Chumbawamba - New CD To The 25th Anniversary

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On January 9, 2007, Trade Root Music Group released A Singsong and a Scrap, a new album from Chumbawamba. This mainly acoustic Chumbawamba album is, for the first time, a collection of songs, pure and simple. They're songs with a radical voice, songs with those familiar Chumbawamba four-part harmonies and catchy choruses, but songs nevertheless without drum loops or samples, without backwards cymbals or synth sequencers.

Chumbawamba's watchword is still "change." Keep moving, keep changing. That's how the band carries on enjoying themselves, and how the band carries on asking questions of their audience, themselves and the world. This is an album which catches a band in mid-flight, a band unwilling to settle. With the added voices of English a capella's finest — Coope, Boyes & Simpson and Oysterband's John Jones — these songs fit easily between a whisper and a scream, but still have that topical and radical sensibility that only Chumbawamba can muster. Whether it's their ode to anarchist revolutionary Emma Goldman on "When Alexander Met Emma, " or their soaring a capella version of The Clash's song "Bankrobber" about poverty and idealism, these recordings will most certainly appeal to both longtime fans and people hearing the band for the first time.

Many music fans associate Chumbawamba with a most unlikely mainstream success story. Twenty-five years ago, in 1982, Chumbawamba played their first concert; one year on from the Irish hunger strikes and a few months away from the Falklands War. From the very start they were determined to sing about the world around them. After more than a decade in relative obscurity since their formation--much of it spent attacking the very notion of stardom--they signed with a major label in 1997 and scored a major international hit with the riotous single "Tubthumping." Ten years later, Chumbawamba is singing more quietly, talking to their audience more, trying different things, working with new people (and now, they rail against Bush and Blair instead of Regan and Thatcher). In their live shows, they engage and play off the audience, approaching radical music from a warm and communal standpoint. This is a formula that works for them--constantly figuring out their position in the real world, and putting their conclusions to harmonies and chords, all in an acoustic setting, remaining true to their beliefs and gracing their audience with their righteous and topical messages. And when it comes down to it - however they choose to sing about it - their life as a band has been shadowed by two great and nasty US/UK alliances. As the circle of their music comes around again, they aim to outlive them both. And they will.

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