Tubthumping – The Best of Chumbawamba

Tubthumping was at least one more hit than Chumbawamba ever imagined they would have. By the time the song became a worldwide smash in 1997, the squat-dwelling anarcho-punk collective had spent fifteen years and fully eight albums kicking against the mainstream, a fiercely political band more at home on the picket lines than on Top of the Pops.

For evidence of Chumbawamba’s disdain for mainstream culture, look no further than the title of their debut LP Pictures of Starving Children Sell Records, released in 1986 on the heels of Do They Know It’s Christmas? and Live Aid. Or English Rebel Songs 1391-1914, an EP consisting mostly of 14th-Century anti-poll tax protest songs. Chumbawamba was not a band formed with the aim of sharing the chart with Will Smith and Garth Brooks, but with Tubthumping they did exactly that.

Even though the song title is British slang for political campaigning, Tubthumping was one of Chumbawamba’s least explicitly political songs, and was often dismissed – in fact gleefully adopted – as a drinking anthem by the beer-swilling football terrace chanters who took it up as their own.

Possibly this was by design; Tubthumping was Chumbawamba’s major label debut, released on EMI (despite their having contributed to a 1989 compilation entitled ‘Fuck EMI’) and helping to sell 3.2m albums in the US alone. They might have sold more had vocalist Alice Nutter not encouraged fans to steal the record if they couldn’t afford it.

Chumbawamba split in 2012 after, in their own words, “thirty years of being snotty, eclectic, contrary and just plain weird.” Vocalist Dunstan Bruce is now a filmmaker and performs in agitprop post-punk band Interrobang?!. Lead guitarist Boff Whalley is a playwright and fellrunner of some renown; Danbert Nobacon lives in the Cascade Mountains of Washington state, while Alice Nutter is now a screenwriter for big-budget TV shows.