I was lucky to see them live when they were still relevant to the charts. I am not sure I would have expected them to be family friendly but there was still some shock that their setlist was heavy with early 90s stuff. Provocative stuff like “Mothful of Shit” and the women dressed like Nuns smoking cigarettes and carrying whiskey bottles.
My friend and I were heavy into them at this time. The irony is that I adored them as if they were 70s arena rockers, a fact that they would surely have found ridiculous. But sure enough, the part of the rock circus saw them in the crowd signing a handful of autographs. Though I didn’t get one, my friend who had bought the rare American version of 1994s Showbusiness (sold here by AK Press as For A Free a Humanity: For Anarchy which was also paired with a Noam Chomsky disc) did get his CD signed by the band.
Not for the first time, my dear friend did a selfless thing and gave it to me afterwards, and I am eternally grateful.
(I don’t begrudge the band for not being fan friendly in that environment which surely must have felt weird for them. I was and am one of their biggest fans. If not the biggest, then certainly if they had a bus of biggest fans, I’d have a ticket, but they would not have known that or even believed that).
I have kept some eye on the post- Chumbawamba careers since the band dissolved in 2010 but they don’t get a ton of coverage. My interest was renewed last year when I watched 2021s I Got Knocked Down- a documentary about Chumbawamba written and featuring Dunstan Bruce.
Bruce makes music with the band Interrobang?! Alice Nutter has a successful career as playwright and TV writer.
Things unsurprisingly were credited to the collective (and I don't have reason to doubt that) but I suspect that Nutter and Danbert Nobacon were the most creative voices, and I am not surprised that Nobacon is carrying the torch.
Relocated in Washington state, Nobacon is doing what he has always done- made satirical albums that make fun of the establishment. Occasionally working with people like The Pine Valley Cosmonauts (Jon Langford of the Mekons, a similarly minded outfit), Neil Ferguson and Harry Hamer (aka Chumbawamba’s rhythm section) and Miranda Zickler of Seattle folk band Kunika.
If anyone, Nobacon feels like the spirit of the band. He was a founder. He famously dumped water on then British Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott.
In the iconic Tubthumper video, he looks like the agitator (to Dunstan’s front man and Alice’s artist)
One suspects if Tubthumper had never happened, Danbert would be making albums with crude covers and satirical titles. And guess what he is, as he did even during some of the time he was in the band.
2024s Kochupus Garden is of course a reference to the powerful right wing billionaire donors the Koch Brothers.
In true Chumbawamba fashion, it’s a musical, a mix of styles, not just punk faster louder. It’s got a wacky satirical plot. “Dark Money USA” runs the country and two of their songwriting Bots have escaped and are on the run. The subtitle of the album is "Now that's what I call Capitalism: A Musical"
I can’t think of really too many artists that are similar to this. Jello Biafra is about the only one who comes to mind.
Also from a content standpoint and style point of view, there is a bit of Billy Bragg here too. But like Chumbawamba, Nobacon is a genre chameleon - folk-punk, pop, reggae, piano ballad and so on
Danbert does have a website and it does contain the kind of repository of writing that the old Chumba.com website used to have. He doesn't tour much outside the Pacific Northwest but I am happy to see him still going at it.
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