Alice: Well, we had a real fuck-up, because we were trying to be a record company and a full-time band, and it's impossible. We are totally useless at business, I'll admit it, we just throw money over our shoulders without putting it back in.
Alice: Yeah, we were working with them and we were releasing other bands. We released Papa Brittle and Credit To The Nation but it wasn't fair to them because we couldn't do the back-up work that needed doing because we were always away on tour and. it was really unfair to us because we could never make enough off other people's records so everything that Chumbawamba was doing was financing somebody else., and we just lost money all the time. Sorting it out took loads of time as well so we've signed to One Little Indian records and just released a split single with Credit To The Nation(`Call it What you Want'). Then we'll do our own single, an album, and we start touring with the Levellers soon. Apart from that all we do is gig-we're stupid, we gig more than we sleep in our own beds.
Alice: Sometimes I hate it, sometimes I like it, rock `n' roll's a weird little bugger. Sometimes you feel really privileged and sometimes you think `what a load of shite'. It's nothing to do with the real world.
Boff: It was nice tonight though wasn't it? I think it's nice when you get a good crowd in who decide to have a good time and that's it, no matter what.
Boff: Its the same anywhere, people will say to themselves `right, we know what this band's about, we sort of half agree what they are on about and we're gonna have a really good time' rather than standing all serious wondering about what we're singing about.
Alice: We're not- we're more political. We actually gave a lot of thought about how we were putting our politics across, to make it more accessible, to make people enjoy the politics not hearing someone go on about self sacrifice and martyrdom. Instead lets talk about killing cops, lets talk about bank robbing, lets talk about class war, lets talk about women fighting back but lets not do it in a way that makes people feel guilty, let people have a good time to the point where they go home feeling completely fucking powerful. You can be political without being a miserable bastard. We haven't toned down anything we've said in the past, we've just made it more funny!
Alice: Everybody joins the rat race to a certain extent. We made certain compromises to get by but I'm fucking lucky. I've done really shit jobs-I've humped sacks, been a waitress, all on crap money. Doing this though sometimes its terrible and all, hanging around, but sometimes you look out and there's hundreds of people totally getting in to it, I've also travelled all over the world, oh god, I sound like Miss World!, like Miss Venezuela!, the `oh, I'm having a wonderful time curing sick kids' thing, but I don't mean that. It is a pretty privileged thing to not having to answer to a boss and to talk politics to ordinary people through music.
Boff: Because I sort of vaguely knew them both as people before they got involved with the majors, they are really nice people. I went to see Back to the Planet in York recently and I talked to the guitarist Fraggle who's really down to earth and recognises what they've done by signing to a major.
Boff: At the moment, no, I can't, no. Alice: We could have done, we've had offers, but we chose not to. Boff: It would just be really horrible if you were working for a company and they disagreed with a mix, I would just say `no' and forget it, but again we're pretty lucky to be able to resist signing for a major as we have a live following of 3-400 wherever we go whereas The Blaggers didn't really have that base before signing to EMI.
Boff: The whole fascist thing is obviously very important. We were touring Germany when Turkish people's houses were being burned down by skinheads. It stunned me because that's politics that's really close. The nazi right have put racism on the agenda just like the ALF in Britain who pushed animal rights, by being extreme, I think its so important to combat them. I've recently been reading Berthold Brechtner who started writing poems in Thirties Germany about persecution of minorities by the Nazis and no-one took any notice of him. There was just liberals saying `oh, isn't this great poetry' but in hindsight we can see the same things happening today. We get quite a big audience in Germany, especially in Berlin where we got 1,300. There's no way that the right wing could attack our gigs, they just wouldn't get a look in.
Alice: I agree with what Boff's saying but I think the difference between Chumbawamba and a lot of bands is that its not just men talking politics, its women too. It's not men who are the leaders.
Alice: I think it's great, I think some of it's early eighties in terms of its politics and it can be confused, but as a big-mouthed, trouble making shit-stirrer its effective because it threatens people. I still wonder about people who get so shaken up by women-only gigs, I think its great though, but could do with more truthfulness, this thing about `you're oppressing me because you fancy me' is crap because everyone wants to be fancied at some point. It can get totally sexless and life's not like that. I'd be totally into `riot grrl' if it was about rioting as well as gender politics, I wont slag it off en mass however cos' it's still a good thing. Men are having to adapt to what women want rather than vice versa for once. My idea of heaven is `adapt or I blow you away', some people think that that's too extreme but I think that there has to be a sex war, a gender war. Men aren't going to change by choice. Boff: The only people who object to it are adolescent males who feel confronted. Its great that there are women out there who are saying to these people you know, `fuck off'!.
Boff: The music papers have this semi-idea of political issues. Steven Wells of the NME is really cool, the Melody Maker have a couple of OK people and they all try to make a political point out of things like the riot grrl thing. When Select came along and thought `we'll go against that' and put a union jack on the cover celebrating certain bands just because they were British, opposing, in this case, American music. It spilled over into a huge nationalist thing with a `British movement' being mooted by the Select to stop the likes of rap and nirvana taking over the British charts. I just wrote the letter to point out the mistakes I thought they were making. Alice: (Cutting in) But the rap thing's great. Its something that threatens the status quo, and its not just black people smiling nicely singing love songs. Its black people saying `look I've been treated like fucking shit and at this point in time I've got a gun in my hand and I'm not smiling at you'. The music press just pay lip service to the whole rap thing because it aint British.
Alice: We don't romanticise class culture. We're not snotty about belonging to the working class. There's this idea in Rightonsville that everything's got to be perfect and that you can't praise working class culture, which is everything from oh, Coronation Street to erm,.... Coronation Street, because there's racism in it. There's always someone saying `oh, you can't support the miners cos they are sexist'. Well, we live in the real word where we accept people's contradictions. Boff: It's good that there are bands out there who are still kind of radical like The Beautiful South. The effect could be seen right away on popular culture if for instance, Neil out of the Pet Shop Boys spoke out at a concert on gay culture. All those people watching would suddenly relate to something that they weren't too sure of before, and I think that's more important than what we done in the early releases, where we tried to be too serious and too correct.
Alice: In Texas we had some heavy looking anti-abortionists had set up a stall at our gig which I was so pissed off about, because I've recently had a miscarriage, so it really fucked me up). Boff: They all got together in a little group, and they were all like, late twenties blokes controlling the rest of the crowd who by this time had shut up. Alice: They expected us to be all liberal about it so we changed one of the songs to be completely pro-choice and they were going crazy by the end of the first song. They then thought they would chant us down but we got off stage and we followed Dan, our dress up man, into the crowd and I had a fist fight with this big bugger and it totally shocked him. Boff: It was good to be able to confront them in the way we did, because some people say our music's wishy-washy, and it was good to forget about that and confront them physically. Alice: Somebody came towards me and I was dressed as a nun and I remember kicking him in the stomach and he crumpled over, then they all left and walked away. That's politics-Chumbawamba style!".