Saturday, 31 July 2010 
Music News
Chumbawamba - Guest Editors - 24 February 2010
How We Work
Just do the washing up...
So. Here’s our thumbnail guide to on How to Work Together with Other People, to Create Something and to Make It Last. (Sub-heading: To not fall out over ‘artistic differences’. To avoid those critical “Right I’m leaving the band!” arguments.)
It’d be easy to say that because we’ve been a band for such a long time we’ve somehow organically created a way of working together as a group of people. But that’s just not true. There was nothing ‘organic’ about it. From the outset, Chumbawamba was set up as a structured and planned collective, a co-operative. Yes, we were a band, we were musicians; but even then we were so aware of the music tradition, the unequal hierarchies in bands, and didn’t want to aim for just that standard few years before we split up acrimoniously over whether the lead singer gets paid more than the drummer. It was Equal pay, equal say. Meetings with a rotating Chair. Not voting, but agreeing compromises. And as a bonus, communal sex every Friday lunchtime. Well, that’s what some people thought we were up to, apparently.
The organisation of the band was based on all sorts of post-Crass hippy lefty ideological structures, communal living and sharing everything, all distilled into something we could understand and work with. Which was how we were as a bunch of people in the shared house we lived in, where the washing up and the cleaning and the hoovering needed doing. That’s the birth of the band – washing up and hoovering. And we all took turns at the lot of it, not following some kind of written-down student rota but in an instinctive ‘it’s about time someone washed up the plates… so I’ll do it’ type of thing.
And there you have it, essentially – the organisation of Chumbawamba didn’t grow out of making music together, singing harmonies, comparing lyrics; it grew out of the washing up. I always thought (and still do) that if you can’t be relied on to do the washing up then you can’t be relied on to be part of a band. In the beginning we rehearsed every day, 5,6,7 hours at a time. We loved it, and wanted to play music constantly. But even then it was structured, we talked a lot and laughed a lot but didn’t ‘jam’ an awful lot. Too much washing up to do. And then there was the Friday lunchtime communal sex, of course.
Occasionally this glorified communal/anarchist set-up wouldn’t work, someone would start to take the piss. We’ve always had a very strong work ethic. Pitch in, help out, lift the equipment into the van, make the tea, if it needs doing then do it. This can create space for people to get lazy, to take advantage of the rest. You have to ride it out for a while, give people a chance to get back in the swing of things. And if they don’t, if they carry on taking advantage of everyone else’s willingness to work, then they have to leave; and generally that’s what they were wanting to happen anyway.
And occasionally someone would be disruptive, would want to strike out and do something for themselves, get away from the confines of this band/bunch of people. And of course that’s fine and normal. But within the band, we’d all still have to hold tight to the rigging and make sure we were still heading in the same direction, make sure we were doing what we wanted to do together. And enjoying it! Because all this talk of Pitching in and Taking Advantage makes it sound like no fun, like Mao-suited Communists chirping the Party Line. Chumbawamba (despite what a lot of people might think) was never like that. We were too busy laughing to not have fun.
To this day we run everything ourselves in an egalitarian way. That’s not to say we agree on everything or that we’re uncritical of each other. It’s just that this way of working suits us, and it seems to be successful in that we stick together. The people in the Chumbawamba electric band who aren’t involved in the present-day acoustic Chumbawamba are still completely in our lives. We still socialise together, work together, keep up with each other’s lives. It’s like one big bloody Woodstock Love-In.
We’ve been going as a band now for 25 or so years, and I like to think it’s because that ‘do the washing up’ ethic still permeates what we do. We all have our jobs in the band and none are rated more worthy than the others. Writing a lyric shouldn’t be worth more than organising the gigs or meeting the taxman. Actually you could easily argue that dealing with taxes and gig promoters should be worth a hell of a lot more than poncing around on a laptop writing a few verses of a song. (I mean how hard is it? “I get knocked down, but I get up again…” Now that didn’t take a degree to write, for pity’s sake).
But apart from all that – I’ve had enough. I’m leaving the band. Ferguson leaves the toilet seat up, and that bugger Lou keeps singing a straight E when it’s obviously supposed to be an E flat. Can’t they see I’m an artist!? Expect a solo album soon. And isn’t it about time you did the washing up?