Get your Morals Off My Body / Do It
First Demo Tape – No Track-listing
A very good quality Chumbawamba gig on Sean Forbes 69 Tapes, the smaller brother of 96 Tapes run by Rob Challice. Both tape labels were run from 96 Brougham Road, Hackney, London E8 which was the office of All The Madmen Records and WOT Distribution.
Chumbawamba for a while were a very exciting proposition on the alternative music scene. All the times I saw them they put on a good show, and seemed to care to the point of after the show handing out flyer’s and mixing it up with the crowd, talking about subjects, rather than closing the dressing room door on everybody. Not quite sure what went wrong. As the wonderfully honest Joe Strummer once spat out “He who fucks nuns, will later join the church…”. As ably shown on this set from 1985, EMI took a hell of a verbal beating during the set. The band list most of the things (rightly) that the corporation was involved with outside music High Street stores like HMV. Why did they sign up a few years later with the same corporation? I don’t know, but it leaves a strange taste in the mouth metaphorically.
More Chumbawumba on this site including the post 86 section if you search for it.
Anok Jon
March 1, 2008 at 9:46 pmThis is what I’m talking about!!! This shit is awesome!!! Thanks a lot for putting this up!
john
March 2, 2008 at 1:01 aman unlimited supply!
Graham Burnett
May 13, 2008 at 6:38 pmThis was the first time I saw Chumbawamba live, they were amazing. Me and my mate james hitched up from Southend to this gig and weren’t disappointed. Support bands were Karma Sutra and No Defences who were all great as well – we ended up partying with the Karma Sutra/Luton Anarchist crew, beginning a long association with them.
A couple of days later we hitched down to London and ended up at some free festival put on by Red Ken in Jubilee Gardens on the South Bank. Spent the day having a really chilled time, drinking beer out of plastic glasses, watching various lefty bands and talking to Ian Bone who we bumped into. Little did we know that simultaneously our comrades down in the south west of England were getting the shit kicked out of them at the Battle of the Beanfield…
Val
May 13, 2008 at 11:50 pmI saw Chumbawumba earlier this year – they were great! Doing acoustic, folk versions of old songs like Homophobia and lots of good relevant new stuff about e-bay, Iraq and mySpace, etc as well as the usual English rebel folk songs. I definitely still rate them!
Penguin • Post Author •
May 14, 2008 at 12:14 amHave a look at post 86 section for more Chumba stuff uploaded…
Boff
May 16, 2008 at 1:48 amFunny, how can someone who slags off Chumbawamba not realise what the arguments are/were with EMI? I thought we’d gone over this a million times.
The Library, Luton, with Karma Sutra and No Defences – great gig. Brilliant people, the audience and the other bands. We loved Karma Sutra and No Defences. They were great bands.
And to quote the comment accompanying the tape: “Not quite sure what went wrong. As the wonderfully honest Joe Strummer once spat out “He who fucks nuns, will later join the church…”.
Here we go: Our objection to Thorn-EMI was about arms production, weapons manufacture. It always was. When they stopped being connected with Thorn we had a good long look at what they were involved in and ended up realising they were just a multinational company selling big pop stars around the world. A shitty, multinational company, big business corporation etc. We knew that, of course. We weren’t stupid. No involvement in arms or weapons.
We put out a record with them which was completely finished and recorded – they had no editorial clout whatsoever. No arms or weapons, no editorial involvement.
We had a good time on EMI, had a laugh and got paid. They never made us release anything we didn’t want to release. We got out of there really quickly, having made a mint (much of which we gave away to various organisations and causes).
We never at any point thought we were being manipulated by a big company – you should see our contract with them, it was watertight.
I reckon we fucked the nuns, (and it was good!) but I still haven’t been to church.
Boff / Chumbawamba
Nic
May 16, 2008 at 8:56 amNice to know you’re googling yourself, Boff…
😉
(But – well put)…
alistairliv
May 16, 2008 at 9:27 amWas part of the problem that thanks to the Sex Pistols “EMI” had high symbolic hate value amongst punk community … unlike Virgin.
Never trust a hippy as they say.
Penguin • Post Author •
May 16, 2008 at 9:50 amHardly a slag off Boff, I thought it was respectably written and I am very appreciative of all the hard work Chumba put out during live performances and on recorded works. But thanks for putting the record straight. Understand the reasons now. Did not know before! I had to do a Y.O.P. sceme at Thorn EMI in Edmonton when I was 16. No one else was intereseted in employing me at the time!
Neil Transpontine
October 23, 2008 at 11:08 pmFantastic, I helped out with this gig, think it may have been a benefit for Luton Hunt Sabs which I was active in. I actually have a tape of No Defences set from this night too (would you be interested in posting the MP3 of this – if so get in touch). No Defences were one of the more innovative bands in that scene sadly never got much out but were unforgettable live. As were Chumba. Another band from that time who explored a kind of anarcho-punk-funk direction were Slave Dance, can’t find much about them online though I still have some of their tracks in my head – anybody got any of their tapes/vinyl?
Graham Burnett
October 24, 2008 at 12:39 amHello Boff, I think the main problem many had with the whole chumbas/EMI thing was that Chumba had used EMI as an almost totemic icon of all that was wrong with consumerism/corporatism which went deeper than just the Thorn/EMI weapons division connection in often quite a moralsitic way, for early Chumbas ‘EMI’ was kind of shorthand for ‘the system’, ‘The Man’, ‘everything we are against’, etc, etc, esp for those of us who remember back to some of the really early releases like the ‘raising Heck with Chumbawamba’, ”be Happy despite It all’ tapes, japes with ‘Secret Records’ as ‘Skin Disease’, the ‘Let It Be’ single, as well as Chumba being very much part of a certain album release called ‘Fuck EMI’. So can understand why some got pissed off, myself i felt quite ambivalent about it, can see both sides of the arguement and a good example of the contradictions that perhaps define what it is to be human in a world we didn’t make.
To say ‘well our only beef with EMI all along was the weapons industry connection’ is a bit like Johnny Rotten claiming a couple of years back that he was a royalist all along and that ‘God Save The Queen’ was intended as a mark of respect for Her Madge only everyone misunderstood it, a bit of historical self-revisionism that doesn’t quite ring true somehow…
Loved ‘Footnote*’ by the way…
Graham Burnett
October 24, 2008 at 12:42 amWould love to see the No defeneces part of this gig uploaded here. The unreleased No Defences Crass Records album plus a demo/practice session were doing the rounds on the file sharing networks a few years back, I downloaded them and burned them to a CD which I think I still have, if I can dig it out and Peng is up for it maybe they can be put up here??
aikanae
November 18, 2008 at 12:42 amany chance of a re-up?
Penguin • Post Author •
November 18, 2008 at 10:16 amWhy, what’s wrong with the upload? I assume that’s what re up means?
Nic
November 18, 2008 at 11:28 amThe links seem OK to me, Penguin…
Tonyhippy
September 1, 2011 at 4:34 pmIt was a blinding gig! I too would like to see the No Defences part on here! There’s a track on YouTube, just the one. (Hands up who fancied her….come on, you did, didn’t you? I know I did)
R
September 7, 2011 at 9:24 pmThe No Defences performance from that night is listed in their post at Anarchoscene.blogspot.com but has not been uploaded yet.