The beauty of writing a song that revolves around a universal idea is that people feel like it could be theirs: it voices the way they’re feeling. The first time I heard my band Chumbawamba’s hit Tubthumping played at the ground of my local football club, I was standing at the urinal in the toilet underneath the stands, pissing the afternoon away with scores of other blokes, ready for the match. I walked up to my seat and watched people singing along to what had instantly become, in that moment at least, their song.
Tubthumping belongs to the guests at the wedding who sing it in celebration. It belongs to the Italian anti-fascists who sing it in defiance on a demonstration. It belongs to cancer patients going through chemotherapy, seeing every successful bout of treatment as a personal victory. I know that all these people have taken the song as theirs, because they write to tell us. This is how songs become “folk songs”: songs that belong to our shared histories, not to a single version performed by a single artist.
There are hundreds of songs like this, songs that feel as if they belong to us all. When we sing Fairytale of New York at Christmas, the let’s-all-join-in spirit of it isn’t the sole property of Shane, Kirsty and the Pogues – it’s our song, too.
But there’s a problem with these universal songs – they can be hijacked by people who clearly don’t understand the spirit in which they were written, and want to use them to aggrandise themselves, or to sell ideas that aren’t universal at all. It’s like baking a cake and declaring to the room: “Here, have a slice, the cake is for all of us!” And some greedy bastard grabs five or six slices and scurries off into a dark corner, sniggering. And to stretch that analogy, the greedy bastard is the person that, noticeably, never turns up with his own cake for everyone to share.
Because that’s the thing with songs, with literature, with art, theatre, cinema, with most of the beautiful, creative, cultural things we love – they are very rarely created by those on the political right. The bigots don’t have any good songs of their own.
Which brings me to New Zealand’s deputy prime minister Winston Peters and his use of Tubthumping. The man is clearly modelling himself on the recent upsurge of populist politicians, these ultra-wealthy men somehow getting to claim to be “of the people”. Across the globe, from Italy to Sweden and from Jair Bolsonaro to Donald Trump, these self-styled “outsiders” are gaining power and popularity using slogans that appeal to ordinary people, slogans that make no sense when you put them in the mouths of millionaire careerists. Their rhetoric is anti-elite, and yet they clearly and definably are the elite. Their popularity depends upon them playing at being just like you and me, the good guy at the bar who buys you a drink while you’re watching the football, who tells you the reason the country is going down the drain isn’t because of the multibillionaire corporate hoarding of the world’s wealth but because … cue a culture-warrior rant about immigration and snowflakes and experts and “I did my own research”.
Let me be clear: the song Tubthumping was written to celebrate the resilience and tenacity of working-class folk who keep fighting when the chips are down. It has nothing whatsoever in common with wealthy politicians with extremist anti-liberal agendas.
There have been many, many examples of rightwing populist leaders using ostensibly leftwing music to hoodwink their audiences into some kind of hypnotic self-delusion that they are “of the people”. The Conservative party has a history of being called out for singing and playing songs by leftwing artists at its annual party conference. From a rendition of John Lennon’s Imagine in the Thatcher years (is it possible to be that oblivious to irony?) to a more recent use of M People’s Moving On Up (apparently the song’s co-writer, Mike Pickering, was “very angry”), it’s as if these careerist politicians think we won’t notice that their jukebox is stuffed full of songs by artists who despise them and their ideas.
Former Tory prime minister David Cameron listed one of his favourite songs as the Jam’s Eton Rifles which prompted the Jam’s Paul Weller to retort “Which bit didn’t you get? … It wasn’t intended as a fucking jolly drinking song for the cadet corps.” When Cameron also admitted to liking the Smiths, guitarist Johnny Marr said simply: “Stop saying that you like The Smiths, no you don’t. I forbid you to like it.”
It’s as if the new breed of populist leaders think they can hide their multimillionaire “man of the people” contradictions behind such universally loved songs. Trump is particularly ignorant when it comes to his choice of campaign songs; he’s been forced to stop using music by artists including Pharrell Williams, Rihanna, Neil Young, Bruce Springsteen, the Beatles and Elton John. Chumbawamba had to send our own “cease and desist” when a pre-president Trump thought he could use Tubthumping without realising we would loudly object. Which all makes it all the more obvious that, simply, the right doesn’t have any good songs. That’s why they keep trying to nick ours.
Boff Whalley is a musician and writer, and the former lead guitarist of Chumbawamba
