Every Fire

"Nothing ever burns down by itself, every fire needs a little bit of help." --Chumbawamba

Chumbawamba began life in a squat in Leeds, Northern England, and the accents seem to bear this out. Also, they started as the northern counterparts to southern English crust rockers Crass, who became famously experimental, anti-commercial, and impossible to define easily. Chumbawamba were punk friends sharing a squat, dedicated to anti-capitalism, veganism, gay rights, anti0racism, etc. Soon, they decided to start a little band.

People who knew them at the time describe them as dedicated to their cause to the point of an alienating fanaticism. One bloke interviewed said he was forbidden from bringing his fish and chips dinner into the Chumbawamba squat house because of their hardcore vegan stance. He also lamented that they use to feed their dog carrots. "Can you imagine anything crueler?" he bemoans.

Regardless, this documentary reveals Chumbawamba, who disbanded in 2012 after thirty years of activity, to have been one of pop music's most innovative and subversive eruptions. Hailing from a communal squat in North England, they quickly ditched the quasi Crass-like anarcho-crust for a slick, if somewhat noisy, emotionally moving pop music, with beautiful, aching vocals provided by Lou Watts and Alice Nutter. The crass, sneering vocalizations of Danbert Nobacon and Dunstan Bruce added an essential counterpoint, making the mockery of radio-friendly commercial culture all the more pointed. (Danbert often sounds like an announcer on a television game show while singing songs such as "Mouthful of Shit"; Dunstan Bruce is the immediately recognizable face behind the vocalizations of the band's runaway megahit "Tubthumping." Other recognizable members from the band's most commercially viable period include guitarist Boff Whaley, vocalist, and horn player Jude Abbott, Paul Greco, and Neil Ferguson.)

Various journalists interviewed seemed to either love or detest Chumbawamba, either hailing them as naive geniuses or deriding them as cynical and crass, publicity-seeking pop sellouts who skyrocketed to fame before just as quickly falling from the world's radar. Vocalist and horn player Jude Abbot laments that so many people "take a band so very seriously." Dunstan Bruce reads a series of letters, laughingly, from irate fans, each castigating them for their decision to become "corporate sellouts" by signing with EMI at the height of their career.

The film makes apparent, through old concert clips and a tour of their original communal squat, that Chumbawamba, while they may have shined temporarily in the spotlight as a "nine day's wonder" to the corporate media, certainly didn't start out that way. Alice Nutter recalls her introduction to them after a bus ride to a demonstration in search of alcohol (she further notes that to people criticizing them for choosing a political stance to further their careers, that "Choosing politics is the worst career move you could possibly make!")

Boff Whalley does an amusing imitation of the first time Danbert shoplifted, making an absurd, nervous guilty face while hiding a book under his shirt. Vocalist Lou Watts recalls shoplifting as "never morally her thing." One wonders, at such candid remarks, just what the hell type of anarchists these are.

The answer may lie in the loosely defined boundary between their activism and their art. Chumbawamba began life as a politically radical mixture between punk rock and Bertold Brecht, a kind of progressive musical theatre that sought to find itself amidst the confusion of the cultural assault, turning the slick, pop music aesthetics of commercial, capitalist-driven radio into a subversive, satirical weapon. It didn't hurt that the members were virtually all visually appealing; the women were lovely and photogenic, the men handsome. This was not your standard group of black-clad crusties drooling on about Thatcher and nuclear war over an unlistenable clattering skronk (at least, not eventually). At some point, they transformed, metamorphosed into the Trojan Horse of cultural infiltration they claimed they wanted to be.

"We couldn't run our business and do our band at the same time...it was silly," explains Dunstan, as to why they signed to a major label. One journalist applauds them, noting that it was the most logical way to export their message. 'Poverty sucks," he adds. Another just as soon spits on them as "hypocrites."

If nothing else, this is a disingenuous way of insulting them. The members of Chumbawamba, if nothing else, come off as all almost painfully, naively sincere. One cannot help but be moved by their devotion to an ideal, even though what, precisely that ideal may have been at certain times, got lost or confused along the way. The central part of the film, showing them touring for "Tubthumping," playing it for audiences imitating group dances and hand moves as if doing the "Hokey Pokey," comes off as almost surreal.

American media talking heads such as Rosie O'Donnell yucked it up at their expense, joking of "singing anarchists" who "must just not like the rules." The corporate media treated them, in 1997, very much as "flavor of the month." The inclusion of a smiling baby on the cover of Tubthumping is vaguely reminiscent of a similar underground group's decision to use a baby on the cover of their runaway hit record. I'm speaking, of course, of Nirvana, the album Nevermind. Both bands were both sustained and cursed by their own ardent idealism, although Nirvana self-destructed far earlier for obvious reasons.

The footage of Chumbawamba's meteoric rise and quick fall have an absurdist, dream-like quality; the members of the group, stepping out on stage, almost seem as if they can't quite believe it's all real. Members such as the loquacious Alice Nutter seem as if they're trying as best as they can to adapt to the new-found fame; her anti-capitalist stance, assuring the panel assembled on a Bill Maher show that the band was okay with fans just stealing their album if they couldn't afford it, is met with blank, bemused looks.

Music fans can argue the relative merit of Chumbawamba, their multiplicity of styles, their blending of disparate genres, and their final dissolution as a folk act not being to everyone's taste. Punk purists will either embrace them as the ultimate invasion of the pop world by complete outsiders (ones who, when they started, actually had to be told their instruments needed to be tuned by a disbelieving friend), or a bunch of "sellouts" whose sellout didn't. Ultimately, afford them the success they eagerly, secretly must have craved. This author will note that they've put out a song or two, "Give the Anarchist a Cigarette," "Timebomb," and of course, the runaway smash hit of 1997, "Tubthumping," that qualifies as a legitimate classic. Whatever that means.

Sellouts or not, sincere, cynical, or something else, Chumbawamba no doubt had a psychic impact on an entire generation, one now seeing the fruition of its cause explode in recent decades as Occupy, Black Lives Matter, growing support for progressive and even socialist politicians, and the resultant pushback by the corporate, reactionary media of Fox News and bourgeois, establishment liberal icons CNN. The political landscape is beyond turbulent; it seems terminal. A group preaching the philosophy of anarchism seems prescient at present. The American zeitgeist is one of unrelenting SCORCH.

Chumbawamba may not have lit the blaze, but they helped initiate the spark. For, as the song says, "Every fire needs a little bit of help."

Bella ciao.