Chumbawamba’s Long Voyage
There’s that song, the one about getting knocked down and then getting back up again, but their body of work is like an iceberg; the bulk of it is submerged below the surface, difficult to get a hold of.
Tubthumping became known to some purely as a drinking song. Which is fair enough, because, if nothing else, it didn’t belong to an elite group of musicians — it belonged to people. People at football matches, people singing along to the radio as they drove, people at parties drinking too much whiskey and tripping over the kitchen chairs. People like me. And because it helped beggar the notion that Chumbawamba were boring zealots on a mission from Planet Anarchy.
The End Result of Populist Fame
Being a shiftless claustrophobe, I often find myself at a party in a strange town with a bunch of people I don’t know. I start taking deep draughts of garbage-can jungle juice concoction so I can get through the inevitable conversations where a stranger might ask what it is that I “do,” what kind of bands I’m into, etc. Having no definitive answer for the first question, I focus on the latter, racking my brain to come up with bands
Well . . . there is this one band . . .
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