Thursday, 09 February 2012 
Music News
Chumbawamba - Guest Editors - 23 February 2010
Song by Song
ABCDEFG – an album about music
Finally an album about the thing that we do. A meta-album as I rather pretentiously (and possibly not entirely accurately) described it on Mike Harding’s show. The idea of an album about music conjures up John Miles’ (ask your parents, young folkies!) epic paean to the art form, and other MOR eulogies to ‘the power of music’ that spring to mind ‘Thank you for the Music’ by Abba keeps popping into my brain. This album is nothing like that. Instead we’ve looked at music’s history, its stories, its heroes and its villains. A sweep through several hundred years of what music means to people and what it means
Introduction
Chumbawamba’s ongoing love-affair with Brecht manifests itself here with this snippet of a song based on his short poem – “In the dark times, will there be singing? Yes. There will be singing - about the dark times.” Musically, the song was inspired by a scene in an episode of Mad Men where Don Draper goes to a beatnik bar and smokes pot, and a folk duo are playing a Jewish traditional song which sticks in your head and won’t leave …
Voices, That’s All
A song about the power and uplift of communal singing. A fond look back at the time when people sang together in pubs, and how singing together has been replaced by listening (together or in isolation – a theme picked up again in Missed). It’s rare to find a Chumbawamba album that doesn’t have a reference to football in it somewhere. Football grounds, together with demonstrations (ask your parents!), are one of the few places where people still spontaneously break into song.
Pickle
Thanks to Martin Simpson for this one. Boff heard him being interviewed and talking about how some people want to preserve folk music exactly as it is and not have it alter in any way. Martin said, “that’s not music, that’s a pickle”. We agreed and wrote a song about it. We also liked the idea of a beautiful song having the unlikely word ‘pickle’ repeated over and over again at the end. Potential audiences take note – you may be asked to sing along on this one.
Wagner at the Opera
A true story. (And there’s footage of it on DVD!) In a nutshell, Wagner was a well-known anti-Semite and his music was taken up by the Nazis. So when the Israel Symphony Orchestra played a concert including Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll, in Israel in 2000, it was always going to be controversial. In the audience was a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps who interrupted the performance by swinging a football rattle. The footage is brilliant – at first you can’t quite make out what the noise is, then you notice the orchestra obviously unsettled by what’s going on but attempting to continue playing. The conductor keeps looking over his shoulder into the audience, and gradually it all comes into focus. The man is ejected by security guards, which only adds further disruption to the proceedings. The song is acappella with Stomp-style industrial crashes and thumps.
Underground
About listening to Radio Caroline on a small transistor radio under the pillow when I was a teenager. The song remembers the furtive intensity of the experience. Millions of other teenagers were doing the same thing at the same time. And obviously, being a solipsistic adolescent I thought I was quite alone in my night-time listenings.
Torturing James Hetfield
Well this one was just too good an opportunity to miss. James Hetfield (lead singer in Metallica) goes on the record saying he’s totally fine about their music being used (along with sleep deprivation) to torture prisoners in Guantanamo Bay. So obviously we had to write a song where James Hetfield’s will is broken by the music of Chumbawamba. Come on, that was a song just waiting to be written!
The Devil’s Interval
A song about the augmented 4th interval, rather than Jim Causley’s former band. The tritone is a leap between two notes generally avoided in Western music because of its dissonant quality, and in the Middle Ages the Catholic Church decided it was the very essence of the devil and banned it. It has subsequently become much beloved of horror film scores and heavy metal bands; we made do with Bellowhead’s Jon Boden and Oysterband’s Ray Cooper (I think he’s trying to lose the ‘Chopper’) for our folk version of death metal. And they sawed away admirably. In fact, I’ve got a feeling we didn’t even play Chopper the rest of the song.
Hammer, Stirrup and Anvil
A song about the perils of writing music under a repressive regime – in this case Shostakovich writing music under Stalin. He was a fickle master, which isn’t necessarily what you want from your dictators – a bit of consistency would be nice. Half the problem was he was so full of his ‘out with the old and in with the new’ rhetoric that he never really bothered to decide what the new actually was; apart from in the most abstract of terms. One minute it was okay to be atonal and polyrhythmic and the next it was a sign of petit bourgeois decadence. So being a composer was a game of cat and mouse, trying to second-guess what would meet with the great leader’s approval. Shades of the Pet Shop Boys we’ve been told in this one – Boff does his Neil Tennant impression, and Neil is let loose in his enormous string library.
Puccini Said
The sad decline of one Maria Tobyn, one-time opera singer (famous particularly for her Madame Butterfly), who descended into Alzheimer’s Disease and ended her days in High Royds hospital just outside Leeds (now luxury flats), chuntering to herself and singing snatches of opera. It’s an actual recording of her on this track.
That Same So-So Tune
A song about music in wartime, where material concerns like lack of shellac to press records, shortages of petrol so nobody could get anywhere to see any music, and curfews and blackouts leading to closures of clubs and dancehalls, all conspired to make listening or dancing to music difficult. Luckily the record companies were churning out sentimental acappella ditties by the dozen to keep up the morale of the people.
Singing Out The Days
Another song about music in wartime – this time the songs sung by soldiers. They were often bawdy and full of criticism of the war and its organisers and the tunes were often popular music hall melodies (heaven forfend!). It’s obvious really – get a bunch of scared young men together in appalling conditions, fighting on behalf of other people, and they make up rude songs to drown out their terror and tell the generals what they really think. For the live shows we shall be segueing seamlessly from this song into something a little more earthy.
You Don’t Exist
Chumbawamba’s always had a bit of a love affair with Germany, mainly because we’ve toured there for so long but also because we’re fascinated by a country with so many huge changes in its recent history. So yes, we all read Stasiland, and we all saw The Lives of Others, and loved them. So there’ll generally be a song about something German on our albums. This time it’s Klaus Renft – self-proclaimed bad boy of East German rock’n’roll – who, having got thoroughly up the noses of the establishment for too long with his songs critical of the government, was eventually told that he and his band didn’t exist any more. Their performing licence was revoked and they were written out of the state-run recording company’s catalogues.
The Song Collector
A fictional tale of a group of wily village folk who dupe an earnest collector of folk songs by making up songs on the spot and passing them off as traditional. The scholarly collector falls for it and down the years the traditional songs he collected continue to be reverently sung. In general, ‘reverent’ is not an adjective to be applied to Chumbawamba.
Missed
A song about cutting yourself off from the world around you and losing yourself in the world of your headphones. We’re not saying it’s a bad thing, we’re simply noting the phenomenon.
Ratatatay
A true story about George Melly channelling a Kurt Schwitters sound-poem to scare off potential muggers. To paraphrase Mike Harding, he created a Dadaist force field around himself and essentially out-weirded his assailants, who fled. An audacious strategy, but attempt it at your own risk. Watch out for Phil channelling George Melly at the live shows.
New York Song
A snippet about confronting your own prejudices when the group of dodgy looking black teenagers walking towards you suddenly break out into a doo-wop song. A true story. Those of you that saw us tread the boards last Xmas with ‘Riot, Rebellion and Bloody Insurrection’, will recognise Phil reprising his role as narrator.
Dance, Idiot, Dance
Who hasn’t wanted to photoshop Nick Griffin’s head onto the body of a morris dancer? Taking the man’s attempt to appropriate elements of folk music for his nefarious ends as our starting point, we imagine his hapless attempts to morris dance. Childish, but funny. The song required a lustier voice then any of our boys could muster so we got Lester Simpson to sing it. Everyone else from the No Masters Co-operative (20 years old this year!) contributes – either singing, playing, or writing a verse or two.
I think Eliza said it best – bollocks to Nick Griffin!
