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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.



]]> General http://chumba.com/blog/index.php?itemid=14 Thu, 22 Oct 2009 02:55:34 +0500 http://chumba.com/blog/index.php?itemid=13 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
]]> General http://chumba.com/blog/index.php?itemid=13 Wed, 23 Sep 2009 03:08:11 +0500 http://chumba.com/blog/index.php?itemid=12
Seething Wells

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

]]> General http://chumba.com/blog/index.php?itemid=12 Fri, 26 Jun 2009 17:45:12 +0500 http://chumba.com/blog/index.php?itemid=11 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 .
]]> General http://chumba.com/blog/index.php?itemid=11 Sat, 11 Apr 2009 20:22:53 +0500 http://chumba.com/blog/index.php?itemid=10
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.

Punitive measures will alienate rather than persuade Israelis.

The world has tried what used to be called "constructive engagement". It has failed utterly. Since 2006 Israel has been steadily escalating its criminality: expanding settlements, launching an outrageous war against Lebanon, and imposing collective punishment on Gaza through the brutal blockade. Despite this escalation, Israel has not faced punitive measures - quite the opposite. The weapons and $3bn in annual aid the US sends Israel are only the beginning. Throughout this key period, Israel has enjoyed a dramatic improvement in its diplomatic, cultural and trade relations with a variety of other allies. For instance, in 2007 Israel became the first country outside Latin America to sign a free-trade deal with the Mercosur bloc. In the first nine months of 2008, Israeli exports to Canada went up 45%. A new deal with the EU is set to double Israel's exports of processed food. And in December European ministers "upgraded" the EU-Israel association agreement, a reward long sought by Jerusalem.

It is in this context that Israeli leaders started their latest war: confident they would face no meaningful costs. It is remarkable that over seven days of wartime trading, the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange's flagship index actually went up 10.7%. When carrots don't work, sticks are needed.

Israel is not South Africa.

Of course it isn't. The relevance of the South African model is that it proves BDS tactics can be effective when weaker measures (protests, petitions, backroom lobbying) fail. And there are deeply distressing echoes of apartheid in the occupied territories: the colour-coded IDs and travel permits, the bulldozed homes and forced displacement, the settler-only roads. Ronnie Kasrils, a prominent South African politician, said the architecture of segregation he saw in the West Bank and Gaza was "infinitely worse than apartheid". That was in 2007, before Israel began its full-scale war against the open-air prison that is Gaza.

Why single out Israel when the US, Britain and other western countries do the same things in Iraq and Afghanistan?

Boycott is not a dogma; it is a tactic. The reason the strategy should be tried is practical: in a country so small and trade-dependent, it could actually work.

Boycotts sever communication; we need more dialogue, not less.

This one I'll answer with a personal story. For eight years, my books have been published in Israel by a commercial house called Babel. But when I published The Shock Doctrine, I wanted to respect the boycott. On the advice of BDS activists, including the wonderful writer John Berger, I contacted a small publisher called Andalus. Andalus is an activist press, deeply involved in the anti-occupation movement and the only Israeli publisher devoted exclusively to translating Arabic writing into Hebrew. We drafted a contract that guarantees that all proceeds go to Andalus's work, and none to me. I am boycotting the Israeli economy but not Israelis.

Our modest publishing plan required dozens of phone calls, emails and instant messages, stretching between Tel Aviv, Ramallah, Paris, Toronto and Gaza City. My point is this: as soon as you start a boycott strategy, dialogue grows dramatically. The argument that boycotts will cut us off from one another is particularly specious given the array of cheap information technologies at our fingertips. We are drowning in ways to rant at each other across national boundaries. No boycott can stop us.

Just about now, many a proud Zionist is gearing up for major point-scoring: don't I know that many of these very hi-tech toys come from Israeli research parks, world leaders in infotech? True enough, but not all of them. Several days into Israel's Gaza assault, Richard Ramsey, managing director of a British telecom specialising in voice-over-internet services, sent an email to the Israeli tech firm MobileMax: "As a result of the Israeli government action in the last few days we will no longer be in a position to consider doing business with yourself or any other Israeli company."

Ramsey says his decision wasn't political; he just didn't want to lose customers. "We can't afford to lose any of our clients," he explains, "so it was purely commercially defensive."

It was this kind of cold business calculation that led many companies to pull out of South Africa two decades ago. And it's precisely the kind of calculation that is our most realistic hope of bringing justice, so long denied, to Palestine.]]> General http://chumba.com/blog/index.php?itemid=10 Thu, 15 Jan 2009 02:56:58 +0500 http://chumba.com/blog/index.php?itemid=9
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.”Humphreys doesn’t give us the proportions.

The day I read this interview was the day the Israeli government invaded Gaza with tanks, rockets and soldiers.

The day before, in the paper, I’d read US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice saying she had “no plans to travel to the region at this point”. She refused to answer questions on whether a ground offensive was justifiable. Basically, the reason she wasn’t going to Israel to broker a ceasefire was because she knew there was going to be a ground invasion, that she had to stay safely out of the way.

She knew; she knew but she lied.

This is how it works in politics. Powerful people tell lies, papers report what they say, people die, then we all forget the lie.

I would hazard a guess that most politicians, in the words of Humphreys, ‘don’t give a bugger what they do.’

We’re all taught about lies when we’re young – witness the collective (and harmless) lie that is Santa Claus. So about the time we’re old enough to discover there’s no Father Christmas, we ought to realise the power of lying and apply it to our understanding of the world – as the joke goes, “how can you tell when a politician is lying? His lips are moving.” We’re not four years old, there isn’t really a fat man in a red suit, and let’s be realistic enough to question what we’re told by those in authority.

After John Humphreys gave Tony Blair an on-air grilling over New Labour ‘sleaze’ in 2000, he wasn’t given access to the PM for four years. That’s what you get for questioning; arguably Humphreys survived those four years with a greater level of dignity, honour and integrity than Blair.

Condoleeza Rice had no plans to travel. And Israel is, somewhat nobly and for all of us, “fighting the war against international terror,” so says an Israeli spokesman. ‘The War on Terror’ itself, the modern-day Father Christmas, a huge umbrella of a lie which serves to justify any manner of slaughter, bloodshed, torture and – yes – terror. Isn’t shelling a UN school terror? Killing civilians, murdering women and children, isn’t that terror? Israel have a long-term relationship with terror, despite the handy and frequently-trotted out cry of ‘anti-semitism’. The list of Israeli massacres (mainly in Lebanon but frequently in Palestine) is long. Look them up, count up the thousands of dead bodies, every one of them qualified and justified by a lie.

20 Israelis have been killed in and around Gaza in the last ten years (20 too many). In contrast, this week alone, 600 Palestinians have been killed, including the 40 civilian refugees killed in the school bombing. An Israeli ambassador responded to this bombing by saying, “Israel makes every possible effort to avoid civilian casualties.” Which is, of course, a lie.

Maybe, as with Santa Claus, people over the age of four still need something to believe in. Need to believe that those self-serving wretches in suits (and dress suits) are acting in our best interests. What a world it would be if we didn’t believe a thing they said.

I just went to see the exhibition of anti-war art and photography at the Barbican in London. Beautiful, harrowing, powerful stuff, as clear a statement about war as you can get. Spain, China, Vietnam, Iraq – and coupled with what’s happening in Gaza right now, I couldn’t help a feeling of futility and desperation. And chanting slogans outside the Israeli Embassy (I went there too) seems so puny compared to the media-trumpeted lies of the powerful.

Thank goodness we have people like John Humphreys: “The one I want to interview is the Queen. Would I stick the boot in? Of course I would!”

Now looks like a good time to be sticking the boot in to the Israeli government, the US administration which funds it and the conservative media apologists who support it.

Not forgetting, of course, a well-aimed boot for Middle East Peace Envoy Tony Blair, who this week was awarded the US Presidential Medal of Freedom – the country’s highest civilian award – by George W Bush. Presumably for his outstanding success as Middle East Peace Envoy.


Boff Jan 2009

]]> General http://chumba.com/blog/index.php?itemid=9 Mon, 12 Jan 2009 04:17:44 +0500 http://chumba.com/blog/index.php?itemid=8
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 unfocused 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 judgments 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
]]> General http://chumba.com/blog/index.php?itemid=8 Mon, 3 Nov 2008 12:19:44 +0500 http://chumba.com/blog/index.php?itemid=7 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]]> General http://chumba.com/blog/index.php?itemid=7 Fri, 10 Oct 2008 22:06:17 +0500 http://chumba.com/blog/index.php?itemid=6 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
]]> General http://chumba.com/blog/index.php?itemid=6 Thu, 9 Oct 2008 21:41:48 +0500 http://chumba.com/blog/index.php?itemid=4
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.

Jude]]> General http://chumba.com/blog/index.php?itemid=4 Tue, 26 Aug 2008 18:53:56 +0500