I’ll be honest – I largely wrote off Chumbawamba in the 1990s because they had that one inescapable hit and kind of fizzled out here in America – and I wasn’t really paying much attention to popular music at the time anyway. In the late 1990s, when I saw that Negativland was doing a collaboration with them, that genuinely piqued my interest. I just had to find out what a radical counterculture group like Negativland was doing partnering with a top 40 one hit wonder band like Chumbawamba. That’s when I started looking into their catalog and really fell in love with the breadth and depth of their work.
From what I have seen, this was very much the case. Much of their proceeds went toward causes they were passionate about. For instance when GM licensed one of their songs to use in a commercial, the band used all the proceeds to fund anti-GM propaganda.
Anyway, I’m a big fan of Chumbawamba and am thrilled to finally see them get some recognition beyond “that one drinking song”.
Indeed – as an American fan, much of the highly Brit-centric social and political references are lost on me, requiring actual research (shocking, I know) to better understand the messages.
It’s whiplash inducing – every album is different. As is typical for artistic collectives, the lineup was ever changing, with different styles, influences, and collaborations in place. You would see stylistic shifts from punk, to more conventional rock, to dance music. Their last album was mostly comprised of largely folk-influenced songs with minimal instrumental backing – including one of my favorites of theirs:
