TAKOMA PARK, Maryland (Top40 Charts/ Trade Root
Music Group) -
Chumbawamba is back, armed with acoustic guitars, accordion and trumpet, five-part harmonies, a bucketful of attitude and a new 25-track album called 'The Boy Bands Have Won' (It actually has a much longer title than that,* but let's call it by its pseudonym). Trade Root
Music and PM Press will proudly release the recording in North
America on June 24, 2008.
Many music fans associate Chumbawamba with a most unlikely mainstream success story. Twenty-five years ago, one year on from the Irish hunger strikes and a few months away from the Falklands War, Chumbawamba played their first concert. They began with a mission to be interesting and arresting, to be literate and understanding, to sing about the world around them. All told, Chumbawamba isn't like other bands. That was made clear around 20 years ago when they made their first album, 'Pictures of Starving Children Sell Records' as a response to Live Aid. After more than a decade in relative obscurity since their formation-much of it spent attacking the very notion of stardom-Chumbawamba signed a major label in 1997 and scored an international hit with the riotous single "Tubthumping."
More than ten years later, Chumbawamba is singing more quietly, talking to their audience more, trying different things, working with new people.
In their live shows, they engage and play off the audience, approaching radical music from a warm and communal standpoint. This is a formula that works for them-constantly figuring out their position in the real world, and putting their conclusions to harmonies and chords, all in an acoustic setting, remaining true to their beliefs and gracing their audience with their righteous and topical messages.
'The Boy Bands Have Won' is a continuation of such ideas; some are just passing thoughts, others are fully formed songs. The album is gentle and warm in tone and caustic in intent. In addition, it continues the trend of their last couple of albums by staying intimate and organic through the use of mainly acoustic instruments, a Capella arrangements, and even the occasional use of handclaps, thrown in for good measure. However, 'The Boy Bands Have Won' is also the band tinkering with the Chumbawamba formula. Because that's what too many bands do - stick to the formula. And that's boring after a while. So the band has written these tunes and words and mixed them up with ideas about culture, mixed in samples of their work from the past, incorporated a range of musical styles, and so on. So here they go again, only this time it's different again. And again. And again.
The album features guests the OysterBand, Roy Bailey, Robb Johnson, Barry Coope and Jim Boyes... and a hundred others, give or take a few. Some of its 25 songs tackle all the important stuff like poetry, war, death, knickers and Lord Bateman's motorbike accident. There's some heavyweight wrestling with WH Auden, Bertold Brecht and Lord Bono. There's a song about El Fusilado, the man who survived a firing squad execution; a song about Gary Tyler, an innocent man who has spent thirty years as an inmate on America's death row; a song about Margaret Thatcher; and a song, 'Add Me', pre-released only on Chumbawamba's MySpace site, a gentle dig at the creeps who clutter up cyberspace. The songs are sad, jolly, up, down, quiet, loud, slower, faster, all in a big mix. It's a real modern-day concept album.
And what about the unabridged title of the album? It happens to be a quote from folk legend Martin Carthy, sampled for the album's opening track. Band trumpeter Jude Abbott explains, "His quote was about folk music and traditionalists, and we've broadened it out. What he's saying about folk, we're saying about pop."
'The Boy Bands Have Won, and All the Copyists and the Tribute Bands and the TV Talent Show Producers Have Won, If We Allow Our Culture to Be Shaped by Mimicry, Whether from Lack of Ideas or from Exaggerated Respect. You Should Never Try to Freeze Culture. What You Can Do Is Recycle that Culture. Take Your Older Brother's Hand-Me-Down Jacket and Re-Style it, Re-Fashion it to the Point Where it Becomes Your Own. But Don't Just Regurgitate Creative History, or Hold Art and Music and Literature as Fixed, Untouchable and Kept Under Glass. The People Who Try to 'Guard' Any Particular Form of Music Are, Like the Copyists and Manufactured Bands, Doing It the Worst Disservice, Because the Only Thing that You Can Do to Music that Will Damage it Is Not Change it, Not Make it Your Own. Because Then it Dies, Then it's Over, Then It's Done, and the Boy Bands Have Won.'
