June 16, 1997

We thought long and hard before we finally decided what to do, and i'll explain the reasoning behind our choices. Our experiences over the last fifteen years have robbed us of the naive view that there's 'good' and 'bad' capitalism. We learnt the hard way that 'indie' isn't shorthand for integrity - it's become a style guideline rather than (how we originally percieved it) a shortening of the word "independent". (Duh).

As a band we've tried releasing records in various ways: we started our own record label, Agit-Prop, but found that we had to choose between being a boss/label and a band. We were OK at the creative end of running a label but we were crap at the business side and lost a lot of money helping bands put out records which didn't sell very well. During that time we used an independent distributor; mad as it seems now we told them that as anarchists we wanted to work on trust rather than from contracts. It took us a while to learn that 'trust' is another word for 'sucker' in the music industry - basically, we got ripped off more by our own naivety than by the industry.

We signed to One Little Indian - our last label - thinking that we'd found a label that we had things in common with. We'd known Derek Birkett (OLI's boss) since his days in the band, Flux of Pink Indians, and we assumed that the label had other objectives as well as profit. We knew the label would only keep us as long as we sold enough records, but that seemed like a fair deal.

In the end, though, the label became preoccupied with it's financial problems; and as we were one of the few bands who didn't lose them tons of money in £200,000 videos and ultra-expensive promotional failures, OLI were keen for us to stay safe, don't try anything new, and release an annual imitation of "Anarchy" to keep the float topped up. (Which we weren't prepared to do). The final straw was a sudden interest in taking away Chumbawamba's artistic control. ("Go away and write some stronger songs...")

We told OLI that we wanted to leave in December 1996. When we started looking round for another company we realised that we no longer made a distinction between 'major' and 'indie'. We knew labels would see us only in terms of whether we were profitable so we stopped pretending that we had to have some vague political trust in whoever released our records; plus we were fed up with constantly bypassing the "popular" part of popular culture, not being able to play in places like the USA, and watching as a million other crap bands were getting the airtime/press space to talk absolute crap whilst we sniped tinily from the sidelines. We wanted to work with the labels who'd work the hardest in our interest.

We went to Germany to sign with EMI at the end of last week, and one of the EMI blokes asked us if it was problematic for us to be signed with EMI. I said it was, because EMI has symbolic status. Chumbawamba's early history is rooted in (so-called) "peace punk", and EMI was always shorthand for everything evil about the music industry. Signing with EMI for us finally lays the ghost of peace punk, its political mistakes and its misplaced logic, to rest. It isn't the eighties any more... you can't fight a modernised army using outdated weaponry.

We haven't actually signed with Republic (in the US) yet but we will be in the next couple of weeks. Our attitude is that we want to make records that people actually get to hear, (and don't have to buy in specialist record shops at import prices...) and it looks like we have more chance of doing that with EMI and Republic.

We realise that some people are going to be unhappy about our choices, but it's not our job to placate people with false distinctions between 'good' and 'bad' bosses. Our job is to spread propaganda, throw up debate and argument, cause some trouble, and carry on making music which goes against the grain of these shallow times. We reckon all these things deserve to reach a bigger audience.

Those of you who don't give a shit who we sign with must think i've rambled on too long, but we felt we owed an explanation to those of you who do,

alice
on behalf of chumbawamba