Anarchy Is Okay

Dunstan Bruce, a member of the eight-person anarchist collective and pop group Chumbawamba, is pressing the flesh with various music industry types at a sports bar in Milwaukee on a recent Thursday afternoon. Though Chumbawamba has been on a world tour since this past October, Bruce is still not quite used to these schmooze sessions.

"They're always a bit strange, doing meet-and-greets," Bruce admits, speaking by phone from a quiet corner of the bar. "It's like you're there as a special person, but you're just thinking, 'Well, I'm really normal.'"

In fact, Bruce is fairly unusual. For the past sixteen years, he and his bandmates have been fighting for left-wing causes, recording stridently political rock and roll songs, and living hand-to-mouth in their native England. But this past September the group's catchy, anthemic single "Tubthumping" (which means "ranting") began racing up the Billboard singles chart, eventually peaking at number six, about halfway between Elton John's "Candle in the Wind 1997" and Jewel's "Foolish Games." The album Tubthumper rose all the way to Billboard's number three. Almost overnight the members of Chumbawamba found themselves answering questions from Rolling Stone and USA Today, booking appearances on The Rosie O'Donnell Show and Letterman, and organizing a tour that will take them through England, the United States, New Zealand, Australia, and Japan.

"Here, we come over and people are treating us like we're a new band," Bruce says of the United States. "It's like, 'Oh, you're not a new band, you've been going for sixteen years?' It's great. It makes it feel really fresh that you can come from somewhere and now you're trawling through your whole back catalogue. So it's new and interesting to people -- rather than in Britain, where everybody's totally fed up with Chumbawamba and thinks we should have died years ago."

But Chumbawamba has endured, which is more than can be said for most radical, idealistic, sociopolitical collectives. Bruce credits the band's survival to its democratic decision-making. Chumbawamba does not make a move unless agreed upon by all members: Bruce on percussion, Lou Watts on keyboards, Harry Harner on drums, Paul Greco on bass, Jude Abbott on trumpet, Danbert Nobacon on vocals/keyboards, Alice Nutter on vocals/percussion, and Boff on guitar. Despite being thrown into the fast-moving machinery of the mainstream music industry, the band continues to function as if it were a small government.

"We still spend hours and hours stuck in rooms having meetings," notes Bruce in his lilting, northern British accent. "We're just always emphasizing to management, agents, and record companies that things must be channeled through us. We've always worked in a defensive and collective way, and we don't want to lose that control."

Of all the highly political English punk bands born during the Thatcher 1980s, Chumbawamba is perhaps the only one left. It owes much of its politics and pranksterism to the seminal group Crass, which helped popularize punk rock as a viable platform for anarchist politics. Crass was nothing if not committed. Its core members -- who took absurd names such as Steve Ignorant and Joy de Vivre -- formed their own record label, lived communally, adhered to strict veganism, and managed to exist almost completely untouched by any vestige of capitalist society. Other like-minded bands of the period -- such as Poison Girls, Conflict, and Disorder -- typically released albums in sleeves that unfolded into broadsheets covered with the addresses of various political coalitions and detailed information about nuclear disarmament, the Falklands War, death squads in El Salvador, and the ecological impact of cattle farming.

At the time, the musical medium of choice was dissonant, primitive punk rock with vehemently antiestablishment lyrics. The band Flux of Pink Indians may have summed up the movement's bitter tone with its 1983 album The Fucking Cunts Treat Us Like Pricks. But it soon became apparent to Chumbawamba that releasing noisy albums through small labels meant reaching only a small audience of already converted listeners.

"When we first started out, I think we believed that we could operate outside of capitalism," Bruce explains. "You could have this band that was a pure entity, that produced its own records, put out its own records, and sold a couple thousand copies. But it wasn't making a dent on anything."

Chumbawamba came to that realization slowly. In 1982 they -- basically a group of squatters in the working-class city of Leeds -- released their first demo tape, a chunk of noise that ended up on a compilation album put together by the Crass collective. Chumbawamba later formed its own record label, Agit-Prop. In 1986 the band released its debut album, Pictures of Starving Children Sell Records, a response to the Live Aid concert. The group then bemoaned the general election of 1987 on Never Mind the Ballots ... Here's the Rest of Your Lives. In 1989 Chumbawamba radically departed from its punk roots with English Rebel Songs, a collection of fourteenth-century anti-tax songs sung a cappella.