Wednesday, 08 September 2010 
Music News
Chumbawamba - Guest Editors - 26 February 2010
Treading the boards with Red Ladder
- or why I’ll never moan about being in a band again.
Not that I do, of course. I am completely aware of how lucky I am. Chumbawamba once played a funny little council-run festival in Middlesborough (it was during that era), where Bob Geldof headlined, and incidentally was unbelievably rude to his monitor engineer from the stage. We were backstage eating pizzas and I was (to my shame) bemoaning the lack of veggie options. Dunstan looked up from his Margherita and, without missing a beat said, “There she goes, the luckiest woman in pop”. Humbling. Although the essential issue of me being hungry, and therefore grumpy, was not addressed.
I’m straying from the point, but not that far, because working on a theatre tour recently with Red Ladder Theatre Company was, in many ways, an equally humbling experience. Essentially the concept of the roadie doesn’t exist in theatre, not at this level anyway. Back in the day, our crew were always warning us off getting involved in humping equipment around, on the grounds that if one of us injured ourselves and couldn’t play, then we were putting everybody’s jobs in jeopardy, not just our own. They were admirable sentiments, although the lofty principles had been known to fly out of the window if one of the crew copped off post-show. But in theatre (I always want to follow ‘theatre’ with ‘darling’), you may be the diva once the house lights go down, but when the van arrives at two o’clock in the afternoon and it’s raining, well you’ve just got to put your hood up and drag heavy and awkward bits of scenery up two flights of stairs along with everyone else. And then at the end of the night time’s arrow flies backwards, and you do the whole thing in reverse – unscrew everything you screwed together only hours before, dismantle that which you only recently assembled, and pack up everything you recently unpacked. It’s a strange piece of theatre in itself, and in fact the actual play, certainly for us, in our role as backing band, was almost a relaxing interlude between the two important acts of setting up and packing down. Throughout December our kitchen and hall were full of guitars, amps and a massive ear trumpet (used in only one scene, but to great comic effect).
December is generally a quiet month for Chumbawamba – no Christmas wassailing for us! – but we certainly crammed it full of action and incident last year. As well as our daily excursions with Red Ladder rehearsing and touring the winter musical ‘Riot, Rebellion & Bloody Insurrection’, we were also finishing off our album. You know, that small business of mixing it, mastering it and designing the cover – oh and getting someone to manufacture it as well (it’s all very hands on with us – we don’t readily relinquish control of what we’re doing). I remember me, Neil and Boff trying to proofread the sleeve notes in the dressing room in Skipton, as the snow started falling and we wondered whether we’d actually get home that night. So if there are mistakes, that’ll be why – blame it on Red Ladder. There’s always the worry that you’ll mess up because you’re focused on something else and not concentrating properly, and miss off something really obvious and important. Like the time when I booked band flights to Zurich, for a festival, and discovered the day before we were due to fly that I’d booked all five flights in my name. I did suggest we all wore Jude Abbott masks at the check-in desk but Lufthansa weren’t having it.
But I’m really not moaning – ‘doing a Radiohead’ as we call it. We know we’re lucky. There are mad times when we all just seem to be rushing around –getting ready to go on tour for example, or just before an album comes out (oh that’s now!) – and it’s certainly not the job for you if you want a steady pace to your life. It’s all peaks and troughs, abundance and fallow. But I don’t have to get up five days a week and drag myself through the rush hour traffic to go and do a job I hate (or even one I quite like) because I am The Luckiest Woman in Pop/Folk/Acoustic/Roots music. Cheers, Dunst. Now pass that pizza.