"Crass had a strong influence on some of our early stuff, but we remembered that we also loved Lenny Bruce, Alberto Y Lost Trios Paranoias, Grimms and The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band when we first started writing songs together as potential Chumbawambas during the summer of 1981. Frank Zappa, especially during The Mothers of Invention albums, had a profound influence on how Chumbawamba evolved. Zappa was a joker and as well as fucking with form and making musical jokes by fusing pop, jazz and classical music, all the songs ran into each other, a technique still in evidence in late 1990's Chumbawamba; Zappa's Mothers also had a quirky, bizarre, but inexplicably humourous undercurrent to everything they did. What made Zappa truly punk, in the sense that Mark Perry and Mark E Smith were 'punk', was that he not only took satirical swipes at middle America in songs such as 'Bow Tie Daddy' 'America Drinks and Goes Home,' and the mournful 'Idiot Bastard Son' but he also lambasted the phoney hippies descending on San Francisco in 'Flower Punk'. . . . . People kept telling us in the later 1980's how our show was 'Brechtian'. Most of us didn't know who Brecht was, but we damn well went and found out; and realised it was a compliment. Not unlike the Greek morality plays from centuries before, Brecht would inject various human qualities into traditionally one-dimensional characters representing all the various factions in Governments' persistent war against the people. From the bent coppers to the colluding liberals, from the down-trodden to the dispossesed. We realised that in taking this agit-prop street theatre onto the rock n' roll stage, and by refining it, and by layering cardboard cut-out hate figures with something altogether more subtle, we were actually developing and becoming more entertaining as a band. More people were coming to see us, successive albums were outselling preceeding albums and we felt we were becoming more articulate in evolving what we did." . . . . For those who don't think Chumbawamba are funny, we draw your attention to the expression on Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott's face after we threw water over him. Now that's what I call funny."
Peace,
Jim
Jim Heartfield writes:
> At that time many bands who sounded similar were drifting to
>the far right, like Screwdriver, with their skinhead style, but as I
>remember it Crass put in a lot of time on the road with a largely
>unpopular anarchist philosophy. Later, groups like Chumba-Wumba
>followed, in the ambience of summer festivals, road protests, communes
>and vegetarianism. Chumba-wumba's Danbert Nobacon gained a brief
>notoriety by throwing a bucket of water and ice (from his Champagne?)
>over Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott at some pop-wards, accusing him
>of being a toff. Nobacon is perhaps too young to know that Prescott was
>once one of the merchant seamen stewards whose strike in 1966 moved
>Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson to denounce them as 'a tightly-knit
>group of politically motivated men' before sending MI5 to break it up.
>Prescott might be a twat, but he is unlikely to be such a twat as
>Nobacon.
>My sympathies, understandably, are increasingly with the late Ayatollah
>Khomeini, who is said to have banned popular music altogether.
"Pontius Pilate came to town, he's the leader of New Labor now"
-Chumbawamba