Day Twenty-Four - Sing About Love

“I wish I could sing about love”

You can hear an audio version of this post here.

Today’s song is Sing About Love, written by Chumbawamba (Boff Whalley in this case - hear the song here). I didn’t come across this song at the folk club in Montrose (for anyone’s who just joined us that was my starting point for this series of posts) but there is a folk link or two so bear with me. I know that for some of you Chumbawamba are just one record (“you knock me down…”) but come on, music fans, you’ve got to know there’s a lot more to them than that. The band existed in one form or other from 1982 to 2012 (yes, that is 30 years…) so it’s no surprise that they released a bit more than just that one track. Today’s song, for example, is from their 2008 release The Boy Bands Have Won (a totally brilliant album). I could have picked several of the tracks from that album and in fact, when I came to start writing this up, I thought I had picked a different track (Words Can Save Us). I think I have that and Sing About Love in my mind as companion songs (both beautifully pure acapella harmony numbers – both talking about how best to save the world and make music, but from a slightly different angle). Also memory is not my finest instrument these days (I wish I’d looked after me synapses, as Pam Ayres very nearly wrote).

Although Chumbawamba were Burnley born and formed, they moved to Leeds not long after and most of their band life was played out there. I moved to Leeds in 1989 (as anyone who followed my FunADay writing project last year might remember) and became aware of them in 1991 or so. Apart from listening to Basque punks La Polla Records* when I lived in Spain in 1985 (not really my choice, I shared a flat with a lass from Donosti/San Sebastian), I hadn’t ever really listened to much that you would call punk and so it’s no surprise that I didn’t know anything about Chumbas until then (most people/fans/friends in Leeds just called them ‘Chumbas’, I imagine they still do). Before the big hit the band were mostly known on the alternative music scene and in certain political scenes too (anarchy!) and I got to know them (a little bit) through mutual friends and shared places of work (the alternative Leeds/West Yorkshire magazine Leeds Other Paper/Northern Star). The Chumbas were big characters in Leeds (and there were a lot of them) so you’d rarely have a night out or a trip to the Co-op without bumping into one of them. They were well-known in the city long before 1997’s Tubthumping – some of them lived in a big squat, they had Elvis themed parties, I think some of them were vegans before it was popular, they were political and fun**. I do have a 7 inch copy of Tubthumping (bought in Leeds Jumbo Records, I imagine). It was quite exciting watching them hit the big time and refuse to change or compromise when they got there.

I did go to one of their gigs in the mid 1990s (in Huddersfield I think) and I really liked some of the songs of that era. My favourite was That’s How Grateful We Are (a song about the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, obvs) from the 1990 album Slap! (cover below). This song should perhaps be resurrected, dealing as it does with the subject of felling statues (in this case one of Stalin). I remember boring at least one of the band endlessly about how great that track would be with a dance remix (I was a dance music DJ at the time, if only I’d just got some sleep and gone and made that remix instead of talking so much). Anyway, they had their big hit in 1997, and everything went a bit mental for them. Then it settled down again.

Cut to some time in the noughties – I had lost my shit, got some of it back together again (sounds lovely) and was living a different kind of life altogether in Scotland. I somehow got a copy of 2008’s The Boy Bands Have Won (did I swap it with Boff by post for a book of my poems – bad deal for him if so…) and I was just delighted with the album (and still am). By this point Chumbawamba were a much smaller band (Alice Nutter became a TV and theatre writer, Danbert Nobacon moved west over the ocean to be an “author, performance artist and drama teacher”, Dunstan Bruce was making films, that’s all I know ... ) and the band for this album were original members Boff Whalley and Lou Watts, later recruits Jude Abbott, Neil Ferguson and Phil Moody, and lots and lots of guest artists***.

Chumbas had always had quite a lot of folk in their musical mix but funnily enough, just as I was having my first folk experiences at the club in Montrose (see Day 1), this new, smaller Chumbawamba were focusing more on the folkie side too. From 2005 their releases were on the folk label No Masters (also home to O’Hooley and Tidow who we talked about on Day 22) and, for my taste, the 2008 album is all the best examples of their many tastes and influences coming together to make a really beautiful and interesting piece of work. There was always plenty of magpie business going on with this band – sampling, stealing, playing, teasing – but in this album the mix is just right for me (a little more gentleness in there with the anger and humour perhaps, everything perfected just that little bit more). The opening track highlights English folk father Martin Carthy’s voice: “You should never try and freeze music…” and from then on it’s very much folk with the freezer door left open. There are songs about specific injustices, songs about poets and historical figures, humour, songs using bits of poems, Brecht gets a look in, then there are poppier moments and also some really, really moving songs. Word Bomber (sung by Roy Bailey, “English socialist folk singer”, 1935-2018, and also father-in-law of Day 15’s Martin Simpson) is one of the latter and another song I could easily have picked for this post. It’s fantastic.

Roy Bailey (L) with Jude Abbott, 

Chumbawamba's last ever UK gig, 

City Varieties, Leeds, 2012

One theme of the album is words so it’s no surprise that the writing on it is so good. Little jokes pop up all over the place (in All Fur Coat and No Knickers: ‘Lord Bono and his pals/They were a bit too busy saving the world/Well you have to take your hat off to the Edge) and there’s also a lovely and cheeky lament to the passing of RP (received pronunciation). In Fine Line Martin Carthy’s voice pops back in with the title quote: “and it’s over and it’s done and the boy bands have won.” My god, what a thought. If I do go to hell (which isn’t totally out of the question) I know it’ll be Gary Barlow I have to share a cell with. Do shut up Gary! And no, that doesn’t sound good, it sounds terrible.

Interestingly our daughter never really got a taste for boy bands (despite many of her generation going One Direction mad). Instead she loved Disney songs, musicals and then, amongst all of that, this Chumbawamba album (even though she was still in primary school and the songs weren’t all what some would consider ‘family entertainment****’). Because she enjoyed it too this album came with us all over the place and we know the songs pretty much word for word. Now 21, she is also a person who cares a lot about words and maybe that’s partly due to this good old anarchist propaganda. The sleeve notes for the album are great too – one reason to have a CD copy (and you can still buy it here) .

After The Boy Bands Have Won Chumbawamba put out one more album (2010’s ABCDEFG – we have that and enjoy it too) and then they ended it all (the band) in 2012. Boff (who will be answering questions in a line or two) is now mainly a writer and I hugely enjoyed his 2004 memoir Footnote (with lots about growing up in Burnley, about Chumbas, about everything – I even bought a copy this time). He’s involved in community choirs, alternative musicals, fell running, writing about fell running … his own website can barely keep up with him. Anyway, here’s Boff to tell you about love, or about a song called Sing About Love anyway.

When did you write this song?

It was written in 2008. It was written for an album called ‘The Boy Bands Have Won’ and most of the songs on that album are quiet, gentle songs. We wanted to write songs that could say powerful things while sounding calm.

Is there anything else you’d like to share about the writing of this song?

Well, I’ve always loved Dick Gaughan’s ‘A Different Kind of Love Song’ where he tells a story about someone at one of his concerts complaining that he never sings love songs. To which he replies that, by singing about wanting a better world, he is singing a love song; just love of a different kind. That’s where ‘Sing About Love’ began, with that desire to sing a simple love song, but that desire being interrupted by the need to sing about the world around us and how we can change it. 

Who performed and/or recorded it first? What year was that?

We recorded it in 2008 and straight away we started to sing it at concerts. It’s such a simple song, very simple harmonic structure, clear and sweet. We always loved singing acapella songs even when we were a ‘rock’ band, it’s always a delight to match voices with people and realise that you can make a strong, unique sound just by blending voices.  

Any other versions of it you know of? Any you particularly like?

I had no idea if anyone had ever covered the song so I looked it up on YouTube just now (!) and found a version by T Sisters that was released on a CD. 

It’s really good, and what I like about it is that you can tell they really mean it. 

I think they’re from California.

Is it a song you particularly like/have good feelings about?

I like it but it’s not a song that I count as one of my favourites! Maybe because it’s so simple, and doesn’t stretch out melodically or structurally. But I do like the sentiment. 

Have your feelings about the song changed over the years?

My feelings about the song are the same as I have for any other old songs that I’ve written, in that they become historic touchstones – they map out both a personal and a real-world history. They tell me what I was thinking, and what we were doing with the band and how we all were with each other. This is a song that tells me we were a five-piece and that we enjoyed sitting around at Neil and Jude’s house with acoustic guitars or just voices and trying to arrange and create songs that moved away from the Chumbawamba that most people would have known at the time (i.e. Tubthumping). We were trying to find ways of singing about the shit that was going on in the world without it being jumpy-shouty stuff.  

What is the song you’ve written that you are most proud of? 

Blimey that is so hard. I worked out a while ago that I’d probably written about 700 songs in my life, and it would be impossible to pick one out since they all say something about a time and a place, they have their own little space, and they can’t compete against each other. There are songs that I like because they had an impact on people (like ‘The Day The Nazi Died’) and songs that just remind me of having fun with the band and songs that have an emotional impact for me personally. And lately because I’ve been writing for theatre and arts projects, the newer songs I like because of how an actor took the song and made it better than I could have imagined. 

Could you name me one song by someone else that you wish you’d written? 

So, so many! ‘Goodbye Joe’ by Monochrome Set was always a song I wished I’d written. So simple and beautiful. Same with The Beatles’ ‘Blackbird’ – to sing about the civil rights movement so poetically and hopefully I find astounding, no matter how many times I’ve heard it. And I have to say, Sex Pistols’ ‘Anarchy in the UK’ is pretty damn perfect; to be able to create a piece of music that can say so much in three minutes, that can galvanise a whole generation… genius.

Thanks so much to Boff for answering questions about Sing About Love. See you all tomorrow for a trip into the kitchen.

*La Polla Records means Prick Records or Dick Records. Apparently in 2019 they released a comeback album. Sounds unpleasant.

**You would be forgiven for not knowing this about Chumbawamba as the tabloid/press coverage of them during and after the big hit did concentrate on the usual politico extremist nutjob angle. This isn’t surprising of course – the British press (most broadsheets and most tabloids) is one of the big reasons the bastards stay the bastards (and the rest of us stay the rest of us).

*** Guests on the album The Boy Bands Have Won are David P. Crickmore, Oysterband, Roy Bailey, Robb Johnson, Jo Freya, Harry Hamer (a former Chumba), Ray Hearne, Barry Coope and Jim Boyes, Charlie Cake Marching Band, and The Pudsey Players.

****This is a family in-joke. We once stayed in a motel in the countryside in Ontario when our daughter Heather was 3. We made a comment to the owner about her watching The Simpsons if we couldn’t find anything else on TV (we were tired…). The woman owner looked shocked and said with what sounded like a US Southern twang “that is not what I call family entertainment.” We’ve repeated that line at least once a month since 2003.

This post is part of my Songs That Stick project for 2022’s Fun A Day Dundee (a community arts project that takes place every January). Anyone can take part (you don’t even have to be local to Dundee) and much of the work can be found on Instagram during January (use #FADD2022). There is usually a real-life exhibition later in the year (though this has been online for the past 2 years). The full list of songs I am writing about this year is here. My first post about why I picked this project this time is here.

If you are interested in my Fun A Day Dundee projects for 2020 and 2021 you can start here and here. They are quite different to this one (a short poem and drawings in 2020 and lots of poems and writing in 2021).