Part One: Chumbawamba: How to Sell Out, But in a Good Way

Margaret talks with Max Collins of Eve 6 about the squatting, organizing, and robin hood antics of Chumbawamba, the one hit wonders with a thirty year career.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello, and welcome to Cool Peoplehood Cool Stuff, the podcast
about all the cool people in history who did cool stuff.
I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and with me today is
the one and only Max Collins, who might not be
the only Max Collins is probably a bunch of Max
collins is. There's probably a few. Okay, are you Are
you aware of any other Max Collins? Is it like

(00:21):
a Highlander thing? I'm not, but my my dad's name
is Michael Collins, and um, yeah, yeah he was. For
a while there. He was like getting stopped and flagged
on flights because like people thought that you know, I
don't know that name. Yeah, yeah, that he was the

(00:45):
iras Yeah exactly, so he would have to be pulled
aside and made sure he wasn't you know an IRA guy?
Yeah yeah, who just is a litch and still alive.
Actually okay, Well, for anyone who's listening, you might know
Max Collins as the son of the Revolutionary i ra

(01:07):
A leader Michael Cotton. No. Um, you might know Max
Collins as the from the band Eve six um, or
you might know him from ship posts on Twitter. Max,
how are you doing today? I'm doing well. Thank you,
Thanks for having me on. Yeah. Um. We also have
Sophie on the call. Who's our producer, Sophie. How are
you doing? I'm doing well, Margaret, Thank you for asking.

(01:29):
All right, no one ever asks me how I'm doing.
So are you doing, Margaret? I'm good. I'm really excited.
I had a whole twenty minute conversation with you off Mike.
I know how you are, that's true. Margaret's well. Okay, listeners,
I'm I'm doing so good today that I get to

(01:50):
talk about I'm literally wearing the shirt of today's topic.
So today wearing You're wearing the merch to the show,
so to speak. Yeah, yeah, yeah, So today we're gonna
talk about a one hit wonder from the nineties. This
is not normally a music podcast, but I hope you
allill indulge me. It's gonna be worth it. Max. Have
you ever heard of a band called Jumbo Womba? Sure?

(02:11):
Have yep? So okay, completely have you have you like
played with them or anything like that? Am I talking
about like your friends? I have no idea what you
know about this? No, I've never I've never met them. Um,
I know the singer whose name I'm blanking on now.

(02:31):
A lot of singers Boff Whalley, h Bruce. Well, nope.
Now I'm going to be really embarrassed that I don't
remember the name of the people that I'm gonna be
talking about because I can't remember names. Well, I mean, yeah,
I can't either, um, but yeah, the main dude. After
I did um, I was interviewed for mel uh piece

(02:53):
written by Magdalene forgetting her last name now alright, p Mel,
I think that's no longer a magazine, but yeah, and
spoke about you know, Chumba Onemba for for the piece,
and apparently he liked it, asked for my email and stuff,

(03:14):
was going to reach out, but I never I never
got an email from the man who I'm disrespecting by
not being able to remember. It's more embarrassing for me
because this is literally a script about him. Um, and
I just incapable. For anyone who's like, wow, Margaret sure
knows all these like dates and all this history, it's
because I write it down when I researched things, and

(03:35):
then it escapes me. But for anyone who uh success
to Dunston Bruce, Yes, yes, that name that I also remembered.
For anyone who is either too young or successfully lived
under a rock. During the late nineties, there was this
song called tub Thumping and it's about drinking and falling
over and then not being falling over anymore. And it

(03:57):
was fucking everywhere. Uh, and I fucking hated it. Um.
I was in high school and I was busy setting
myself up as someone who hated everything that was popular,
and that was my original introduction to Chumba Womba. Then okay,
can I ask you a quick question? Did you did

(04:18):
you legitimately hate the song? Like, did it make you
bristle with antagonism when you heard it if you were
like alone in your car or something like that, or
did the version of yourself that you wanted to enjoy
and present to the world. Um did that? You know?

(04:41):
Did did that person not like Chumba womb Because I
know with radio rock of the nineties, you know, like
if tub Thumping or like Hey, Jealousy or even some
of those live hits came on when I was in
my car alone, I would enjoy the ship out of them.

(05:02):
I would be totally moved by them and stuff. Yeah, definitely,
I definitely wasn't telling my friends that, you know, Yeah,
that's sort of embarrassing. Yeah. No, I I genuinely don't
know the answer to that question, because I've like rewritten
my own script in my head. You know. I think
I tended not to like anything that was happy in

(05:23):
the late nineties, and so I think the tub pumping.
But on the other hand, it is just so like
now I love this song, right, and actually, hey, Jealousy.
I actually always liked Helly Jealousy. But I think it's
because it was like just before I got too cool
for everything, right. I don't know if I could go

(05:43):
back whatever. I'm not mad at my younger self, even
though it was affectatious that I refused everything that was like.
And then I listened to the radio. What am I
doing listening to radio if I'm claiming to hate everything
on it? I don't know. I know what you mean, though. Yeah.
So I started learning more about the band, and they've
been around for almost twenty years before that song came out.

(06:04):
They were an anarcho punk collective. Selling out was this
calculated move to reach more people, sustained themselves and just
give a fuck ton of money away to political projects
working to destroy capitalism. I found out that they started
out as working class kids who wanted to be in
a band but couldn't play any instruments and to know
how to sing. They lasted for thirty years. They toward
the world. They pranked everyone, They got arrested again and again.

(06:25):
They squatted a house, they worked collectively, they took in runaways,
they raised kids, and along the way they learned how
to make really fucking good music. And so I will
present to you my hypothesis that Chumba Womba is the
single punkus thing to have ever happened. And no offense
to me and no offense to you, Max, But that
is my hypothesis that I'm working off of cool. A

(06:45):
wonder if Crass is gonna come and yell at me,
But you know, whatever weren't. Isn't there a cross over there?
I feel like maybe there's an ex member of Crass
who was in Tremba Womba or something like that. I
know that they heavily influenced, well, Crass heavily influenced Chumbaweba.
I don't know about vice versa because they like came
out just a few years after Cross kind of came
on the scene. Um, but I don't know whether or not.

(07:08):
I'm sure that they all know each other now. And
so today the story I want to present is the
story of a band that's sold out, but in a
good way, the chumba Wanba story. Yeah, and I'm how
I'm glad I got over myself. That's the subtext, Margaret
over herself. We start our story in Burnley, somewhere, some

(07:28):
nowhere town in northern England, population people. And it's in
the northern England. I I didn't know this growing up,
so maybe other Americans didn't know this. It's the the
poorer part of England, the place you're supposed to make
fun of everyone who's from for being like backwards and provincial.
The Northern accent gets compared to the Southern accent or
maybe the Appalachian accent in terms of its social impact,

(07:51):
is the best I've ever heard it described. And Burnley,
where they start, is this sort of town where all
the factory jobs have gone overseas and the town is
quietly dying, just familiar to you know, many people who
might be listening to this. Most of the band is
from there, born in the sixties. Boff Walley, the guitarist,
he's the one who he got tasked with writing the

(08:12):
book about Chumba Womba at some point. So I know
more about his childhood than anyone else's because he wrote
a book about it and I read the book. But
he's not the protagonist or the lead singer or in
charge of Chumba Womba. They were all very aggressively a
collective at all times. Um. But he's one of the founders,
and so he wrote the book, so we're gonna talk

(08:33):
about him. He was a Mormon as a teenager. His
mom had converted. He was a believer. He was raised poor, thankfully,
estranged from a shitty birth dad, and he had pretty
cool stepdad. We probably I didn't. I didn't know that
there were British Mormons. Well, so he's the only one
who started off Mormon that I'm aware of. Maybe the

(08:54):
other ones did. I think that. I'm just saying in general,
I thought Mormonism was a distinctly American. Oh, I see
what you're saying. Yeah, you know religious phenomena. Yeah, that
was yeah. They I don't know exactly how it hit
the sixties in England, but I was reading about that.

(09:14):
I had kind of a similar reaction, being like this
thing has gotten out of Salt Lake City. Um, someone
should do something about it. I mean yeah, yeah, and
so so so boff. He he's raised in this family,
seems like a reasonably happy family childhood or he's not
the type to talk to about his family. And an
autobiography and he's he's really into football, British football, soccer whatever,

(09:39):
and he's really shit at it. And six I think
he's about fifteen years old, maybe fourteen. He sees the
sex Pistols on TV and singing Anarchy in the UK.
He sees Johnny Rotten and he's like, this is it.
I'm in. I'm going to be a punk um, which
is way more original than me deciding I'm going to

(09:59):
be a punk and like, you know, the early auths
or early nineties or whatever. His best friend Midge is
into punk too, and Midge's dad is obsessed with saving
electricity to save money. So it's this house like imagine
a house where like all of the light bulbs are
forty what light bulbs and everything's dark all the time,
and his dad would yell at you if you rang

(10:20):
the doorbell too many times because you're wasting his electricity,
and and Midge were pants so tight, and this is
the opposite of my experience of being a teenager in
the nineties. He wore pants so tight that he had
to cut slits in the bottom for his feet to
go through. And again direct opposition also to the style
of the time, which was flared jeans. Yeah no, that's amazing,
because we would cut slits in our pants too. But

(10:44):
I mean we were buying like size forty waste yeh
pants from like Ross Dressed for less and then cutting
triangles in the bottom and adding a piece of fabric
under it to make them even bigger. Because the goal
was you wanted your his shelters to be completely covered,
completely shrouded by pants. Yeah. Yeah, I I loved my

(11:08):
elephant leg pants in the nineties. I used to walk
around barefoot underneath them because because no one knew every Yeah,
and I felt very you know, I would I would
end up in like cities. I would take public transit
to like other cities and just feel very like edgy
that I had successfully gone without. Okay, anyway, so we

(11:28):
have the opposite of the um so Boff and Midge
they're going to show us whenever they can. The late
seventies and one day they're at a bus stop and
they see a kid across the street who's wearing a
straight jacket, a homemade straight jacket that he made for
himself out of a parka and that he needed his
mom's help to get into. And they're like, oh, we
gotta be friends with that guy. So they go and

(11:50):
meet that guy. His name is Dan. He's going to
be in Chamba Oneba two. Boff says in his autobiography
that he hated school. He never did his homework and
ship um and this might have been true, but he
else of like got into Oxford and Cambridge, So I
I wonder how much this is, how accurate this is.
I don't know enough about British schooling. But he says
that the main reason he went to school is that

(12:12):
him and his friend were selling bootleg records. They would
they would take a bus to another town and they
meet this like sketchy, grown as adult with food in
his beard, who would sell these kids illegally copied classic
rock on vinyl. And then they would go back and
be like, hey, do you want to buy a record?
You know, hey, you want to buy Pink Floyd or
whatever too? To the other kids in school, and the

(12:33):
same bootlegger later pays for a bunch of the local
punks to record their albums, which I think is fucking cool.
I like this weird, random, sketchy bootlegger guy. He loses
religion soon enough. He uh, he starts looking at his options,
you know, he's like looking around. He's like, I don't
know if I want to be religious. A punk girl
takes him home after a UK sub show and and
fox him, and he's like, no, no, no no, this is

(12:55):
the sex rock and roll, punk rock, fuck Mormonism. And
so they start a band and they have a problem. Uh,
none of them know how to play any instruments. So
they add more friends, presumably to get more of a
chance to learn how to play instruments. But there there
are other friends they add also don't know how to
play any instruments. One of them who did not end

(13:17):
up in Chumba one because he moved away. His name
was high Jump in the Deem. He's a South Asian
immgrant who always send up for the high jump and
then jumped into the pole because it was funny. Uh.
And then they had Bootleg Phil. Everyone has cool names
when they're teenagers. You know. Bootleg Phil was the bootlegging partner.
I don't know. This is this is how your band
started to write None of you all could do anything.

(13:37):
I actually, I actually don't know much about the origin
of your band, and so I'm curious. Yeah, I think
I think a lot of bands start that way. Um,
you know, our story was just a lot less illustrious,
interesting and cool. Um, if you wrote the book on it,

(13:58):
you could probably figure out a way to do it. Yeah,
figure out a way to sort of dress it up.
But uh, but yeah, I think I think that's a
fairly common tale. But it sounds like, I mean, with us,
we could sort of make our way, you know, uh,
through some chords and stuff like that. It sounds like
maybe Trumbo Bomba was like, you know, really quite literally

(14:22):
coming at this with you know, absolutely zero musical uh
education or proficiency. Yeah, although it's interesting because I do
wonder a little bit. I've watched some of their older videos.
They had this band I'm about to get to you
called CHIMPI It's Banana and they and the book is like, oh,
we didn't know anything, We didn't know how to tune

(14:43):
our instruments. But it's actually like passable punk rock. Like
I've I've seen videos of them playing, and I'm like, no,
I would have a good time at this show, you know.
Um and so, and it seems it seems like they're,
you know, there's maybe a little bit of a theme
developing here where you know, in some sense, they're writing
their own lore a little bit. Yeah, which is fine,

(15:06):
you know, which is great. Um, but it sounds like, yeah,
maybe one dude was like a little bit more academically
inclined than he Yeah, maybe they were a little bit
more talented than they're letting on. But it's all good.
I'm I'm I'm here for the story. Yeah. Yeah. And
I actually I really appreciate that they're participate in mythologizing,

(15:28):
you know, I I yeah, I think that's great. I
do too. And so they formed this band called Chimpeats
Banana and basically they're like at this thing where this
promoter is like, if you're in a band, write down
the name of your band on this slip of paper.
And so they write down Chimpeats Banana, even though they're
not a band, and he calls them up and he's like, hey,
you got a gig, and so they go and play shows,
and they play a couple of dozen shows. I believe

(15:49):
it's chimpets Banana, and they theme each one differently, and
they're already art weirdos from the very beginning, Like one
of them is like, Okay, this one we dress in pajamas,
this one we lie around and lounge chairs. They do
whatever they one and they you know, again, they claim
they're terrible. I've seen footage and yeah, I would go yeah.
And they're still in high school or whatever the fun
British people call high school. Um you think I would know,

(16:12):
because British people make better high school TV than Americans do. Um,
but I don't know what they call it. So they're
punks in high school and they spend their time like
getting in trouble and they enjoyed. They get you know,
they adorned their jackets with safety pins and get called
into the administrator's office for that, and they like spit
on adults. And they also are really into football and
being football fans, which is not in the normal punk

(16:34):
narrative and I find really interesting. Um, I don't know,
are you. I know Sophie is a big sports player. Um, well,
I do remember I do remember. Um, how should I
introduce him? You know, punk trovocateur um, you know, infamous

(16:56):
lead singer of Screeching Weasel then Weasel Penning. Um. I
think he maybe even had a column and Maximum Rock
and Roll where he would talk about baseball at the time.
He was like a massive, massive baseball fan. Um. And yeah,
I always like it when punk rockers like play against
type like that. Yeah, Sophie, I went and found you

(17:17):
punks who like sports. That was my sole purpose. That
was not my sole purpose. But so so Boff graduates
and goes off and and he gets offered to go
to Cambridge or Oxford, and he's like, no funk all that.
He goes to a local school, like a local trade
school for a minute, and then he goes off to
art school near London, and at one point he gets

(17:38):
arrested for being a punk. Like it's the first time
he's arrested, and they accused him of having stolen his
own camera, and he's wearing a shirt that says I
don't want to go to art school, so I don't
know whatever. He arrest the kated goes to art school
for wearing a shirt says I don't go to art
I don't want to go to art school. Fair enough,
fair enough. Uh. He drops out because he was true

(17:58):
to his shirt. It wraps out and he buys a
twenty pound guitar, which is not weight but instead a
unit of measurement of price. So it's a one stone
six pounds guitar, right, it wasn't a less Paul yeah. Um.
And so he goes back home and all the punks
are hanging out in this new spot railway workers club

(18:19):
that some guy named Spider was renting out once a week,
And it was Spider who introduced Boff to the works
of dead nineteenth century anarchists like Malatestin bakoun in Um.
It was Spider and Bob's new girlfriend Lou, who ends
up in Chumbawamba. Literally, she gets dragged into the band
because she's the only person who knows how to sing,
and they're like, we have shows where you come sing

(18:39):
for us. We don't know how to sing. Boff gets
a job as a postal carrier. He is a dead
end job. He doesn't like it. He doesn't want an
office life. They all spend half their time skipping work
and hitchhiking around the country to go to punk shows,
and they sleep in bus shelters and they just are
punks in the late seventies, which actually sounds really nice.
It sounds like a really it's time to be allowed

(19:01):
to be real. Um. Around this time, High Jump into
Deem moves with this family to Tampa, Florida, and a
few months later, the rest of the heroes they give
up on sleepy Burnley and they moved to the big
city of Leeds, which is an hour east of Burnley.
And so chimp eats bananas done, and now Chumbawamba is
the new thing. It's just they're both terrible names. They

(19:24):
don't improve upon their name as where as I'm concerned.
The four of them they run a place there like
and they go to college, and then they drop out
of college, and then they try and figure out how
to actually have a band. And they started just swapping
instruments constantly and just spending all of their time. They
build a practice space like egg cartons on the wall,
and just like try to have a fucking band. Uh,
summer of they say fuck it, four of them with

(19:47):
one acoustic guitar and one snare drum. They hitchhike to Paris,
they start squatting a stadium like they just it wasn't
an abandoned stadium. They just sneak in at night and
sleep in the stands and then try to slink off
unnoticed the morning, off to go bust all day in
the big fancy city, making enough money for food and beer,
basically being twenty year old punks. And that's how they

(20:10):
start Chumbawamba. And their name was picked to mean nothing.
Every time they tell the story of how they got
the name, they tell a different lie. The most prevalent story,
which reporters now report is fact, but Boff Whalley says
this is a lie when he recounts it in this book.
So who fucking knows is that while they were busting
in Paris they got hell outclassed by a bunch of

(20:30):
drummers from Africa who were chanting something that to them
sounded like chump chumba whalen. And if so, this is
the biggest thing that they did that doesn't look very
good in retrospect, you know, being like, oh, that sounds
like nonsense, let's take it, you know, but who knows?
Who fucking knows? They also claimed that they got it
from some pub where there were two genders on the

(20:52):
bathroom and one was Chumba and one was Wamba. However
got the name. They played their first show on January two,
which before I'd done so much as be born. Um,
they're way ahead of me, Jamba Womba. I'm pretty bitter
about this. I have a lot of catching up to do.
Like the rest of their shows at this time, everyone

(21:12):
ignores them, and they just did weird ship and called
it punk. They film projected behind them of everyone wearing
dresses and hanging out in a graveyard. Yeah, they're weird
fucking punk kids. I like them. I clearly like them.
I am recording a podcast about it. Making everyone listen
to me talking about my his band, as I think
is cool. Their second show was in Tampa, Florida. They

(21:36):
flew to Tampa to visit their friend, the Deem, and
they played a show where everyone ignored them and they
got kicked out of the Deem's house by his mom
forgetting the carpets. Gross. You imagine this iteration of this
anarcho communist band playing in Tampa, Florida in the early
nineteen eighties like that that you you could not you know,

(22:01):
dream up a more hostile environment for them. Totally, totally
um so. So back in England, they pick up Dunstan Bruce,
whose name I obviously remember this whole time. I'm sorry,
Dunston if you ever listen to this, I just don't
remember names. Who put up a bandmates wanted sign in

(22:23):
a shop. And he's the guy who wins up the
male lead singing the mail lead on top flumping. We'll
get to toub flumping. After he meets the punks, he
drops out of architecture school and moves into their shitty apartment.
He gets disowned by his high society dad for doing
all of this, which I think makes him like the
the rich kid of the band compared to everyone else,
is like these small town punks. But obviously this gets

(22:45):
really messy when you throw in disowned, right, Like, I
don't know what that looked like. You know, I have
a friend of mine who like, grew up southern society rich, right,
but he got kicked out of the house when he
was sixteen for being trans Like does he have class privilege?
I don't know, because fucking fucking homeless kid when he
was sixt you know, Yeah, No, these are class traders. Yeah. Yeah,

(23:05):
and speaking of class traders in the opposite direction, this
show is supported by advertisers, and this is pointing out
that well, actually here, well we'll have good advertisers this time.
So so this show whenever possibly try to be sponsored
by very positive things like my my favorite perennial is uh, well,

(23:25):
actually it's a season, it's a it's an annual crop.
But potatoes, the concept of potatoes is what I like
to be sponsored by because I think potatoes are very good.
We've also had other sponsors such as sleeping dogs. Um, Sophie,
what are some of the what are our what are
some of our repeating? A really good calm drinkable tap water? Um,

(23:49):
A pillow that always stays cool. Oh I like that one.
Yeah that's good. Yeah. So is there anyone that you
would like to be sponsored by in this and uh
for this show, like something that's just you feel good about? Yeah? Um,
I'd like to be sponsored by conceptual Kindness and aspirational Love.

(24:16):
All right, So this show is sponsored only by Conceptual Kindness,
Aspirational Love, and Sleeping Dogs. And if there's any other
advertisers that you hear that is a problem and you
should write to Sophie on Twitter at I right, okay
and complain and we are back from those ads are

(24:40):
ray okay. So so as important to the music that
they're around at this time, the things that are inspiring
them is also the radical politics at the time. They're
involved in the anti nuclear movement. It's like peace movement
against the Falkland Wars, which I literally only know about
because of eighties punk. You know, the American education system
wasn't like really big on the wars of the only

(25:00):
a century of UM England. And Margaret Thatcher is coming
to power, who again I only know about through punk,
but it was a yeah, not a popular person in
the punk scene in UM. Basically, Margaret Thatcher is this
right wing asshole who gives Margaret's a bad name everywhere
and was Prime Minister of the whole of the eighties.

(25:23):
And then there's Crass And if I ever become a
music podcast then Crass will end up on it. But
unlike some other like kind of would be radicals at
the time who would like quote the situations but not
really mean it, Crass like was the opposite. They like
they meant it about politics, specifically like anarchist pacifism, and
they there are this collective of x hippies and punks

(25:44):
who redefined punk music for better and worse. Musically, um, politically,
I think they're great, although I'm not a pacifist but whatever.
But like you know, they change punk punk's direction in
a lot of ways, and they tied into direct action
in the peace movement. And the point of me bringing

(26:04):
up crosses so I can tell you, and I guess
accidentally the audience the most embarrassing punk thing I've ever done,
which was that, um, one time, me and two of
my friends started an acoustic cross cover band with the cello,
accordion and guitar, and we were so we were so
let's say good, we're so good at this that not
only did we get kicked out of the bar that

(26:26):
we were playing that we had been booked to play,
the entire convention that booked us to play this bar
got kicked out of the bar. They were like, you know,
we don't want you here anymore, even though you paid
to be here. And yeah, and actually the the cellist
of that is the person who did our theme music
on Woman. She's actually a very good cellist and his
my fault that the band was terrible anyway, very proud

(26:50):
of this. Have you, uh do you have any worst
terrible things that you've managed to do in this vein
curious thanks for second year. I mean in terms of
like mortifying moments on stage. Yeah, one leaps to mind,

(27:11):
which is going to be really funny contextually here, because
but we we did. My band EAP six did a
co headlining tour with the band gold Finger and the
year two thousand or two one. And you know gold

(27:31):
Finger by comparison to EEP six, which is, you know,
a radio and the bands um two public perception. Um,
you know, gold Finger was a pump, and so we
would go on every night usually like a handful of

(27:53):
middle fingers or like you know, gold Finger, who's a
real punk band, and you're six x and you know
your radio rock you suck and um you know this
was in my drinking days. Uh so you know I
was I was hitting the stage you know, with anywhere

(28:14):
between like sort of a buzz to being like pretty
substantially loaded, and um so this one night, I think
we were actually in Salt Lake City and this one
dude just wasn't putting his middle finger down and it
was really and it was really grinding my gears. So
I was like I kind of vacuumed him up to
the front of the stage, like you, I like, come here, uh,

(28:38):
And so he did. He came up to the front
of the stage and I had like three quarters of
behind akin that was like next to my microphone, and
and I dumped it on his head. I just emptied
the entire thing, this guy said, and and that wants
people over, you know, yeah, because now you're real punks, right,
because now I'm real punk, I like, you know, and uh.

(28:59):
And in so like I sauntered back to center stage.
We had a bass player out with us at the time,
so I was just being like douchebag singer guy. And
you know, we start a song and I put my
foot on the wedge like a rock god and promptly
slipped because like I got to some of the beer

(29:21):
on either the wedge or the bottom of my foot,
so super slippery, and I slipped and ate ships like
I fell all the way down to the ground. It
was the most like instantaneous karmic retribution I've ever experienced.
That is perfect. Yeah, yeah, it sucked, but you know,

(29:43):
it also felt kind of deserved. So it's like, you know,
I'll take this one on the chin. Yeah, I mean
like both things are perfectly good, you know, like both
things just make a better story. Like both things are fine.
Everyone who went was like too crazy things happened tonight,
you know, yeah yeah yeah. So some some of Chumba

(30:03):
one Ba buy a school bus with a few older punks,
like mid twenties punks, and they make the decision to
buy the bus pretty much because the guys selling it
had six six six in his phone number, and they
fix up the bus. They head off to Europe to
to bum around in a bus, and they bust enough
money for food and fuel. They park every night at
the outskirts of town. They had bonfires and argued about politics.

(30:27):
They played impromptu shows to people who did not give
a ship at all, Like they would just like show
up at a cafe and like pull instruments out of
the bus and play and everyone's like, what the fund
is happening? This sucks. Sometimes they would just put on
a cassette recording of music and pretend to play along
on tennis rackets like as guitars, and all the people
on the bus took on ridiculous punk names like don
Quixote and Mad Hatter and legal Aid. It's awesome. I

(30:51):
love the conversions here of like, um, hippie aesthetics with
punk ones. You know, yeah exactly, you got the reappropriated bus. Yeah,
you know, bonfires and stuff it, you know, almost distinctions
without difference when you prepare them to Yeah, yeah, no, totally,
And like the whole thing just sounds like everything I

(31:12):
dreamed of doing when I was a teenager, you know.
But the ten people crammed into the bus, they start
to lose their minds. One of them decides he's Jesus.
Fun arguments turn into not fun arguments. The bus keeps
breaking down and they have to hustle like hell for
spare parts and gas. One one guy gets off the
bus and France said, literally no one has ever seen
him again. Um, one by one everyone was it the guy?

(31:36):
I wondered if it was the guy who decided he
was Jesus. That seems the most likely. Yeah, although don
Quixote and Matt Hatter are fully up there as also
born also born travelers. Yeah, and you know, one by
when everyone leaves, and to be honest, this sounds like
most of the times I've done. Basically this like travel
around in a bus where people are like, well, we're

(31:57):
gonna have this great communal experience. Then one by one
everyone's like, I want my own life by yeah. So
the three lads of Chumbawemba who are on the bus
at this point, they go and they pick and they
go pick grapes in the south of France and they
decide they're not getting paid enough and they're young anarchists,
so they go on strike. So they get fired um
and then they go home to England and four of

(32:18):
them move into a squat in Leeds and it's called
the South View House and it's this huge Victorian red
brick almost mansion in a state of near collapse. It
was falling apart when they moved in. It had been
squatted on and off for a long time. There's an
overturned black Volkswagen Beetle in the middle of the garden.
Scavengers have been all over it. They've stolen everything worth stealing,
down to the the door knobs and the floorboards have

(32:41):
been stolen out of this house. It has never occurred
to me that floor boards have value value and the
banisters they steal the banisters and the furniture. Not Chumbawemba
whoever had been there before. Yeah. The guy actually who
had been the most immediately previous squatter had just moved
out and so decided it was free to move in.

(33:03):
Was a guy who only ate avocados and wore a
loincloth and followed a religion called Life Wave, which I
tried to learn more. Yeah, I try to learn more
about Life Wave, but unfortunately not available through Google. So
usually when I say that, Sophie looks something up in
about thirty seconds and then schools me on it. Um.

(33:23):
So they move in and they start fixing everything up.
They dump all their money and time into the house.
They learn electrical and plumbing and all of that ship
in the process. They although by the end they they're
in this house for like ten or ten years or
more by the end then, and it's no, it's no
small feat at that time to learn electrical and plumbing.
It's not like you're going videos, No, that's a good

(33:44):
check books from a library. Yeah, and finding some old
guy who kind of hates you because you're a hippie
and being like, hey, can you teach me how to
fix this thing? Yeah? Yeah. No, that's a good point
because I'm like, oh, I can do a lot of
that stuff, and I'm like, I watch YouTube every night.
I like, this is what I do to decompress as
I watch people rewire things and say rewire things now,

(34:07):
so far, so good. By the end, they claim that
the house is held together by the yellow paint on
the walls, like the cracks. They just paint over with
yellow paint, over and over. Within a year, there's nine
of them living there, including a bunch of their old
punk friends from Burnley, Alice Nutter and Lou who end
up in Chumbawamba pretty much its whole thirty year run
as an actual band. And Alice Nutter She's named after

(34:29):
a woman who had been murdered for witchcraft and I
believe Northern England hundreds of years earlier. They live communally.
They pull their money, they shoplift what they need. They
pay off Alice's crime debt because when she first moved in,
she had committed a bunch of like felony level fraud
and they had to pay it all off collectively, which
is very nice of everyone. I think it's awesome. Alice

(34:52):
later refers to this house is the first place that
she ever felt secure, the first home that she had,
you know, and I doubt she was the only one
who felt that way. Just found her quote about it.
Um not everyone in the house joins the house band Chambawamba,
but most of them did. And it's kind of interesting,
right because this is now I'm totally off script, but
it's it's kind of interesting right because, like on the bus,

(35:13):
it's this classic hippie dream and it kind of just
seems like it goes terribly but this house, they they
pull it off. You know, it doesn't last forever. Nothing
last forever, but they do pull this off. Everyone cooks,
everyone cleans. Everyone sort of collectively gave garden in a shot,
but then failed to grow potatoes. It's not even me
making a potato joke like it usually is. Uh, they

(35:33):
tried to grow potatoes and they got blite, and everyone's like,
you know, it's actually easier to buy bulk food. Let's
just buy bulk. They run a printing press, I believe,
in their basement and start publishing anarchist pamphlets. They rescue
a dog and make him their mascot. They went vegan
to various levels of strictness. Again, this is the early eighties.
For a brief and terrible moment. This is this is

(35:55):
me making a potato reference for no good reason. For
a brief and terrible moment. One of them, Dan goes
on a strict diet that precludes potatoes because he got
mashed and now he got mashed potatoes in his ear
from a food fight and he had to go to
the doctor. And I got really sick from this, like infected.
I love these people so much, saying my heart is swelling,

(36:19):
and so he gets because I'm just like super strict
all natural diet. And then eventually he gives up and
goes back to whatever else he was seating, and they
start watching their neighbors kids after school, and years later,
still in the squatted house, two of them have kids
their own. Two fifteen year old runaway punks move in
and Lou and both have to go down and meet
their parents and basically be like, hey, your kids ran

(36:42):
away from home and they're in our house and you
should let them stay. Um, we're not a cult, totally
not a cult. We promise you we're not a cult.
And it works. The kids staying. They joined Shambawamba at
least one of them wrote that ship all the way
up to fucking world tour, you know, number two in
the pop charts, and which which fucking so awesome. Yeah,

(37:04):
like that is that is I mean it's unfortunately the
fifteen year old Runaways dream, you know. Um. And so
they're they're all already I mean they're punks and they're
punk band, but they're already going art and pop and
theater directions with their music. And Alice is opening the
shows by reading feminist poetry. And one of the first

(37:26):
pranks that they run is they start a skinhead band
to make fun of the right wing skinhead scene, and
they call themselves skin Disease, and I remember reading it's
one of the most incredible trolls. They they find an
a brave and a brave one too, because you're talking
about like a pretty violent, you know opposition here. No,

(37:51):
that's a really good point. Yeah, like walking in especially
as a bunch of like at this point they're still
pacifists walking into this scene that really likes eating people
and making fun of them. Yeah, And so they tell
this by compilation to record their song, and their song
is called I'm Thick, and the lyrics is they just

(38:13):
say I'm thick and over and over yeah yeah, And
it appears on the compilation UM along with all these
like right wing patriotic songs. It's not like a Nazi compilation.
It's a like go England, we beat the Falkland War whatever,
like you know, back when you used to have right

(38:35):
wingers who weren't Nazis in the Western world. Yeah, yeah, no, okay,
and so and so. At this point, they're still pacifists
because the anarchist scene in the early eighties in England
and probably because of Crass. And then they play a
benefit for the minor strike that was going on alongside
the York's old punk band and Nazis show up an

(38:57):
attack and they end to the show by stabbing people
right um and basically apparently make fun of everyone for
being too pacifist to fight back, and then closer to
home and leads someone, uh, a right wing person like
smashes up their van while it's in the driveway to
get the Commies or whatever, and so Chumba Oneba was like,

(39:17):
all right, you know what, we're not pacifists anymore, this
which makes sense to me. I mean, it's like part
of why I'm not pacifists, I'm like, well, Nazis, Nazis.
That's that's the end of the argument, Nazis. So they
get a baseball bat and when the Van Snasher came back,
they swarmed him. They held him down, and basically we're like, hey,
if you fucking come near us again, you're leaving an

(39:40):
ambulance um. And he didn't come around to funk with
them anymore, But you know what will funk with you,
our products and services that support this podcast, Sophie. Are
they pacifists or they violence us? I can't remember. Are
we supported by both sides of that argument? We are
supported by both sides of that hard gum sure Capital

(40:04):
very good at playing both sides of that particular argument.
Violence for them, peace for their opposition. I think that's
the here's some ads, Okay, we're back. And so they've
now changed their attitude, and they did more than play

(40:27):
benefit shows for the minor strike. They print up posters,
they organized, they joined pickets. And one of the things
that I like about this part of the story is
that like they were punks, and so they weren't necessarily
culturally the same as the miners that they're working in
solidarity with but they're from the same towns, right, Like
they are not this like totally distinct like rich siting

(40:50):
not everyone who clearly not everyone lives in cities is rich,
but like they're not like coming in from outside and
being like, oh, you poor miners, let us like look
down upon you. These are pep from these areas. You know. Yeah,
they're from the same class. They're just people who gravitated
to making yeah, exactly, um, and it's not bad when
other people show up to help, but like working class

(41:12):
solidarity fucking rules. So one time one of them while
they're on a picket because they say on instead of
in whatever it's in the snow And Chumba Womba does
not take credit for this action. They describe it in
detail in their book. But there are several things that
happened that are illegal that Chumbawemba simply describes as things
that happened that they were around. And one of them

(41:34):
is that there's a one of those uh you know,
those concrete posts to keep cars from running off the road,
and they build a snowman over it and they put
a picket hat on it, and the cops get really
mad about this snowman, so they drive it, they try
to drive it over and smash up their own cop car. Um.

(41:57):
And I feel like that's a good way to have
a weird ticket is to watch cops smash up their
own cars. Yeah, Like, and they have all of these
What a weird coincidence. We were randomly at dozens of
major riots and numerous countries that just happened to coincide
with our tour. And I don't know what the statute
of limitations is for rioting across Europe in the eighties,
nineties and two thousands, So I'm going to go with coincidence.

(42:19):
It was just a weird coincidence, just a coincidence. The
miners lost despite the pluckiness of the pickets. Um. And
it's this whole big deal that I haven't fully wrapped
my head around, right And I'm not a huge eighties
labor history England person yet, although through this podcast it

(42:39):
will eventually get to all of it. It really changes
things in your In England, industry closes, scabs and cops
pretty much need to move out of the towns they're
living in because everyone fucking hates them, and so just
to get like divides these communities. But for Chumba Womba,
this was a big political awakening. They've been politically involved
this whole time. But what they realize is that by

(43:01):
being in solidarity with people who weren't like, culturally aligned
with them, they realized how basically naval gazing and insular
and obsessively d I why punk was not all then
but aspects of it and had all these weird and
specific rules. From their point of view, all these like
cultural rules, this is going to be totally unfamiliar to
anyone who's involved with leftism today. There's no way that

(43:22):
we would ever police our own over increasingly complicated systems
of rules. Yeah, it wouldn't make any sense, you know,
actually would And so bof at least is reminded of
his Mormon upbringing or points out that he's reminded of this,
And so they release their first DP called Revolution, and

(43:45):
it basically is making fun of that kind of elitism.
They're not mocking the idea of revolution, they're mocking the
weird rules that everyone has. Basically, they're like, we gotta
be fucking better because we're not trying to have a scene.
We're trying to fucking different society, and and they're really
politically savvy, right, Like I had kind of when I
found out that Chumba Womba was like into radical politics,
I'd kind of be like, oh, that's cool. But I

(44:06):
hadn't realized quite that they were like in it, like
it was there as as much a part of what
they did. Um Alice Nutter in the late nineties, I
think in the tub thumping era told a fan zine
about single issue politics. Single issues half the time, This
is me quoting Alice Nutter. Single issues half the time
end up being welfare groups for social misfits, all the

(44:29):
sad bastards that don't have a life joined single issues.
I refused to be guilt tripped, saying that any one
thing is the most important. The problem is we don't
have an overview of what's happened to us politically. It's
really hard to step back and look over the last
fifteen years, capitalism has come on and leaps and bounds.
Why ain't we Instead people go, well, I've done this,
and I've done that. We've been really stupid. We've not

(44:51):
responded to what capitalism has done. Instead, we've been too
busy policing each other. I've changed the way about things.
Yeah right, Um, I've changed the way I go about
things because I've had to because I want to live
in the real world. That's the quote. Brilliant yeah, and
and and incredibly relevant I know, years later from even then,

(45:12):
and it's like I think about it because like I
got into politics twenty years later than them, and I
had to have all these epiphanies all over again, you know. Um.
Their their ap Revolution is a hit, at least by
their standards at the time. It gets radio play. I
think it's their first radio play. It charts on the
indie charts, and so they put out next to a
full length called Pictures of Starving Children Sell Records, which

(45:35):
is basically a whole album making fun of live aid,
a charity concert happening at the time that costs millions
of dollars to stage. And because they're weird, annoying art punks,
they pressure one of their own bandmates, I think Dan,
to make himself puke so that they could record the
sound for the end of the record. And I watched
at one point an interview with the sound producer and

(45:55):
it's like the first time he met them, and he
was like, I met this band and the first thing
they made me do was like record one of them
throwing up, this is great, I'm doing. I've made good
decisions in my life, thought the sound producer, and to
to funk with the sort of standards that they feel
like they're being held to. They would do ship like
release an album of like punk pop um and then

(46:16):
followed up with an acapella album. They would they opened
for motor Head by singing acapella. They started in course
speaking of opening for someone and getting their middle fingers
thrown at you. Oh my god. Yeah, just go and
sing seventeen century workers songs to people who are at
a festival in Europe to see Motorhead. Uh. And they

(46:39):
started corporating dance music and house music into their music
and it's not a cynical thing. They just like going
to raves and doing ecstasy. So they're like, bucket, let's
do rave music. And they also wrote an album by
how much they love sports because they're working class British
kids at the end of the day. Ah. And that
reminds me of have you are you familiar with VIAGRAA boys,

(47:02):
I am not. Please tell me about VIAGRAA Boys actually no, yeah,
go ahead, okay, yeah, fantastic fantastic punk down uh that
I discovered via Sleaford Mods, who definitely have some crass
influence in in their sounds. But they have a song
called Biagara Boys has a song called sports and uh,

(47:24):
you just gotta look up the video and watch it
for yourselves. It's it's fantastic. Yeah. I I love the
tension around things like sports in the subculture because you
have all these people being like, no, we're too cool
for everything that's cool, and then other people are like, yeah,
but it's really fun. Have you all tried playing sports?
It's really fun, very very yeah. Yeah. And so they

(47:49):
tour constantly and it's the only way they can make
any money because they're not selling enough records to sustain themselves.
And they also have this permanent shoplifting competition because of
course they do, which is who can steal the most
expensive and ridiculous ship before their their shows. Um. One
time they get banned from a venue in Dublin because
they throw packages of condoms into the audience, which is

(48:10):
condoms were barely legal in Ireland at the time. You
had to be eighteen. You can only buy them in
certain places. It didn't help that Alice Nutter was dressed
up like a non drinking out of a bottle of
whiskey while she's breaking this law. And then Boff Whalley
gets into fell running, which I believe is best I
can tell is British for trail running, and how it

(48:31):
happens is well, first he goes and sees some fell
runners with his dad, and he sees one of them
with a pink mohawk, and he's like, huh, and I
think the guy wins, but I'm not sure, and he
and Chumbawamba opens for Conflict and Conflicted, this punk band
that at the time they always carried baseball bats to
their shows because their shows always turned into riots. So
the show turns into a riot and the cops come

(48:52):
to arrest everybody, and the punks start fighting back, and
Boff meets this punk in the crowd who was the
champion fell runner he had seen, and he watches this
spell runner out run six cops. Six cops take off
chasing him, and the runner takes off, and basically Boff
is like, I think I'm going to get into fell running.
That sounds cool, and most of the books he writes

(49:15):
now are about how awesome fell Running is. And they
keep being activists as they start touring constantly and stuff.
Their house gets rated by cops three times. The first
two times cops are basically like, we've seen those people.
There's probably drugs there, uh, And so the cops raid
and there weren't any drugs at the times of the raid,

(49:37):
or maybe they didn't keep drugs at home because they
were responsible people who had children in the house. That
actually acts. I don't know the answer, but that's my
actual guest based on everything I've heard about these people. Um.
And then the third time, the cops battering rammed down
the door to search the place for explosives because someone
presumably tied to the antipartheid movement, which all the punks
were part of, has set off a bomb somewhere that

(49:58):
didn't hurt anybody. And they're like, oh, well, we know
are some you know punks are, so let's go kick
down their door. They get arrested, they get kept in
cells for twenty four hours, they get strip searched, the
whole house is trashed, all their literature is taken, and
so what they did once they got out is they
took the name of the cop who had interrogated them,
and they put it on their electric bill um until

(50:19):
they figured out how to make their electric bill run backwards,
and then they just stopped paying for electricity. They get
pulled over and strip searched by cops who are looking
for drugs all the time at borders. One time they
get pulled over on tour and strip searched, and they
don't like that. There's hundreds of copies of anarchist magazines
in their van, so they get turned away from countries
fairly often and they have to like change their tours

(50:41):
around as a result of all this. And one thing
that they tried to do one punk classic they tried
and failed at actually is they tried to siphon gas
for their tour um. But they got caught really quickly,
and they were like, this is not worth it. It
is not worth it for us to safe and gas.
We should just pay for our gas um. They get
arrested a lot. Uh to quote Boff again. For a

(51:03):
few years in the eighties, Dan and Alice were king
and Queen of getting arrested. It didn't matter if they'd
been somewhere else at the time. If there was trouble,
they'd get arrested. It became a liability to stand near
them on demonstrations. One minute, you're watching Jill Scott Heron
in a sun soaked Hyde park with two thousand other
nuclear disarmament campaigners. The next thing, you're trying to pull

(51:25):
Alice out of the back of a police van surrounded
by baton wielding cops, and if one got arrested, the
other would get jealous and fling themselves into the arms
of eager policemen. And later Alice was like, you know,
eventually we figured out that the point of protest wasn't
to get arrested, and that not getting caught has its
own merits um which if I were to add an

(51:47):
additional sponsor to this show, so if he could you
reach out to not getting caught and uh an advocate,
I mean I would. I would give up potatoes for that.
I think, Okay, okay, yeah, um, not getting caught has
its own merits. So and Alice has her her leg
broken by Dutch cops at an anti NATO rally and

(52:09):
still managed to stay on for the rest of the tour.
But that's where we're going to leave it. For today,
they're in their pre celebrity heyday. They're running around getting
into trouble every chance they get, including getting into trouble
with the punk scene. And when we come back, they're
going to get into way more trouble with the mainstream
world and the punk scene both. But Max, first, let's

(52:29):
hear about the trouble that you're getting in or the
stuff that you're up to that people can check out.
Oh excellent. Well, Eve six has a new album coming out,
our first full length record in like ten years. I
forget the date of that, but I think it's sometime
next month. We just put out the first single from it.

(52:50):
It's called Mr. Dark Side, and you know it's in
all the likely places. Um, you can find us on
Twitter at eve six and I post a lot, probably
too much on there and uh and I also recently

(53:10):
started doing an advice column for Input magazine and I'm
really enjoying doing that. Um and yeah, that comes out
twice a month. So yeah, if you follow me on
Twitter you'll you'll see that too. But that's sort of
what we got going on. Okay, and Sophie, what trouble
have you been? What legally actionable trouble have you been getting?

(53:33):
Just got to cools on we do dot com all
the things and Margaret, you have a book coming out,
don't you I Do. It's available for pre order now.
It's called we Won't Be Here Tomorrow. It's available for
a K Press and if you pre order it you
get an art print of like teens riding around on
bikes past graffiti that says the Devil lives here and
all the fun hole U short science fiction and fantasy

(53:55):
stories that your heart could possibly desire. Awesome, We'll see
you on Wednesday. Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is
a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts and
cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zone media dot
com or check us out on the iHeart Radio app,
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