MUSIC | LIFE

I Saw Them Live Before They Were Famous

Chumbawamba

We all have at least one story of when we watched a band that years later would suddenly hit the big time. A journey back in time. The joy of discovering a band that nobody else had heard of. The feeling of belonging to an exclusive club as you become a die-hard advocate for everything the band produced. You may even start following them from gig to gig and harvest a secret crush on their lead singer.

The older you get, the more responsible you become and the more commitments that eat into your spare time. You no longer want to hang out at dives drinking cheap beer and shoving past sweaty strangers to the front of a crowd. The kids have moved on and the music isn’t what it used to be.

But looking back, do you remember when…?

Like many young people, I was heavily into music and an ardent follower of local bands. There were so many cheap dives that my ‘gang’ would frequent, that it was impossible to avoid seeing certain crappy bands. Camden Palais was our haunt. Every Tuesday night was Indie night and a live band. Melody Maker and NME reporters stood at the various bars getting rat-arsed on cheap booze. I once got into a fight with Mark Lamarr (look him up, he used to be somebody!).

The Worlds End and Camden Falcon (first ever gig for Suede) were our drinking-hole before we hit the Palais. It’s here you could rub shoulders with the upcoming members of various bands. Damon Albarn (Blur) first hooked up with Justine Frischman (Elastica singer) at the Worlds End. Alex James (Blur)was constantly getting drunk and we would occasionally get to wind up Jarvis Cocker (Pulp). They were good times.

I remember when…

Chumbawamba came to play. They were my band. I loved watching them. They were regulars at the Palais but barely drew a crowd. It didn’t matter to me. Everything about them was anarchic. They were a huge band, possibly seven to ten members. They played brass instruments. Their lead singer, Alice Nutter, dressed as a nun. They had some bald annoying chap who couldn’t sing. And the press absolutely hated them.

They weren’t popular. They weren’t cool. They had basically been playing shitty clubs and pubs for the best part of a decade without any success. They weren’t loved on the festival circuit. Even the travelers, the great unwashed roaming the country, only had eyes for The Levellers or bloody Ozric Tentacles.

In short, Chumbawamba was a joke band that everybody mocked.

But I couldn’t get enough of them.

Their live show was outrageous. They had so much energy. They sang weird lullabies and folk tunes. They made jokes about how crap they were. They had on-stage fights. They were pure chaos with hookable tunes. It was also very difficult to buy any of their albums in regular shops. You had to attend their gigs to buy their music. ‘Shhh’ was on heavy rotation and I adored this album.

‘Big Mouth Strikes Again’ is still one of my all-time favorite records. It featured MC Fusion who went on to become a one-hit-wonder with Credit to the Nation and their brilliant single ‘Call it What You Want’. The song featured snippets from Lenny Bruce’s trial. I had never heard of Lenny Bruce. I thought I was such an intellectual namedropping Bruce to the in-crowd. Chumbawamba was shaping my views on the world.

They continued to be widely mocked and ignored by everybody until that one hit. Then everything changed. It seemed to happen overnight.

At first, I was delighted that everybody could finally hear Chumbawamba. I gleefully pointed them out to my parents as they performed live on Top of the Pops. I proudly boasted how I’ve had a drink with the MC, the bald one, and saw them when there was just me, my mates, and some bloke with a dog at the gig.

‘Tubthumping’ was a game-changer. It was completely different from anything they had ever done before. In short, they were selling out. Everybody loved them. The song was everywhere. A tune that celebrated drinking culture and made a mockery of their annarcho-communist politics. What had happened? Who was responsible for this?

I could no longer buy tickets to see them. Screaming girls began to follow them. They were on kid's Saturday morning TV. What the actual fuck? Where was my band? Had they actually met the devil and sold their souls? Fuck. This was a band that had a woman give birth on their record cover. Not an arty shot with lovely lighting. It was a full-on close-up of a baby emerging from the vagina. Where was this confrontational band?

The song entered popular culture. It went international. I remember hearing it on the Superbowl. It was played at every football, cricket, rugby, netball…every fucking sports game. Every highlight show for any subject featured this tune. We hate it when our friends become popular once sang Morrissey…

But I remember when…

Go on, tell me of a moment in time when you saw a band BEFORE they became famous and I’ll tell you about Radiohead playing at the Pink Toothbrush!