This book is about life, love, history, politics, music, and Burnley Football
Club. It’s about what can happen when people have faith in an idea and
stick with it, when having no expectations is a good thing because it sets
no boundaries and prescribes no destination.
Boff Whalley is guitarist with Chumbawamba, the band who, after years of not
taking themselves particularly seriously, happened to write a song that filled
dance floors around the world, and helped them sell 5 million albums. Amongst
the people most surprised was the band itself. This hadn’t been in the
script, for there was no script. The Chumbawamba manifesto was to stir things
up and provoke reaction by practising radical politics through music and theatre.
There was no grand plan, or indeed any great expectation.
Boff is, of course, a Burnley lad and his account of life as a working class
lad in a decaying industrial town is both compelling and colourful. Dusty street
corners and chilly shop doorways provide the scenery, and an array of eccentric
characters litter the prose. A few of his
Burnley Grammar School teachers get it in the neck, too.
Like so many of his generation, punk provided the jolt that induced Boff to
veer away from the preordained path of his upbringing, in this case a life
devoted to the Mormon faith and the prospect of a two year sabbatical knocking
doors in some midwest American outpost. At the same time as finding punk, he
finds Burnley Football Club, through the influence of his mate and fellow Chumbawamba
stalwart Danbert Nobacon. These discoveries are to change his life forever.
He writes:
Walking away from Mormonism was surprisingly easy. I took with me a fierce
self-discipline and hatred of coffee, and I acquired an obsession with Manchester
record shops and rainy Tuesday nights at Turf Moor.
Boff details life following the Clarets in the mid-70s, and I found that his
account added further depth and context to Tim Quelch’s observations
about Burnley during this period. In his book Forever and Ever, Tim describes
his return to Turf Moor in the 1970s after a few years’ absence:
My first reactions were fairly flat. However, upon hearing the chanting,
my spirits began to stir. This was the real stuff. New repertoires had emerged
since I had lost touch. The kids seemed harder. It wasn’t so much their
narrowed, rolled-up jeans, their Bovver Boots, their insect-like shaven heads
or their scarves, tied to their wrists. None of them wore coats. Christ, they
must have had reptilian circulation systems. I was deeply, deeply impressed.
Boff was one of those kids, though his love of music sets him apart from the
rank and file (known as the ‘Football Thickies’) and his group
are christened the ‘Music Puffs’, though they all stand together
on the Longside, trading insults and trying to get the rest of the crowd to
sing their own made-up songs. It is a richly evocative passage, though never
nostalgic. As well as the football, Boff runs an expert eye over the punk scene
in those early days. Apparently, Notsensibles were the only punk band in Burnley,
any such pretensions by The Pathetix being discounted on the grounds that they
were from Nelson (hey, what’s wrong with being the only punk band in
Nelson?).
It’s worth thinking here about the role of music in Burnley. I have
had many enjoyable conversations with two of our match day regulars, Paul Burrows
and Lee Wilkinson, about the music scene in Burnley and Nelson during the 1960s.
They describe a vibrant town able to attract some legendary names. Similarly,
Boff details the predominance of reggae in Nelson and Colne in the early 1980s,
and as punk evolved into the angular sounds of The Fall and the alienation
of Joy Division, Burnley’s youngsters organised a musicians’ collective
and started venues for themselves at the Burnley Clarion Club and the Nelson
Railway Workers’ Club, which hosted a Fall gig and introduced a generation
to the political sounds of Gang of Four and the Mekons.
This serves to illustrate my long-held contention that, for such a small and
predominantly working class community, Burnley has shown an unusual resonance
to diverse forms of music. To this day, Boff enjoys a cappella, since he remembers
from his infancy smoky evenings in the Mitre pub with his uncle leading sing-a-longs,
and it's good that the town can, in the face of everything, portray a positive
image through music via the Blues Festival. But what’s happened to that
DIY ethic, that ability to organise, that spirit to create something collectively?
Has that valuable heritage of embracing the new withered away terminally?
The Chumbawamba part of the story begins with the onset of Thatcherism, when
Boff and his friends move to Leeds and create a squatting community in a large
but derelict house. It’s a quite wonderful story, full of wit and warmth,
and with many laugh out loud episodes. The irony of the title is that, despite
20 years of inventive endeavour, Chumbawamba will probably go down as a footnote
in pop history for throwing the contents of an ice bucket over the Deputy Prime
Minister. But that was just one of a long line of pranks and scams that places
Chumbawamba firmly within a tradition of English political dissent. My favourite
was the Oi! parody (a song called ‘I’m Thick’ recorded under
the pseudonym of Skin Disease) which they suckered the odious Gary Bushell
into recording and releasing. They also conned the Liberal Democrats by posing
as student band ‘The Middle’, and within a week had received an
invite to play at David Steele’s birthday party, which all goes to show
(as Chris Morris has done since) that a simple but well-executed idea can expose
how frighteningly dumb those who want to lead us can be.
Another notable theme is that of change. Odd to relate this to the Chumbas,
but pragmatism – the acceptance that some change cannot be resisted and
may be beneficial – is a staple of classic conservative thought. Read
your Edmund Burke and there it is, the notion of accepting change in order
to preserve something more important. It’s a lesson that many on the
left refuse to learn, but after a few years of immersing themselves in radical,
ideological politics, Chumbawamba were sick to their aching back teeth of stultifying
dogma. They had lived the ideology. Trying to figure out how to run a harmonious,
self-sufficient and egalitarian household was enough. The failure of the miners’ strike
and the spectacle of Band Aid, which they found sickening, brought home the
lesson. As Boff writes:
It grates when you’re trying to move on somewhere and you have people
around you who think it's your duty to keep pulling the same old rabbit out
of the same old tatty hat. Because while you’re getting stuck in a comfortable
little rut, the world’s changing. You fall asleep for a few hum-drum
minutes, and the next thing you know, the telly’s full to bursting with
millionaire pop stars strutting their stuff for the starving millions, and
that’s when you know something’s up.
It’s a theme that Boff returns to time and again, it was (and perhaps
still can be at times) a cause for dissension within the band, but this willingness
to change in order to preserve was crucial. The psychedelic / dance explosion
of the late 1980s – the Stone Roses, the Happy Mondays, ecstasy and warehouse
parties – set Chumbawamba on a new path towards crafting accessible pop
music with a message.
If Chumbawamba did stick to an ideology, it was to subvert themselves, a knee-jerk
reaction against progress, an almost ritual undermining of promise whenever
it arose. When asked to do a John Peel session, they agreed, but decided to
perform cover versions of songs they felt an affinity to, songs rooted in the
good-time, all-join-in world of the Wheeltappers and Shunters. Thus it was
that Chumbawamba eschewed the chance to showcase their material on Radio 1,
and instead did ‘Agadoo’, ‘The Birdie Song’, ‘Y
Viva España’ and ‘Knock Three Times’. Similarly, when faced
with a festival crowd of German heavy metal fans awaiting headliners Motorhead
(the loudest and greasiest hard rock band on the planet), Chumbawamba decided
to serenade them with a cappella folk songs (how they escaped with
their lives isn’t detailed).
You can’t help but admire a band who make shooting themselves in the
size tens such a deliberate art form, but I find that link with working class
culture the least convincing part of the Chumbawamba world view. It’s
tempting to see working class culture as an inclusive and benign thing, Phoenix
Nights as art imitating life, but this glosses over its reactionary elements:
Sorry love, no ladies in the games room. Similarly, when Boff sets the 1990
Poll Tax demonstration (a genuinely popular movement) in the context of going
to see “the Tina Modotti retrospective at the National Portrait Gallery”,
he reveals the tension that always arises when a working class upbringing has
to compete with a liberal education.
In the middle of trying to make Chumbawamba a going concern, Boff decides
to return to the Turf on a regular basis. The year is 1986. He has a gift for
comic timing, doesn’t he? Consequently, he is there on the Longside during
Burnley’s darkest hours, though he is also present at York in 1992 to
see the beginning of the long haul back to respectability. This is a seminal
moment for Boff, for it heralds the birth of his relationship with alcohol.
At the start of the 1991-92 season, he declares that he will get drunk if Burnley
win the Fourth Division championship, and he apportions the blame accordingly:
So John Francis, scorer of the winning goal that night, I hold you personally
responsible for my descent into the nightmare world of flavoured home-made
Polish vodkas and green German drinks that taste like medicine.
But Boff has his own perspective on the Clarets, one which he talked about
when we interviewed him for this magazine last year. Boff said then:
I’ve been so chuffed with what they’ve done over the last two
seasons: as long as they survive in the First Division, playing these so-called
big clubs and doing well on such a low budget, then that’d be brilliant.
I don’t want Burnley to change into Manchester United and I don’t
want to see them bottom of the Third Division. But you go on a match now, and
you’ve still got the moaners who are there every match and I think, ‘I
can’t believe that anyone can moan now'.
You know if Burnley get beaten everyone’s slagging them off and I just
think, ‘Look, they’re footballers, they’re playing for Burnley
and they’re doing all they can do’. I hate it if they don’t
try, but I can’t get depressed at a football match because I love watching
Burnley.
This is a perspective that runs through the book – try hard, do your
best, keep an open mind and just enjoy the ride, wherever it might take you.
Burnley and history are wound together like the double helix of DNA, some
think it a millstone, others a precious resource, and Boff does take time in
his book to consider the role of history, especially the potential to unmake
history, to reshape it, to train the stage lights in a different way to give
an alternative perspective. There is a fine sense of how history is there for
the taking, if only people would grasp the opportunity. As Boff puts it:
This story, these footnotes, rely on the notion that great chunks of
the past are up for grabs, and that it’s only fair that I grab what’s
mine…
In a fascinating interlude, he recreates the story of the Cragg Vale Coiners,
ordinary people living along the Calder from Burnley to Halifax. In response
to the King’s taxes (for which they received nothing tangible in return)
they resisted by clipping gold from government coins and using the shavings
to mint their own coinage. Clever and heroic working folk, or just plain thieves?
Convicted coiners were tortured and beheaded, and when a group of coiners
suspect that a local might inform the authorities, they kill him. Who are the
barbarous ones here? The government, bribing some impoverished people and summarily
executing others? Or the coiners, meting out mob-handed justice?
The final part of the book details Chumbawamba’s mad, careering dash
through pop stardom and then out at the other end. The offer from EMI was clearly
a major dilemma and left them open to accusations of selling out (sad to say
I had a playful dig myself on the Burnley E-mail group). But Boff convincingly
sells his case. They were in it to shake things up, to make people take notice
of what they had to say. And they’d tried to do this their own way, touring
America and Europe on a shoestring, promoting their own concerts, designing
their own sleeves, releasing their own records. By 1996, though they had achieved
much, they were all DIY-ed out, broke and exhausted. They signed the deal,
and within weeks found themselves on Top of the Pops.
Boff’s account of their time as pop celebrities is hugely revealing
and very funny, and it did allow them to be more effective in getting across
their message. After ‘Tubthumping’, Chumbawamba hit the top 10
again with ‘Amnesia’, a song questioning ‘New’ Labour’s
commitment to the movement’s historic aim of improving the lives of ordinary
people, probably the first such record to do so at a time when Tony Blair was
still enjoying a prolonged ‘honeymoon’ with the British electorate.
(Warning: blatant political statement imminent). A few years down the line,
with the gap between rich and poor now wider than it was in 1997, with towns
like Burnley refused the money to regenerate and its people reduced to voting
BNP because at least it looks like they listen and understand your grievances,
who was right on that one?
In one way, this isn’t a political book. There’s no posturing
or advocacy. But politics at root is the process by which groups of people
resolve their differences, and what this book describes is how a group of talented
and very individual people tried to live a set of ideas, how they tried to
hold everything together and resolve difference whilst understanding at the
same time that difference is good because it is a creative energy.
For all his self-deprecation, Boff writes beautifully. It’s an effortless
read, packed with careful observation, compassion and laughter. I’m not
a prodigious reader, but I found this well-nigh unputdownable. For anyone with
an interest in football and rock ‘n’ roll in all its guises, this
is a book that addresses your fascinations with wit, wisdom and a liberal dose
of sobering reality. Well before Stan arrived at the Turf, Chumbawamba were
a Burnley team that just cracked on – and look where it took them.
