Alice Nutter of Chumbawamba
by Peter Millington

For years, the musical press has consigned the British anarcho-punk band Chumbawamba to the "Bunch of Losers" bargain bin. Then, last winter, the group's pop hit, "Tub/humping," spent more than twenty-seven weeks on the U.S. charts and went triple platinum. This boisterous anthem to the pleasures of drink outsold songs by the Spice Girls and the Brit bad boys Oasis. More astonishing, the single struck a deep chord in the hearts of prepubescent white Americans. A whole new fan base was created.

The irony, the bourgeois shock, if you will, is that Chumbawamba is a group of self-confessed anarchists from the industrial city of Leeds, in Yorkshire, a two-hour journey north from London. They are a bunch of layabouts with little dress sense who don't work and who have communistic values. The band says it is influenced by the do-it-yourself ethos of punk rock and the adrenaline rush of anarchist ideas.

Chumbawamba's international success has brought new opportunities for political notoriety. At the Brit awards (the English equivalent of the Grammys), vocalist Danbert Nobacon poured a bucket of ice water over Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott to protest the "despicable treatment of 500 sacked Liverpool dockworkers, who had been forced to end their picket and accept a derisory payoff" Nobacon was formally charged with criminal damage to Prescott's suit.

The eight-piece band is composed of five men and three women, all over thirty, who play drums, guitars, synthesizers, percussion, and brass.

Chumbawamba's most recent album uses sound collages to separate tracks that address racism and political betrayal. The songs also throw in quotes from leftwing British filmmaker Ken Loach. Part dance music, part political rant, and part rock cabaret, the vocals are mellifluous folk melodies or venomous raps that contrast with clever, shouty choruses.

On their U.S. tour, members of Chumbawamba talked about political prisoners on Late Night With David Letterman. On Rosie O'Donnell's show, they discussed the merits of saying the word "anarchy" a lot. On ABC's Politically Incorrect, bluehaired vocalist and dancer Alice Nutter exhumed the spirit of the late, lamented Abbie Hoffman and urged people to steal the Chumba's record--but only from megastores.

Toward the end of its tour, the pop group played Minneapolis. "This is the story of Lenny Bruce--he was one of your lot!" shouted Nobacon in introducing "Big Mouth," the fifth or sixth song of the evening. "He was a comedian who was hounded to death by the censors, by the cops, by the moral majority, and by the right wing for swearing and telling the truth!"

The band did more costume changes than David Bowie during his Ziggy Stardust period. At one point, a smiling Alice Nutter came out in boxer's gear, with giant boxing gloves, and sparred around the stage. Then she was dressed as a nun, splashing Jack Daniel's on her habit, smoking a cigarette, and asking the audience for condoms. Later, she recited the weather forecast for shipping zones around the British Isles, and the group played "The Good Ship Lifestyle."

"Do you have riots in Minneapolis?" Alice asked at the end of the song.

The band came out for three crowd-pleasing encores wearing prank T-shirts--LABEL WHORE, MID-PRICE, SHIFT UNITS, POINT OF SALE, and to cheekily confound the critics, ONE HIT WONDER.

So, are Chumbawamba the real thing, or are they just a bunch of lefty poseurs, champagne socialists who should slink back to their English nest of decadence as soon as possible? I had to find out.

Being a middle-class, middle-aged Londoner, I approached the matter with some trepidation. Was the interview going to be painfully P.C.? Would there be endless accusations of "typical distortion by the rightwing press to maintain the fascist establishment status quo," and "the power of the proletariat"? Would I have to hear a long and boring lecture on dialectical materialism?

Well, no, nothing like that happened. I got to speak with one member of Chumbawamba, Alice Nutter, between sound checks as she grabbed a sandwich.

She turned out to be soft-spoken and articulate, with short, spiky, currently orange hair. Disarmingly frank, speaking in her regional dialect (a bit like Daphne in Frasier), Alice spoke with little prompting.

When I asked her about Chumbawamba's 1988 release "Never Mind the Ballots" (a pun on "Never Mind the Bollocks," by the Sex Pistols), she explained it was a response to the 1987 general election. "Michael Heseltine, who is a widely disliked Conservative Member of Parliament, once came to a bookshop in Leeds," she said. "We all managed to nick copies of his book and went to get them signed, so we could tell him to fuck off!"

Q: You have come out of nowhere. How has sudden fame affected you?

Alice Nutter: It's frightening. There are six-year-olds bringing their parents to the concerts. In some ways it's brilliant--we've wanted to be in the middle of popular culture, and we've definitely done that. We get everybody, from toddlers to grandmas, but it's strange. People are coming with their kids to shows--kids as young as six--and you can see them going [Alice imitates someone's jaw dropping] and covering the kids' ears up. They're shocked. In Europe, we've still got the same fifteen to twenty-five audience as before. It's only in America that we've cut right across the board.

Q: What are your impressions of America?

Nutter: America isn't one country, whatever anybody says about it. Each time you cross a state line you're in another country, with its own culture. It's not just North and South. How can you compare Texas with San Francisco? How can you even compare some where rightwing like Orange County with Los Angeles?

Q: Do you think Americans have been overreacting to the media blitz of scandal in Washington?

Nutter: It's quite interesting that nobody seems to care--I personally don't care if Clinton has sex. I don't give a shit about his relationship with Hillary Clinton. His sins are far more humerous than adultery. He believes that a country with so many homeless people is basically on the right track. As the dividing line between rich and poor gets more definite, he's saying this country has never had it so good--that's Clinton's main sin for me. If I was going to indict him, I'd do so on real moral grounds, not like fake sexual hypocrisy.

Everything that's happening in Britain has already happened in America. It's terrible that there's no safety net here at all--look how many homeless people there are on the streets.
The whole move to revitalize the country is based on building fucking sports stadiums. You've got one across the road here [Minneapolis Target Center] that's obviously not used apart from the gym below. Inside there's a plaque that says the center was built for the people of Minneapolis. The big con is that these centers provide jobs. They actually don't--it's a casual labor force that works at these places. They're not open enough to provide full-time jobs. It's all low-paid, no-contract, service-industry work. That's what Britain's becoming. We're not a manufacturing country anymore. There are people begging all over.

Q: How is England doing with New Labour?

Nutter: New Labour is more rightwing than Thatcher ever was. Things have changed so much--all the allowances have been cut. Blair is attacking single mothers and demonizing them; he's saying that they're getting pregnant so they don't have to work.

We knew Blair never had any intention other than being Margaret Thatcher in a tripper outfit. He was saying things like, "It's time for a new way to look at the Labour Party. There are no such things as unions and management, we're both on the same side now."

He also said, "We live under capitalism. People have to learn to take its opportunities and risks." He said that in the context of dissolving the welfare state. People didn't really listen to what he was saying. They just thought, "Oh, it's a Labour government. He's young, his wife's pretty, and they're not going to be half as evil as what we've had to put up with." In actual fact, New Labour is doing more rightwing things than the Tory government ever did, and they're getting away with it because they've got what is supposedly a background of socialism. But it's not! They ditched that years ago.

There's always been a history of the Labour Party not living up to its promises. People think it's the Tories that do all the rightwing things, but it was Labour that sent troops into Ireland, it was Labour that brought in nuclear power. A lot of nasty things that went on were done by a Labour government--and this is the worst version we've ever had. What they're saying at the moment is that there's so much unemployment because of an upsurge of laziness. It follows that there must have been an upsurge of laziness in Britain and America in the thirties.

The English trade unions started off with the idea of ordinary people being paramount, share and share alike. The leaders have sold out their principles. The further they've climbed up the trade union tree, the more they've gone on the side with the bosses.

Q: What is the British government doing to resolve social problems?

Nutter: The government is saying that there's nothing wrong with society, apart from the fact that they've got these bad criminals. "It's a violent society, and the only way to make it better isn't to improve our practices, but to lock these bastards up!" They're feeding everybody's paranoia, they're not addressing the fact that crime is related to poverty. As Emma Goldman said, "Society gets the criminals it deserves."

One thing that makes me really angry is that they're bringing in laws that allow them to jail ten-year-olds. At the moment, they're concentrating on kiddie crime, like somehow children are more evil--which isn't true. Children's crime doesn't even register as a percentage. But they're saying, "Our children are growing up evil. We must clamp down on them now. Jail them!" They're talking about electronically tagging kids from ten years on. The person responsible is the Home Secretary, Jack Straw. Last year, his son was exposed as having smoked a marijuana joint, so he took him to the police station and turned him in!

Another thing that Blair is doing is cutting all the funding to the voluntary sector. Leeds lost its funding for the rape crisis center this year. To demand that the government reinstate the funding, one woman waived her right to anonymity and talked abou t a case where she was raped. They got enough for another year. It's tragic--you can no longer take for granted that when you need counseling from a rape crisis center, there will be somebody there for you.

Q: Do you see the backlash against women's liberation?

Nutter: If you examine all the ways that feminism has been discredited, it's a heap of ridicule. It doesn't have anything to do with the fact that feminism has changed women's lives and continues to do so.

A lot of the people that were influential in the women's movement in the seventies didn't run it, but that was the impression that the media always gave you. Betty Friedan, Germaine Greer, Susan Brownmiller--although she's not too bad, actually--they all wrote groundbreaking books in the seventies, but in the late eighties and early nineties they all came out with really reactionary views. Germaine Greer was suddenly saying, "Feminism has robbed us of our right to have babies and be true women." Susan Brownmiller was saying, "Maybe we've turned ourselves into men, and that's why we've all got hairy lips!" Betty Friedan was saying that the women's movement was bad for people because they hadn't done exactly as she had told them to do.

As soon as they came out with reactionary stuff, they got far more publicity. And they fit in with the early nineties mode of thinking, which is, "Hey, we no longer need feminism, women have jobs." Most women still have low-paid jobs. They hardly even get anywhere near the glass ceiling. There's been a near-conspiracy to get us to turn against this idea that we should be demanding equality. If you demand equality, you're a harridan--one of the loony left.

There are all these myths about the feminist movement. One is that we all went around burning our bras. That was a media stunt. A newspaper paid two women to burn their bras and then said all women were doing it.

Q: You call yourselves anarchists. How would you define "anarchy"?

Nutter: I would say "class struggle."

Q: So, is anarchy peaceful, or does it mean going to the barricades?

Nutter: There are times when I wouldn't rule violence out. I personally don't like violence at all. But it wasn't until we had the Trafalgar Square riots that the Poll Tax went out in Britain. When people take to the streets and fight the police, it's the one thing the government can't control. You can march round in circles for the rest of your life and they can ignore it, but once you start damaging property and fighting with the police, they can't. Even though they tar you with a brush and say you're a set of bastards, they have to actually tone down what they are doing.

Q: You have been criticized for suggesting that people steal your records yet you still collect royalties. Isn't that hypocritical?

Nutter: That's if you believe business is honorable, but I don't believe business is honorable. I believe that most of the time--as Chumbawamba--we act honorably, but I'm not going to pretend that I think capitalism's a good idea, and I'm not going to pretend that I give a shit about Virgin Megastores, because I don't. They steal people's labor every day and pay them below the going rate for the job. I really don't care if people steal from them.

People assume that we take all these storms in teacups seriously, but we don't. The biggest sins going are committed by big business; the reason they make so much profit is because people get poor wages. Look at Nike. They're paying people in Third World countries a pittance to make $150 sneakers. Steal as many Nikes as you want, because they're a right bastard company.