Music Arcades: Chumbawamba: English Rebel Songs 1381-1984

Funny things happen when the establishment invite the rebels in. Especially when the rebels still fancy themselves to be a threat to the established order. The Barbican put on a show in 2003 on the theme of protest songs, originally with Chumbawamba and the Watersons, headlined by The Levellers. Coope, Boyes and Simpson subbed for The Watersons who had an illness in the family.

Faced with the polite formality of the Barbican Hall, The Levellers were full of sneering attitude, appalled that the place had anything as conservative as seats, which evidently they hadn't anticipated. It was as if they were wondering aloud why they'd agreed to do the gig, the generous fee having presumably slipped their minds.

Earlier Chumabawamba had showed them how to do it. Ignore the trappings, project your own values into the space. They looked like they were there to enjoy themselves and to encourage the audience to have fun with them, and that enabled them to own the evening and the surroundings. Revolutionaries can have fun, too, even in the most unlikely places. Quite right.

They played several songs from this album that night, plus The Clash's Bank Robber. I've just remembered and found something I wrote when I got home that night:

What's impressed me ever since [I first came across Chumabawamba in the eighties] is the mix of joy and seriousness that they bring to their music as well as their politics. It's not an obvious journey that they've taken from punk-pop in the 1980s to the a cappella folk performance they gave tonight at the Barbican (notwithstanding a glorious version of the Clash's Bank Robber), but it's an English journey, and in the process they're renewing the country's culture, making it a better place to live.

I can't think of anything released in the 1990s to match the joyous pop of 1994's Anarchy album — another great title, unusual cover. Britpop didn't have such good tunes or (with the possible exception of Pulp) the same wit. Madonna and the big pop names cannot better the arrangements or harmonies. Belle and Sebastian don't have the same energy. And Chumbawamba are savvy enough to borrow from rap, doo-wop, or use a string section, without ever being gauche or sounding forced.

All this, and they're still able to find plenty of critic soundbites to use in their Well Done, Now Sod Off! documentary, saying things like "they make appalling music" and "they've inflicted aural torture on the innocent listening public" — ha! That's another thing that could only happen in England: Chumbawamba have only been going for twenty years; maybe when they've notched up forty — like, say, Martin Carthy — people will start to realise that they are a national treasure.

When I wrote that and when I bought the CD a few months later, I was unaware that they'd first put out an album of a cappella folk songs fifteen years earlier, in 1988. Which makes me like them even more.