Chumbawamba Musings

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Pulling Punches

Never let it be said that the BBC has lost its remit to ‘educate’. Watching the first part of the ‘John Prescott on Class’ documentary was a simple lesson in understanding the nature of class in contemporary Britain. Not, however, in the way Prescott presumably expected it to be – his blustering grouchiness was aimed at reiterating the fact that yes, class still exists and that, yes, it dictates a large part of the culture and politics of this land – but by way of showing how not to go about changing that system.

The lesson I learnt was this: If you want things to change, don’t set yourself up as the Labour Party’s inflatable idiot savant, the bolshy buffoon who’s there to disguise the drift rightwards with lefty language. John Prescott’s role in New Labour as the prize pig on which Alistair Campbell (chief bullshitter and spin doctor) painted lipstick would be sad and pathetic enough without this televised bleating and justification.

Some things about class which John brought up: firstly, the glorification of ignorance. It’s Prescott’s way to constantly plead utter disbelief of any culture outside his own narrow range of focus. You want to talk about working the ships? John’s your man, every time. And every time, and every time, like a ferry crossing the same stretch of sea four times a day forever. John Prescott used to be a steward on board passenger ships, and that’s the limit of his experience in real working class life – since then he’s climbed his way up the sticky brown ladder of parliamentary privilege with no little help from all those Oxbridge-educated toffs he so despises. But he’s embarrassed about it, ashamed to have swapped his days as a working union man for the ritualised ruling-class pomp and rigmarole of parliamentary politics.

So what’s Prescott to do with all that shame? He hides it behind a caricature of working classness, a cartoonish dummy who misrepresents the working class by refusing to accept that learning and education can be empowering and liberating. At least three times in this one episode alone he refers to his critics, with no proof whatsoever, as ‘obviously having a private education’. There are few things sadder than a millionaire mansion-dwelling bloke trying to retain his working class credentials by acting like an irksome ape.

Tony Blair invites him to an informal dinner and tells him (smugly, probably) not to dress formally, and that “I’ll be wearing chinos.” Which prompts a full-blown spluttering from Prescott, loudly declaring “Chinos? What the bloody hell are chinos?!” A little later he’s told he’ll be visiting a council estate that has a reputation as a ‘chav’ stronghold. “Chavs? What the bloody hell are chavs?!”. And so on and so on. At the Hay-On-Wye Literary festival, where John is invited to speak, he mutters that “I might have to admit I’ve never read a book in my life,” before adding, “to me, books are for facts not pleasure.”

Prescott’s proud emphasis on his ignorance is matched by his utter delight in his ability to hit people. Again, as a lesson in working class ethics it’s not hard to see his ideas as dated, unthinking and ridiculous. Of course working class violence has a long and proud tradition, and of course it has its place today, but Prescott’s version of fisticuffs is more about basic aggression and anger than about using violence to defend your community. Let’s see, since taking his seat in Parliament, Prescott has been involved in two incidents that might broadly be called ‘violent’. Both – the Brit Awards soaking and the wrestle with the egg-throwing farm labourer – were skirmishes with working class blokes. The toffs and nobles that John so loves to threaten get off scot-free.

How’s this for utter nonsense – Prescott talking about ‘the toffs’: “I can see ‘em, I can smell ‘em – and from time to time I tend to hit ‘em.” Really? When, John? When do you actually hit them? As far as me and the world can see, all you do is have tea with ‘em, vote with ‘em, and let’s face it within the next year or two you’ll be sitting in the House of Lords with ‘em.

I grew up in a working class family and I’m glad to say that education gave me a way into music and literature and art and traveling. I also grew up with a violent father and I’m glad to say that education gave me a way out of believing that smacking people around is something to be glorified and celebrated, or worse, used as a badge of class. For all the working class violence I’ve seen, there’s precious little of it used in the right way, to defend a community, to stick one on a fascist, to defend our rights, to protest at attacks on working people. In the documentary, Prescott’s constant reference to his ability to fight is not only wearying and pathetic but also has no class basis whatsoever.

And onto what prompted me to watch the programme in the first place: his reference to the incident involving ‘that pop group Chumbawamba’ at the Brit Awards. Having already read the relevant part of his (ghost-written) autobiography, I half-expected something like this, but it was still annoying to see him sticking to his own mythical account of the affair on national television.

The basic facts are these: Prescott was watching Fleetwood Mac and sipping champagne. We were at the Awards with a couple of friends who were striking Liverpool dockworkers, workers who were suffering because New Labour had refused to get involved in the dispute, fearing it might mucky their ticket with the new Labour Luvvies and their friends in big business. Prescott, obviously, was staying quiet on the matter – he’s a good dog who keeps his trap shut when demanded.

Danbert, Alice and Paul went over to his table, declared that “this is for the Liverpool dockworkers you sold out,” and dumped a bucketful of iced water over him. He flustered and blustered and raged but did nothing, and within seconds a group of us were held by scores of police in side rooms. So it’s galling to hear him say that “I got up and give the feller a tap in the side of his ribs and he went on the floor.” At no time did he give Danbert as much as a nudge, and Dan certainly didn’t end up on the floor. I was there, I watched the whole thing, laughing. Seeing the school bully purple-faced and humiliated.

What is it about the man’s psyche that, even when he’s the second most powerful man in the country, he still has to tell such petty lies? He’ll go to his death-bed with his own version of events, obviously, but let it go on record that the big prize-fighter never even got a punch in – knocked out in the first round by a small balding bloke with a bucket of water.

When Prescott is confronted in the documentary with a trio of working class girls, you can see that he might hope to win them over with his stories of punches thrown and battles won. Instead he’s thrown off-guard by one of the girls saying she was excluded from school for repeatedly punching her teacher; and just for a moment we see John wincing slightly, fidgeting and looking uneasy when confronted by the violence he so eagerly champions. Then he’s off again, back to playing the angry oaf who stays behind the battle-lines bragging about hard-earned victories.

My version of working class involves stuff like caring and responsibility and solidarity. It thrives on turning the anger at an unequal and unfair society into constructive and effective opposition. It can encompass art and nature and beauty. What it doesn’t do is hang onto outmoded ideas of what and who we are. It’s not embarrassed to get out into the world, and in fact it knows that it must. And it doesn’t plead either ignorance or unfocussed violence as basic tenets on which to build a class-based opposition to privilege and power.

The transparency with which Prescott has been used by New Labour, and the ease with which the man himself allowed such obvious manipulation, still shocks me. Honestly, he might as well have actually worn a big leather lead and a spiked collar. His desire to cover up his shame by constantly spouting his distorted cloth-cap version of his own roots – to the extent where he’ll make a documentary featuring himself making the same misguided judgements over and over again – just underlines the tragedy of a sold-out union man who never came to terms with joining the Boss class.

Boff

The Loudness Wars

Some things just gladden my heart. I heard a piece on Radio 4 today about the new Metallica album, Death Magnetic, being too loud. Not, as one might imagine, the complaint of a Cambridge University historian (see Boff's piece), but the opinion of quite a large number of Metallica fans. Some 16,000 of them have signed a petition to have the album remastered. Lars Ulrich (possibly the man I most love to hate in rock music) has dismissed the number of complaints as 'insignificant' - bless.

To be honest, this is more Neil's department than mine, but he's got his head buried in an algorithm somewhere, so it's left to me to discuss it. He did nod sagely and say that the whole 'loudness wars' issue was one much discussed on the sorts of nerdy forums he frequents.

Anyway, it's a fascinating issue, and while perhaps it's stretching a point to say it's analagous to the collapse of consumerist capitalism that appears to be happening, nevertheless it is another example of something being pushed further and further until it caves in. The music industry has, for a number of years, been pushing for a 'loudness at all costs' approach to recording. One blog I read described it as an 'arms race', where the whole process escalates to such a degree that the sound distorts. Essentially what happens is that in order to accommodate the overall increase in volume, the dynamic range has to be squashed - so the gap between quietest and the loudest is smaller. No pianissimo and no fortissimo. The result, it is argued, is a reduction in the emotional range of the music as well as the dynamic one.

The new Metallica album is 50% louder than the last one apparently. That's what the man on Radio 4 said, anyway. Actually that's more or less corroborated by various blogs and forums and if you really want to go the whole nine yards there are detailed anayses of the wave forms that show the top and bottom frequencies being clippped (or brick-walled). The man who mastered Death Magnetic, Ted Jensen, said:

"In this case the mixes were already brick walled before they arrived at my place. Suffice it to say I would never be pushed to overdrive things as far as they are here. Believe me I’m not proud to be associated with this one, and we can only hope that some good will come from this in some form of backlash against volume above all else."

So it must be what the boys in the band and their producer, Rick Rubin, wanted. Obviously, my image of Metallica is informed by Lars' statements against music piracy, and by that fantastic documentary of a band in meltdown (which they've subsequently distanced themselves from), Some Kind Of Monster, so I'm aware I'm less than partial in my assessment of them. But I can't get the image out of my head of Lars yelling "What the fuuuuuuuck!' when challenged on anything. I'm not a fan of the genre, so it's easy for me to dismiss it all as mindless noise, but I love and respect the fact that discerning Metallica fans are analysing the band's latest offering - which they've waited five years for - and deciding it's just too loud and distorted, and all the subtlety is lost. I'm resisting the temptation to scoff at the use of the word subtelty in the context of Metallica, as I'm feeling very warmly-disposed to these fans who are daring to challenge the mighty Lars and co. So in our post-capitalist future, will we all be listening to quiet music? Will Radio 4 presenters (because Radio 4 will obviously survive the demise of capitalism) be bemoaning the loss of presence and edge on the latest Mötorhead release? I don't know, but I signed the petition, even though I'm unlikely to buy the album in any form.

And is it just me, have I spent too long looking at graffitti on dressing room walls, or does the album cover look like a crudely drawn vagina?

Jude

The Beatles

An article in The Guardian got me going. It doesn’t take a lot. A Cambridge University historian has published a study (what does that mean?) called Youth Culture In Modern Britain, claiming that the Beatles were not heroes of the counter-culture but capitalists who cynically exploited youth culture for commercial gain. This bloke David Fowler claims: “They did about as much to represent the interests of the nation's young people as the Spice Girls did in the 1990s.”
Fowler claims that many commentators during the 1960s saw youth culture as being all about the Beatles. But he says that just because they were fantastically popular - maybe bigger than Jesus, as John Lennon said in 1966 - it did not make them leaders of their generation.
Instead Fowler identifies a dreamy, folk-dancing rural revivalist Rolf Gardiner, the father of conductor Sir John Eliot Gardiner, as a true youth culture pioneer of 20th century Britain.
“They were young capitalists who, far from developing a youth culture, were exploiting youth culture by promoting fan worship, mindless screaming and nothing more than a passive teenage consumer.”

Now I know The Beatles are big enough to take care of their own playground squabbles, but this sort of stuff is like a red rag to a bull with me. Not just because I’m a fan of the band, but because youth culture and pop and the state of the world it exists within are so vitally important to everything I’ve done with my life up to this point. I’ve lived through an age of cultural change, where racism, homophobia and sexism are gradually being challenged and altered largely through shifts in culture – an age where pop music, art, literature and film have repeatedly refused to accept the status quo and indicated and forced real political and social change.

The Beatles were an important part of that change; reducing their impact to “mindless screaming” ignores the impact of a band who reflected the evolution of pop culture from screaming fans to effective counter-cultural movement; from teen hysteria to anti-Vietnam protest; from mop-tops to student power; from Fab Four to Civil Rights Campaigns.

The Beatles reflected that change, echoing the feel of a decade when young people were learning to organise rebellion. They neither developed nor led ‘a youth culture,’ as Fowler rightly states, nor did they try to. But they served as an oppositional rallying-cry, they were the anti-Nixon in a way that Elvis could never be. They stood for the new cultural phenomena of change, in the way their music constantly reinvented itself, in the way they looked, and in their attitude to the pivotal issues of drugs and war.

Of course they were young capitalists pandering to ‘passive teenagers’. For a while. But they clearly got bored of that and threw themselves into a wholesale re-working of what a pop group can be. What were the ‘passive teenagers’, rioting on the streets in Paris, London and Chicago in 1968, listening to? Let me guess…

Certainly they weren’t listening to Rolf Gardiner, pre-war fascist sympathizer and all-round sandal-wearing nutjob who thought he might create popular cultural revolution by encouraging skinny-dipping and herb-growing with Nazi academics.

Basically an upper-class twit who swanned off to Germany to instigate a ‘masculine brotherhood’ and who wrote articles for The Times serenading the German Youth Movement and bemoaning “the impoverishment of the stock” in his racial theories, Gardiner seems to be exactly what The Beatles stood against – popular culture’s greatest achievements are its ability to break with the past and to deny conservatism, both politically and socially.

There, I got it out of my system. Now onto more important matters…

Boff

That Song

As we never hesitate to tell you, playing in Chumbawamba is nothing if not diverse. In the course of one week this summer we played at an old-style hippy festival, a quiet and intimate Arts Centre and on the optimistically named ‘Acoustic Stage’ at the Rebellion punk festival.

After the Arts Centre gig someone emailed expressing their disappointment that we hadn’t played Tubthumping. At the hippy festival, a couple of very drunk people shouted for it constantly, and at the punk festival somebody came backstage afterwards and expressed their heartfelt relief that we hadn’t played it. Like it or not, that song is still an issue, so I thought it was worth addressing it.

We don’t play Tubthumping as part of the acoustic set. There you go. We’re not ashamed of it – we played it until the very last of our electric gigs – but we’ve never found a way to play it and make it fit with what we do acoustically. It’s not just because it’s an old song of ours either – we still find room for Timebomb and Homophobia. We did do an acoustic ‘neo-billy’ version of it with a fiddle, and the temptation was always to sing with an American accent (never a good idea). But even then the verses were spoken. That whole ‘whisky drink, vodka drink, cider drink’ bit just doesn’t have a tune, frankly. Pop band in ‘hit song without tune’ scandal – I know, it’s shocking. Believe me, we did try and find a way to make it work as an acoustic song. We tried doing it as a waltz, attempted an acappella version, even slowed it right down. And we got nowhere, so we decided that it had had its day and put it to bed. Does that appear a disingenuous answer? I hope not.

But we’re not unaware of the significance of the song – both to ourselves and some of our audience. So now we make do with wry references to it in the set: there’s a tantalising ‘pissing the night away’ moment in Charlie, and the entire last verse of Buy Nothing Day has been rewritten to acknowledge the weird position we’re in of not playing the hit anymore (‘And the bastards won’t play the one song that you know’). Because what we don’t want to be is one of those ever so precious pop stars who dissociate themselves from the songs that made them famous (and wealthy) because they see it as somehow sullying their integrity. As if it happened against their wishes. If they really wanted to eschew the possibility of mainstream exposure and financial reward and pursue a more artistically pure path then they’d get out of rock’n’roll and start playing jazz.

What’s the difference between a rock musician and a jazz musician? A rock musician plays three chords to thousands of people and a jazz musician plays thousands of chords to three people. Don’t worry, I got told that joke on a jazz course.

So that’s where we are with that song – not ashamed of it, grateful to it for the exposure and success it brought us, and for allowing us to still be making music today – but you won’t be hearing an acoustic version of it in a town near you anytime soon.

BNP camp

Mum, where’d you put my sleeping bag?

It’s less than a month away now until the tentpegs are hammered in at BNP Camp (official title – the Red, White & Blue Camp) in the heart of Derbyshire. The weekend of the 16th August sees up to 5000 fascists (big dogs are free – cheaper than taking the girlfriend) descend onto the quiet village of Denby, famous for its pottery.

The festival has grown into an annual neo-Nazi jamboree through the goodwill of a local landowner and BNP member who allows the party to use his land and erect a big wheel, dodgems and hold firework displays. There’s all-night drinking and, according to local residents, bouts of mass singalongs. These lot don’t sing ‘Ging-gang-gooly’ or ‘Kum-by-yah’, they sing Second World War German marching songs. Really! I hope there are lyric sheets or I’m knackered.

The landowner in question is a Mr Alan Warner, and he laughs off suggestions that the festival is, basically, a big drunken racist gathering (see there’s a better name for the festival. Big Drunken Racist Gathering. At least there wouldn’t be any confusion). He says, “We are not Nazis. We are just the opposite.”

I’ve been trying to work that out for a while, but it’s proving difficult. Maybe I’d find help on the British Nationalist Youth Movement website? Well, they are at least offering guidance in what the young Nazi needs to pack for camp. Here’s the list:

Water bottle/flask
Torch
Knife
Wet weather kit
Trainers
Sleeping bag
Small tent
Plate or mess tins
Washing kit
Pen and paper
White T-Shirt (cheap)
T-shirts and tops
Trousers
Jacket
6 x pairs of socks
Spare underwear
Clothes for socialising
Sun cream
Hat
Shin Pads

Yes, yes, Mum, take trousers. I know. I always forget trousers. Six pairs of socks? It’s a three-day camp. Well, you can say what you like about the fascists, but they have clean feet. My favourite though has to be ‘Clothes for Socialising’. Go on, make an impression at Nazi Camp! If one of the Camp leaders gets frisky at the sight of your Socialising Clothes, you’ve always got your shin pads to protect you.

There are a few omissions which the organizers forgot to add – boots, beer and big dog are three handy essentials for any Big Drunken Racist Gathering (from now on, BDRG). Let’s not be cynical about the Youth wing of the BNP, though – their website does have a Bible Quiz if you feel so inclined. (Example: ‘Which Gospel is the only one to describe the visit of the wise men to the infant Jesus?’ See, you don’t know it do you? Come along to camp and we’ll find out together, shall we?). You have to love how the fascists are re-discovering the Bible in response to the Muslim reverence for the Qur’an. Maybe there’s something in Leviticus about clean socks. And shin pads.

There’s to be a national demonstration against BDRG on Saturday 16th August in Denby Lane, Codnor, Derbyshire. Eleven am sharp, and whatever you do – don’t forget your trousers.

Slovakia Klikkfest 4th July

This was what you might call a quick in and out job. A leisurely mid-morning departure - plenty of time to take the kids to school - a direct flight to Bratislava from Manchester, do the gig, get the midday flight back and home in time to watch the tennis. Hardly even notice we'd gone. What could possibly go wrong?

The plane did have a particularly rowdy example of proud English manhood on board, but they stopped short of actually vomiting. All the suitcases turned up undamaged and a nice man retrieved Phil's siunglasses from the plane so it was all looking good.

About an hour into the journey from the airport to the festival, the driver of our minibus stopped to top up the radiator and that was it. The engine just made unpromising splutterings and was having none of it. We tried pushing it - slightly hairy on a single carriageway with trucks and all sorts hurtling towards us at breakneck speeds - and some burly Slovakians stopped, threw aside the puny English boys and also tried to push. Nothing. Our guide was on her mobile phone by this time arranging for back-up transport, and we spent a not unpleasant half hour by the roadside looking out over the maize fields and having our photo taken underneath an amusing sign.



Our relief driver took his mercy dash mission very seriously. So much so that he nearly killed us. I exaggerate for effect but he drove like a man possessed (with the spirit of Nikki Lauder). Anyway, real men don't wear seat belts so we just had to cling on and clench. Mild-mannered Neil was driven to shout at the driver (who looked up briefly from the text he was sending and grudgingly put both hands on the steering wheel - briefly).

Klikkfest was a small rock festival in a field, the like of which we haven't played for some time, and certainly not since we ditched the drum kit. To be honest we'd never have got away with it in England but there are some places where normal rules just don't apply. Fields in Slovakia being one of them. I have to say, sandwiched as we were between two rock bands, we did very well. In fact, we rocked - in an acoustic guitar and accordion sort of a way. I'll hazard a guess too that Lou and I were the only two female performers on the whole weekend.

And that was that. We came, we broke down, we played, (some of us) drank our own body weight in vodka, we went home again. One week it's deep folk in Dent and the next we're rocking with the best of them in Nove Zamky. Let's see what else the summer brings.