Tubthumping

I hear this uproarious tune now and again from the little speakers in my office, summoned by an algorithm after one of my fellow workmates gets the digital assistant going. I remember what a lot of fun folks had when Tubthumping (from Chumbawamba’s album Tubthumper) arced across the radio waves when atop the charts.
Tubthumping was released in 1997. It’s, by far, in my estimation, one of the best candidates for a singalong in a favorite bar or pub. Get folks together. Have a brew and let it rip. Celebrate the resilience… Let’s pick a stronger word… resistance of the everyday working person.

Don’t hear much about the group these days, but there may be a reason. According to the 2022 MEL Magazine story by Magdalene Taylor, “They got in, spread their message and got out.”

Members of Chumbawamba weren’t shy about their political views. From “Tubtexts,” in notes about Tubthumping by the band:

It is essential to be drunk all the time. That’s all: there’s no other problem. If you do not want to feel the appalling weight of Time which breaks your shoulders and bends you to the ground, get drunk, and drunk again. What with? Wine, poetry, or being good, please yourself. But get drunk. And if now and then, on the steps of a palace, on the green grass of a ditch, in the glum loneliness of your room, you come to, your drunken state abated or dissolved, ask the wind, ask the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, ask all that runs away, all that groans, all that wheels, all that sings, all that speaks, what time it is; and the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, will tell you: ‘It is time to get drunk!’ If you do not want to be the martyred slaves of Time, get drunk, always get drunk! With wine, with poetry or with being good. As you please.” Charles Baudelaire, 1866

“I’m a human being and I’ve got thoughts and secrets and bloody life inside me that he doesn’t know is there, and he’ll never know what’s there because he’s stupid. I suppose you’ll laugh at this, me saying the governer’s a stupid bastard when I know hardly how to write and he can read and write and add-up like a professor. But what I say is true right enough. He’s stupid, and I’m not, because I can see further into the likes of him than he can see into the likes of me. Admitted, we’re both cunning, but I’m more cunning and I’ll win in the end even if I die in gaol at eighty-two, because I’ll have more fun and fire out of my life than he’ll ever got out of his.” Alan Sillitoe, from ‘Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner’, 1959

Resistance was everywhere in the lyrics:

I get knocked down,
But I get up again.
You’re never gonna keep me down.
I get knocked down,
But I get up again.
You’re never gonna keep me down.

And, from another song on the album, a hint about the ruckus in a bar or pub (ruckusing?):

This is Tearoom England.
They’ll kick your face in
So politely.
This is Tearoom England.
They’ll kick your face in
Oh, so nicely.

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