The Judge
RAVES!
Date: 11/07/12
Knocked Down But Never Gave Up
I suppose the day had to come, but now it has. The legendary Chumbawamba have finally called it a day (or possibly several).
Like most of my favourite 'out-there' music, I first encountered them on John Peel's show. This was a bit after their first flush of punkoid power, when they were starting to widen their style a bit. I think Rappaport's Testament (I Never Gave Up) was the first Chumba track I ever heard. A combination of an insistent beat, strong guitar riffs and intruiging lyrics (based on a Primo Levi story) was quite beguiling.
I subsequently learned more about their music, their politics, their sense of angry fun. Over the years, I bought all the albums, charting their metamorphosis from musically-less-than-entirely-competent post-punks, via their dance, sampling and mash-up years through to the final incarnation as radical folkies (with the superb voice of Lou Watts to the fore). And throughout, that intense desire to kick over the tables of the conventional way of looking at things, and to bring to wider attention the history which the ruling classes of our land (and world) would prefer us never to learn.
It's unfortunate then that most people in the world who get their information from the corporate-state media will only know them for two things: singer Danbert Nobacon ("the transvestite of the group") upending an ice bucket over class-traitor John Prescott at an awards ceremony; and for that song - a song not anywhere near representative of their art, one which they put out during their brief, hilarious association with a giant media corporation, and one which would have even got to that coveted Number One spot had some aristocractic brood-mare bimbo not got herself wrapped fatally around some car upholstery in a Paris tunnel (it went Top Ten in the US and hit the top in three other major 'territories').
There was always far, far more to their music, to their art than one of the Great Earworms Of Our Time. So Lou, Mave, Danbert, Boff, Simon, Jude, Dunst, Harry, all Chumbas past and present, thanks for the music, the fun, the passion, and for sticking a big, calloused finger right up the noses of the pretentious, the self-righteous, the vacuous and the vicious bastards who dominate our world. Just like Rappaport, you never gave up.
