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Leeds Refuse Workers

The other night I went to a benefit concert in Leeds, a large hall full of supporters of the Refuse Workers strike. Keith Allen (him off Fat Les) played, and some others. It wasn’t about who played, though, it was about the strike and the workers.

The Leeds Refuse workers – bin-emptiers, street-cleaners – have been on strike for almost two months, because they’ve been singled out by the Leeds Council as scapegoats for a cost-cutting exercise.

The 600 strikers walked out on the 7th September over Leeds Council’s proposals to level down pay for workers in the refuse and street cleaning department as a bizarre way of equalising women’s pay, which they’ve been forced to do by law. These workers face pay cuts of up to £6,000 down from an average of £18,000. The City Council is run by a Lib Dem/Tory administration.

In short, the council officers, the suits and leaders (all on substantial, protected wages, some earning well over £100,000 a year) picked on the sector of the council workforce that they thought might give them the least trouble. They thought wrong, obviously. Bins are overflowing, rats are thriving, but significantly the people of Leeds are almost unanimously supporting the strike.

At the gig I was shocked because this was the union’s crowd, the workers crowd. Where were the young people? Where were the eco-activists and anti-fascists? Leeds is a student city. Where were they all? They get their bins emptied, don’t they? Mind you, we all choose our forms of protest and activism, and I’m happy to have witnessed and been encouraged by the determination of the Refuse strikers.

How long this strike will last I don’t know. Me, I’ll put up with having to take my rubbish down to the dump. I’ll laugh at the council’s scab refuse workers on their once-a-month collection. And I’ll raise a fist for the workers who don’t give in to unreasonable demands, who do a job that we all respect, and who have decided not to be treated like serfs by the well-paid councillors who came up with this scheme.

And to jump issues: The crypto-fascist English Defence League are turning up in Leeds on 31 October. Here’s hoping there’s a huge turn-out of anti-racists; and here’s hoping people might make a connection between the relatively clear politics of anti-fascism and the politics of supporting workers’ rights.

We’re not Jamming!

Canadian Folk Festivals 2009

The Canadian Folk Festival – it’s a closed secret. What happens over there doesn’t seem to happen anywhere else on the planet, but all the British musicians who make the trip over there and play these things don’t ever say anything once they get back. Shhh! Canada? Folk Festival? Don’t know what you’re on about, mate.

It’s like the Freemasons. You meet someone who’s played at one and suddenly you’re all fancy handshakes and nods and winks. Oh yes, ha ha, how weird and freaky… But between ourselves, let’s keep it quiet, eh?

Here’s the big secret (what a blabbermouth. Half a lager and a cocktail with an umbrella in it and I’ll tell you anything). You go to Canada and play one of the Folk Festivals. You may or may not get the chance to play on the main stage (and to be honest, the main stage is an irrelevance there). You’re given an itinerary that tells you that you’ll be doing four workshops over the weekend, at any given time of day, sharing a stage with any given type of act/musician/band. It’s like opening Xmas presents. Ooh, what’ve we got? It’s exciting and weird and interesting.

Canadian festivals open their gates at some unearthly hour of the morning, and hundreds – no, many thousands – of people pile through the gap armed with folding chairs and rucksacks full of sandwiches. At one such festival last year we were told that this morning rush was called (after the preferred choice of footwear) ‘The Birkenstock Dash’.

Those few hundred who get to the main stage first set up their chairs and their little rugs and blankets, do their territorial pissing, and then wander off to find coffee. The chairs and blankets stay put, ensuring that the space is reserved for the time seven hours later when some ageing old folkie strums his/her way through a couple of old hits as the evening’s finale.

Thus, the main stage audience is claimed and staked out first thing. The only thing to do is see what’s going on on the other stages. There are usually four, five, six other stages. Here’s where the interesting stuff goes on. No Birkenstock ‘claim your patch’ bollocks here. Turn up and watch. Elbow your way to the front, like at a proper gig.

The Canadian organisers call them ‘workshops’. That implies teaching, or demonstrating, or something. In reality they’re loose gatherings of several musicians, stick ‘em on a stage together and see what they come up with. And call it ‘a workshop’.

Now anyone that knows Chumbawamba will know that we’re not Grateful Dead or Phish or any of those jamming bands. In fact, we are officially the anti-jamming band. We don’t jam. We meet. We don’t play loosely together, hoping for musical inspiration. We meet. We don’t cruise the old twelve-bar looking for inspiration. We meet.

We meet and discuss what we should sing about, and how, and why, and in what form. It makes everyone’s life simpler and clearer. It’s verbal and open, not hidden behind fretwork and foot-tapping and fancy musicianship. That’s how we see it, anyway.

So the idea of this band sharing music with other bands on stage at these Canadian Festivals could be seen as the ultimate horror. But no! Because, despite our aversion to jamming/noodling/communicating with the musical muse, we love a challenge. Love being thrown in at the deep end. Swim, y’buggers!

And this is what the Canadian Festival has taught us – get up there, and make it work. There’s an audience. Yes, we know it’s 11 o’clock in the morning. But the audience want to be entertained. Now! Fear and thrill all rolled into one.

Over the past few years we’ve been up onstage playing with Scottish trad fiddlers, fey singer-songwriters, African dancebands, the lot. This year at Edmonton we were pitched right in with Arrested Development, fantastic Atlanta rap group, great tunes, amazing history, great politics. But a hip-hop group nonetheless, and how do we fit in with that? We shared a stage for an hour. We played our songs, laughed together, sang ‘Enough is Enough’ and kept the rhythm and chords going as Speech from Arrested Development rapped over the top. We joined in with them, they joined in with us. We marvelled at the ass-shaking women on stage (don’t cry ‘sexist!’, we all love to see a woman shaking her behind), they laughed at our ridiculous Englishness, and we all met somewhere in the middle … somewhere that’s friendly and funny and political and audience-friendly and entertaining.

And half-way through the show I caught myself thinking, ‘this wouldn’t happen this easily anywhere else in the world.’

I recently saw Tinariwen and Tunng playing in Leeds. Two different cultures meeting in the middle. It was brilliant. And I thought then, as I think now, this is what happens on stage at all those strange and obscure and massive and amazing Canadian festivals. Every day of the long weekend, on five different stages. Sometimes it’s a disaster. Sometimes it’s boring. But it’s always an adventure. Always.

We did other workshops that weekend. One with some bands I can’t remember the name of. One with Oysterband and Dick Gaughan (which, frankly, was too easy – joining in with Gaughan on ‘Diggers Song’ and convincing Chopper from the Oysters up to sing Johnny Cash with us) and one with Mongolian throat singers Hanggai, which was incredible. Singing one of our acapella songs along to a throat-sung drone was risky, ridiculous and beautiful, all at the same time. Joining in with their Chinese drinking song was a joy.

So there you have it. The secret of the Canadian festival. It doesn’t seem to happen anywhere else in the world – the Canadians have their own strange rules within their own cultural bubble, and I’m happy for them. Happy that they don’t think like we do, that festivals have to be neatly parceled into genres and styles and boxes. Happy that they don’t feel the need to massage the artist’s egos by keeping them well separated from the other acts. Happy that it forces us musicians into thinking on our feet, working together, dealing with stuff outside our cosy worlds.

And believe me, the Canadian Festivals are well outside this band’s cosy world. Good. I’m glad. Just don’t expect me to buy a pair of Birkenstocks.

Boff 2009

Seething Wells, Not Michael Jackson

Irony. It’s what the British do best.

Seething (Steven) Wells died two days ago. Then tonight, starting to write this, I find out that Michael Jackson has died. One of these two men owned a ranch called Neverland and had three children called Michael Joseph Jackson Jr, Paris Michael Katherine Jackson and Prince Michael Jackson II. The other one was the King of Pop.

I grew up reading the NME, the New Musical Express as it was called back then in the mid-seventies. I ate it up, all the cynical hipster talk and the post-hippy anti-establishment rants. Nick Kent and Charles Shaar Murray sticking it to Pink Floyd and ELP and the rest of their bloated ilk.

Then along came Tony Parsons and the new writers, ably deconstructing the decade and rebuilding it as punk, replacing cynicism and cannabis with positivism and anger and come on, get off your arse and do it yourself.

That was important for me back then – I needed to read stuff by people who were prepared to kick me up the arse and tell me to do something. Anything. Anything except sitting down reading the NME.

Post-punk (those salad days between the gruesome let-down of Sid joining the Pistols and the horror of Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet) was a vacuum filled by those clever enough to see that good music, good art, involved a knowledge of politics and a sense that the world was much bigger than Top of The Pops: Crass, The Specials, Elvis Costello, Robert Wyatt, Dead Kennedys. And so a new bunch of journalists came crawling out of the lefty woodwork to champion this music, slowly at first, but eventually picking up momentum… ex-fanzine writers, pushing and jabbing each other into saying something worthwhile in the national music papers (there were three back then – NME, Sounds and Melody Maker).

Swells came along on that wave. I first heard about him through a couple of fanzines done by himself and a local Leeds lad called James Brown – Attack On Bzag and Molotov Comics. Swells wrote poems, polemic-disguised-as-poems. Great, ranty, in-your-face poems. Along with people like Mekons’ Jon Langford I contributed stuff to both zines, convinced that here in Leeds in the doldrums of the early eighties there was something exciting and important coming out of the Rock Against Racism, Miners Strike northern city culture.

Next I knew he was in the NME writing reviews. Scathing reviews. All the old guard – all your Phil Collins has-beens – were summarily summonsed and shot by Swells. I remember an interview with Mike Oldfield. It may or may not have been on board Mike Oldfield’s private jet. Or was it conducted while playing tennis? Memory tells me it was an exercise in the annihilation of pompousness, but mostly I remember laughing at the lad’s cheek and his ability to sneak his brand of agit-prop into the pages of the New Musical Express. James Brown says of Swells’ time at NME that “he was obsessed with class war, masturbation, dogs, cancer, Jello Biafra and the multiple use of the exclamation mark.”

Come 1985 and Chumbawamba released our first single and got our first proper live reviews in the music press. And who was there singing our praises, sticking up for this weird northern punk/cabaret hybrid? Seething Wells. From that time on he stuck his neck out for us. In a world where the NME editor increasingly dictated copy according to what the advertisers/record companies wanted to see, Swells was the thorn in the side who refused to kow-tow to the bland norm. Through the miners strike he was alone in championing the idea that music could be used for something important, that there were bigger issues here than whatever gold lame was being worn by Haircut 100 or ABC on Top Of The Pops.

Swells stuck by Chumbawamba when we were ridiculed and lambasted by the journo hipsters who celebrated the return of bland, everyday and utterly non-political ‘indie’ music which dominated the next decade. Politics was unfashionable (especially if you had a job writing record reviews for a music mag). Bands like us disappeared from the popular cultural radar, despite growing live audiences.

When ‘Tubthumping’ was a worldwide hit in 1997, all the old magazines and writers suddenly had a change of heart and wanted to get back in touch with us again. Ha! How funny. Get lost.

We agreed to an interview with the NME only if Seething Wells was to do it. They agreed (bloody prostitutes). Through all this time, our dialogues with Swells were peppered with anarchist v Marxist arguments, disagreements on the merits of the Third International and debating the difference between Redskins and Conflict. Him and us, we ranted and barked like wary dogs, snapped and snarled and probably dribbled at the mouth a bit, too. But always, Chumbawamba recognised what this Swells bloke was doing, how much he meant in a world where the same old groups made the same old charts and the same old magazine covers time after time after time.

And my goodness the rest of the journalists hated us. It seemed like Swells was the only one who ‘got’ our sense of humour and our way of laughing at ourselves while doing something utterly serious. In 1998 we made a documentary of the band. We contacted all the major journalists who’d gone on record slagging us off and asked if they’d like to be in a documentary “about pop and politics”. They all said yes. Each of them turned up (not suspecting they were being interviewed by that their most hated band) and, with little prompting, slated us. They signed cleverly-worded release forms and bob’s your uncle, we stuck them all in our film, slagging us off. The exception, of course, was Swells. We interviewed him straight. Sat him in a pub and asked what he thought of this rag-tag bunch of situationist clever-arses called Chumbawamba. He did his usual thing on-camera – told stories, embellished, sexed-up, ranted etc – but essentially came up with how Chumbawamba elongated its stay in the pop world: “It’s alright walking around with hair like a gonk. But it doesn’t half alienate you from ordinary decent working class people like their parents. That’s the reason why they changed.”

Seething Wells. I can’t, even now, get used to the idea of calling him Steven Wells. Because by rights he was always seething. Really, he was. Not seething with undirected, Liam Gallagher-style dumb-ignorant fury, but with a righteous (yes, that’s the word! Righteous!) indignation that, bloody hell, while he was around, things could be better! Now!

He died of cancer; specifically, Hodgkins Lymphoma. My Dad almost died of it two years ago. It’s a killer that sneaks up on you not because you’re unfit or you’ve been smoking thirty cigs a day but because… because nothing. Annoyingly for a ranting poet/journalist who spent his life pointing fingers and trying to get to the heart of society’s ills, there’s no explanation and no reason for suddenly finding out you’ve got lymphoma. A big question, without an answer. Reading Seething Wells’ blog, detailing his own illness, is to read the powerful madness of someone wrestling with science and logic. It’s Swells telling himself that, if there’s very little beauty in cancer, at least there’s plenty to be got from the wrestling.

Seething Wells died having spent his short life writing stuff that was mainly designed to piss people off, and he probably succeeded. Because those people were the millionaire, hypocrite know-nothings of the music world. And the answer to the question ‘Why?’ would be, in Swells’ case – “because someone had to do it”. And on behalf of Chumbawamba, I’m glad someone was there to do it.

Seething Wells, if you were still writing, you’d probably have something to say about how Michael Jackson chased you into the grave. I won’t say it for you. But the irony, oh the irony. And for a northern English writer who lived his last decade in America, I’m sure you’d understand. One final thing. If anyone ever says to me, remember Michael Jackson, the King of Pop? I’ll think of Swells.

Here’s Seething Wells’ last written diary entry, the day before he died:

“I speak as someone whose greatest craving at this exact moment is not world peace and universal democracy or a rational and global redistribution of wealth, but a can of ice cold ginger ale.
“And of course all this bollocks is written by an idiot who has polished his image as an existentialist, atheist hard-man and anti-mope, forever sneering at the tribes who wallow in self-pity -- the gothers, the emo kids, the Smiths fans -- the whole 900-block-wide marching band composed entirely of the white male urban middle classes who are convinced that (as the most affluent and pampered human beings who have ever walked the planet) theirs is a story worth hearing. Blissfully unaware that they are but a few generations away from regular visits to the doctor who would wind parasitic worms from their beer bloated assholes using sticks.
“You could blame this fallacy on poor education, cultural deterioration, or simple moral decline.
“Me? I blame it on sunshine. I blame it on the moonlight. I blame it on the boogie.”


What an apt and ironic last line.


Boff Whalley

Swells’ harrowing, funny and typically ranting diary of his last days are at:

www.philadelphiaweekly.com

Jade Goody

Q: What's the difference between cancer and a cow?
A: Max Clifford can't milk a cow.

As with the ‘tragic, shocking and devastating’TM death of Princess Diana, we’ve all been invited of late to fall in line with the sanctification of some inconsequential girl who’s met her maker (her maker actually being publicist Max Clifford) and then shuffled off in as garish a way possible under the glare of the dear old British media (hitherto referred to as ‘the nation’).

Jade Goody. I’ve got nothing against the poor girl. From what I can tell she was a lass who did the best she could to make something of herself, given a terrible start in life and against all the odds becoming one of those rich people who get photographed in magazines and sell their own perfume line. I have nothing against those people, as I say, but then again I’ve got no vested interest either in believing I ought to mourn them on demand when they give up the ghost.

It makes me puke, this media-deification: watching how the red-tops and the paparazzi and the silver-haired publicists have us all in their pockets, worshipping what we once were sold as rubbish. Makes me angry that I’m not allowed to come out and say that the whole thing stinks, it’s all a sham, a joke, a huge expense account payable by the British public for whatever regurgitated morality we’re all spoonfed, without coming across as heartless. And with Jade, of course, the big morality word was Cancer.

People close to me have been diagnosed with cancer. I like to think that their efforts in reaching some kind of breathing space (literally), and remission from the pain of chemo- and radiotherapy, gives them some kind of personal hero status. Not front-page tabloid headlines. Not Max Clifford on morning TV telling the world (for his £200, 000 fee) that he was “a personal friend, and very very close” (pass the sick bucket).

Cancer’s a right bastard (not the best way to describe a wholesale biological killing machine, but you know what I mean) and it’s great that Jade Goody could be highlighted as a focal point for the campaign for women to come forward for screening for cervical cancer. But let’s get this clear: Jade and her media-profiled struggle does not represent the thousands of people who are involved on a daily basis with fighting, struggling with and caring for cancer patients; and so it gets my back up that Clifford can monopolise the word ‘brave’ for a Reality Show client who’s paying him huge sums of money. And as Michael Parkinson said in a recent article – “Why buy a Jade Goody candle, when you can simply make a donation?”

I hated all the Diana crap, the instant canonisation of a deeply-flawed and ignorant rich girl who happened to get famous by marrying a twerp with a Royal lineage. But this Jade Goody stuff takes the biscuit; it’s as if the media wondered whether they could actually pull off the same scam with some utter nonentity from Essex – ordinary woman to instant sainthood in the space of a few weeks. I hear Sky TV went wall-to-wall on the funeral, too, prostitutes that they are. I wouldn’t know, I refuse to watch Murdoch’s tacky version of the news.

Death’s a funny thing. It’s sacred, sacrosanct, above ridicule. Jade Goody was always ripe for a good slag-off, a right laugh, until she was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Suddenly the media stopped its sniggering and guffawing and got all pious and serious. I didn’t. I laughed all the way through the whole charade – not at Jade’s plight, obviously, but at the media’s hypocritical about-face. The media’s pathetic attempt to play the straight man. The media’s black-tie cry-baby seriousness. The media’s laughable ‘we really care’ headlines. The media’s stifled-sniggers hand-rubbing as the sensationalism of the story translated into newspaper sales.

For anyone who read Johann Hari’s piece in The Independent*, no Johann, it’s not about snobbery and class. I’m not talking about Jade Goody as a person (neither I, nor Johann Hari, nor anyone I know, nor most of the people in the media, ever met her) but as a media-construct, a clay model thumbed into life by the indescribably awful Max Clifford and his money-grubbing hangers-on; bloodsuckers who live off the lives and (more lucratively) deaths of real people.

Only one newspaper didn’t feature Jade’s funeral on its front page. (Come on, everyone, join in!) Nevertheless, catching the mood not of a nation I’ve read about in the crap papers but a nation I see and meet and talk to every day, can I suggest that we don’t waste time mourning the death of ‘Our Bermondsey Diana’ (spelled out in a wreath at the funeral), or ‘the Nation’s Brightest Star’ (OK Magazine) or indeed ‘an ordinary woman from a rubbish telly show’ (me). Let’s mourn instead the death of common sense and the passing of a sense of perspective…



*Johann Hari’s piece about Jade Goody can be read here .

Boycott Israel - by Naomi Klein

It's time. Long past time. The best strategy to end the increasingly bloody occupation is for Israel to become the target of the kind of global movement that put an end to apartheid in South Africa. In July 2005 a huge coalition of Palestinian groups laid out plans to do just that. They called on "people of conscience all over the world to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era". The campaign Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions was born.

Every day that Israel pounds Gaza brings more converts to the BDS cause - even among Israeli Jews. In the midst of the assault roughly 500 Israelis, dozens of them well-known artists and scholars, sent a letter to foreign ambassadors in Israel. It calls for "the adoption of immediate restrictive measures and sanctions" and draws a clear parallel with the anti-apartheid struggle. "The boycott on South Africa was effective, but Israel is handled with kid gloves ... This international backing must stop."

Yet even in the face of these clear calls, many of us still can't go there. The reasons are complex, emotional and understandable. But they simply aren't good enough. Economic sanctions are the most effective tool in the non-violent arsenal: surrendering them verges on active complicity. Here are the top four objections to the BDS strategy, followed by counter-arguments.

» Read more

Lies, Lies, and Palestine

The most recent issue of Q Magazine has an interview with Radio 4’s John Humphreys. There’s no other reason I would have bought a magazine with U2 on the cover (other than to read Bono’s latest preposterous chest-beating, of course).

John Humphreys, for anyone that doesn’t know, is the main interviewer for BBC radio 4’s Today programme. He’s a man that continually interrupts the politicians that he interviews, won’t let them get away with their two-faced, mealy-mouthed, half-arsed attempts at lying.

This is what he said in that interview:

“There are three types of politicians. Those who never lie; those who are economical with the truth when it comes to the possibility of embassing the government; and then there are those that don’t give a bugger what they do.”

» Read more