You were in trouble. In the eighties that felt a bit Maoist, but in the nineties and in the early 2000s it just seemed like a very responsible way of working with a large group of people where everyone took equal ownership.’
At the end of an enjoyable hour in the company of Dunstan Bruce, I’m more persuaded than ever that the music industry was simply no match for Chumbawamba’s internal structures. Better yet, the whole berserk thing seemed to happen by accident. Following a modest measure of success, by the middle years of the nineties the band appeared to be heading towards a future of steadily declining fortunes. Released in the autumn of 1995, the badly executed and poorly received Swingin’ with Raymond LP peaked at number seventy on the British chart. Out on the road, the crowds were getting just that little bit smaller. To pay his way, Dunstan took flexible hours as a removals man. Trumpeter and co-vocalist Jude Abbott found work appearing as an extra on Emmerdale. Artful collectivists they may have been, but even Chumbawamba couldn’t outfox the dreadful inertia of stalled momentum. Like a thousand other groups, this one appeared to be staring at two dismal options – disbandment, or incremental decay.
The band responded with a series of radical moves. After their record label One Little Indian rejected Tubthumper for being – yes, really – commercially unviable, for the first time Chumbawamba enlisted the services of a management team. Described by Dunstan as ‘old industry types’, Doug Smith and Eve Carr had in the past overseen the affairs of such groups as Girlschool and Motörhead. With the pair’s help, ‘Tubthumping’ found its way onto the free CD attached to the weekly trade magazine the Tip Sheet, a publication read by every serious player in the industry. For the first time in their career Chumbawamba became the beneficiaries of the most priceless commodity in the business – a buzz. Sensing movement beneath their feet, out on the road the band were discovering that audiences were already taking a tumble for their brand new song. At the end of shows, perfect strangers were telling them that ‘Tubthumping’ should be their next single. In the corridors of power, others agreed. Courted by ‘five or six’ labels, after an age of internal deliberation the group eventually signed with Republic/Universal in the United States, and with the German arm of EMI for the rest of the world.
Straight away there was bother. In the nineties, any underground punk group who signed to a major label were guaranteed a mountain of grief from people in the scene keen to enforce an occasionally creditable moral code. To this end, even bands who at the time were no more ideological than a charcoal briquette – Green Day, for example – felt the heat. But Chumbawamba were ideological. Always up for a scrap, in 1989 the group had contributed a version of ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ to a compilation album called Fuck EMI. Yet here they were, barely seven years later, aligning themselves to the company’s cause. I tell you it was all a frame.3 In defence of their decision to sign with a label that had once released ‘Anarchy in the UK’ by the Sex Pistols, the octet explained that by 1997 Electric and Musical Industries had at least divested itself of its links to the arms trade.
‘It just seemed so hypocritical that we would sign to EMI,’ Dunstan tells me. ‘But we were at a point in the band’s trajectory where if we didn’t do something different then we might have been finished. We were bored. We had to take a risk. We had to take a leap of faith. We had to do something different.’
It was the kind of head-scratcher with which vegan revolutionaries have long tussled – ideological purity versus influence and power. For what it’s worth, I tend to regard Chumbawamba’s decision to test the waters of the corporate music industry as being something close to an experiment – almost an instillation, actually. In various ways, the group had spent more than a decade pressing against the boundaries of genre and presentation. Witty and fearless, they’d invested a great deal of energy perfecting the declining art of getting up people’s noses. In a stab at the Band Aid charity single ‘Do They Know it’s Christmas?’, in 1986 they titled their debut album Pictures of Starving Children Sell Records. As the fictional outfit The Middle, the group wrangled an invitation to play at the birthday party of former Liberal Democrat leader David Steel. For their most startling caper, Chumbawamba even went so far as to repurpose a photograph of a young woman who had died from drinking excessive quantities of water after taking ecstasy. In its original form the poster of teenager Leah Betts lying in a hospital bed beneath the word ‘sorted’ became the centrepiece of a widespread anti-drug campaign. Spying alarmism in the public square, the band subverted the message by changing the word to ‘distorted’. Beat that for bold.
Backed by their two major labels, the band went to work. Deciding that ‘if we’re going to do this, we’re going to do it properly’, Chumbawamba appeared on Top of the Pops, at a Radio 1 Roadshow, on TFI Friday, on TV programmes in the United States hosted by Jay Leno, the Wayan brothers, Rosie O’Donnell, Barbara Walters and many dozens more. Dunstan recalls that, ‘We did plenty of stuff where you travel halfway across the world to mime to [“Tubthumping”] because EMI Japan want you to be on this quiz programme … and then the next day you fly to an island off the coast of Italy to do the song again.’ The band undertook these tasks without being fully housetrained. On American TV they voiced their support for the death row prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal. In Germany, singer Danbert Nobacon interrupted a television appearance from the Smashing Pumpkins by dancing across their stage naked with the word ‘PUNK’ scrawled across his chest. Performing ‘Tubthumping’ at the Brit Awards in 1998, Dunstan added the lines ‘New Labour sold out the dockers, just like they sold out the rest of us’. Aggrieved that deputy prime minister and fellow attendee John Prescott had declined to come to the aid of striking workers at the Mersey Docks and Harbour Company in Liverpool, towards the end of the drunken night vocalist Alice Nutter and Nobacon poured the dregs of a champagne bucket over his head. With this, Chumbawamba were able to put to bed quietly nagging concerns that their time in the spotlight had been just that little bit too well behaved. For his troubles Nobacon was placed under arrest.
‘We loved the fact that we were in the belly of the beast,’ Dunstan tells me. ‘We loved the fact that we were now in a position where we had a voice. We were suddenly visible.’ Following the fracas at the Brits the writer David Quantick criticised the group for attacking one of the government’s few authentically working class politicians. ‘If we’d have had that platform for fifteen years under Thatcher we would have done stuff about her,’ Dunstan says. Caitlin Moran complained that Chumbawamba were ‘not very good pop stars and they’re not very good political activists, either’.4 Again, wrong. Alice Nutter’s refusal to condemn shoplifting on the US television programme Politically Incorrect was the talk of a very good pop star indeed. (As well as this, in provoking a horrified reaction from host Bill Maher, the group’s de facto spokesperson ably demonstrated that a smugly self-aggrandising name was not enough to save the show from being as uptight as any other.) By donating a hundred thousand dollars to the anti-corporate lobbying groups Indymedia and CorpWatch, Chumbawamba partook in activism that was both very good and rather expensive.
Asked if he enjoyed his time in the music industry’s VIP section, Dunstan tells me that, ‘I suppose the unsatisfactory answer is yes and no. Yes, the adventure was incredible. We did things we would never have done. We went to places that we would never have gone to. We travelled in comfort and we were well looked after. We were able to do things with the money that allowed us to make the kind of impact that we were never able to make before.’ But. ‘But I suppose the other side of the coin was …’ – and here Dunstan pauses, another performer snake-bitten by the extraordinary yet legitimate complaints about a job in the music industry – ‘I’m really wary of complaining about what happened. What we do doesn’t compare to …’
‘Filleting chickens for a living?’
‘Yeah, filleting chickens for a living. It just doesn’t compare to that. But there is an aspect to it that is fucking exhausting. And there’s an aspect to it where it’s really fucking boring, too; where you’re sitting around for hours to talk to some idiot on a pop programme and answer stupid questions about irrelevant things. You’ve got to find a way to turn that round to make it interesting so that there’s a point to what you’re doing.’
Chumbawamba were seduced by fame for about ten minutes. After getting perhaps a little bit too chummy with cocaine, Dunstan was called to account by other members in the group. Seeking to replicate the success of ‘Tubthumping’, the band recorded a calculated and somewhat dreadful song (‘Top of the World (Ole, Ole, Ole)’) that knocked on the door of the UK top twenty. But that’s where it stopped. In preparing to record the successor to Tubthumper the decision was taken to junk demos on which they had tried too hard to replicate what, anyway, had been an accidental success. Bruce tells me that the question of whether or not the group deliberately handed EMI and Republic an unmarketable album remains a topic of live debate. For his part, the singer believes the decision to spike their own guns was deliberate. Either way, with a complete absence of potential hit singles, WYSIWYG (What You See is What You Get) remains one of the most gloriously perverse reactions to mainstream success I’ve ever heard.
‘So this is how I think about that album,’ Dunstan tells me. ‘Imagine if in 1998 Eminem, an American, had come over to the UK, had had an enormous hit, toured the UK for a year, was on every TV programme you can imagine, and then his next album was a cultural and social critique of the UK, which he then released telling us what our country was like and what he thought of it. Of course people would be absolutely appalled. Who the fuck does he think he is? Coming over here writing an album about our country. But that’s what we did. We spent eighteen months in the US and then we wrote an album about what a pile of shit it was. So of course it didn’t sell. Of course it didn’t. And what’s weird about that is that we loved it in the States. I still go there whenever I can, and I love it over there.’
In a reversal of fortunes that would destroy most bands, in the United States WYSIWYG sold a blush over twenty thousand copies. Recognising a commercial dud when they heard one, EMI and Republic told the group not to worry because ‘we’re in this for the long haul’. That’s what labels always say, and rarely mean. In truth, both parties surely knew that it was over. The fame belonged to ‘Tubthumping’ rather than the band that had written it; for all their subversive intentions, the song’s likeable creators had merely squatted on its coveted real estate. Over the course of eighteen months in the glare of a piercing spotlight, Chumbawamba failed to attract any committed supporters to their cause. Not just this, as their profile fell the band discovered that their audience was actually smaller than it had been before. Remembering this, Dunstan Bruce’s voice ripples with several notes of genial disbelief. ‘Both [EMI and Republic] eventually sort of lost interest and it sort of petered out,’ he tells me.
For once, though, there was more to it than this. In a vanishingly rare example of a mutually beneficial arrangement, the band themselves had had quite enough of being strapped to a rocket. ‘We were in our mid-thirties when all this happened,’ says the singer. ‘And obviously there’s both men and women in Chumbawamba. [Vocalist] Lou [Watts] and Alice [Nutter] in particular were at a point in their lives where they wanted to have kids. Obviously, also, we made money; we’d never had anything like that sort of money before at any point in our lives. So this was the point at which people thought, “Well, if we’re going to start families, if people are going to buy houses …” All that day-to-day domestic real life stuff, in a way people had to do it then.’
