ENGLISH REBEL SINGSONGS

In which this band, Chumbawamba, somehow complete a circle we began to draw over twenty years ago: from a self-produced cassette-only folk song sold as a benefit for the striking miners in 1984 to an acapella rendition of a Clash song at 2006's annual London South Bank Folk festival. Here's the sometimes vague and half-remembered story of how we criss-crossed genres and ended up as an acoustic band, here, now - with occasional interjections from Jude and Neil who were absent from the proceedings until slightly later, but spookily were ploughing sometimes parallel furrows in other parts of the country.

Before we recorded our first single - 1985 - we spent several years not only playing countless benefit gigs around Britain but constantly going to gigs and rehearsing. It seemed that our influences - the stuff we heard on John Peel, went to watch, found in each other's record collections - turned us into a real mess of styles and ideas. We'd see PigBag at Leeds Warehouse and decide to add more drum/conga percussion to our sound; hear a song by New York trio ESG on the Peel show and try to get funky ; buy the new Crass single and decide to play louder; borrow an old Last Poets album and try to rap. Along with this catch-all attitude (and its attendant emphasis on the obscure), we discovered political folk song.

In the early eighties there wasn't much buzz around folk music - a lot of the vitality and eclecticism around nowadays just wasn't there. It wasn't very young, for one thing. We originally latched on to Christy Moore and Moving Hearts through his involvement in the Irish Hunger Strikes. From there it was a short skip around the Wolfe Tones (who played annually at Leeds Irish Centre to a packed Union Jack-burning audience) to Scotland's Dick Gaughan and his inspired and beautiful miners' songs; we eventually sampled his voice on our Readymades album twenty years later. He, too played at Leeds Irish Centre several times, as did Gil Scott-Heron, denouncing Reagan's Cold War politics from behind a single spotlight and a Rhodes piano. All middle-aged blokes, and yes, mostly with beards.

Meanwhile, down South somewhere, Jude had teamed up with her old schoolfriend, Kathryn Locke, and together they spent a summer busking folksongs in historic English towns (notably Bath) to the delight of the tourists. They carried on after the summer, spending their time discovering new songs and the sheer joy of singing in harmony. They did spots in folk clubs, got onto a Buskers of London compilation cd, played some miners' strike benefits, got their first paid gig at the Empress of Russia Folk Club with Janet Russell and Christine Kydd, sneaked over the fence into Sidmouth Folk Festival and sang at various singarounds there, played a gig with Billy Bragg, and became known, briefly, as Those Two Women, as they kept popping up places (Jude sporting a rather fetching mohican at the time) and nobody quite knew who they were. And then of course there was the free Flight to New York with Virgin Atlantic, in return for providing in-flight entertainment.

By now we were getting hooked on the radical end of folk music, especially since it linked so easily with the harder edge of pop - Elvis Costello, Billy Bragg, Paul Weller. With this latter trio seemingly falling under the sway of Bob Geldof's all-encompassing Live Aid Blandathon, it fell to folk/radical stalwarts like Leon Rosselson and Roy Bailey to keep us buying records and hitch-hiking to gigs. It was at a Leon Rosselson concert in Manchester that a couple of us first learned about the sacred "don't enter the room when the artist is singing" rule. Oops. All a little too formal after a few years of punk rock, but nonetheless Leon's albums - and the anti-nuclear folk compilation he'd made with the likes of Martin Carthy, Frankie Armstrong and Roy Bailey - dragged us into working out how to sing folk harmony and stitch together an acoustic song. Maybe The Beatles' Rubber Soul had got to us first, but whilst we were still blissfully unaware of Nick Drake and Nic Jones, never mind the Copper Family, it was the political songwriting coming out of the folk scene that most inspired and excited us.

During the miners' strike of '84 - '85 we wrote a song about a small mining village decimated by the strike and by the ensuing poverty; a village with which we were linked as a Leeds Miners' Supprt group. Fitzwilliam, it was - the town and the song. Despite twenty years of experimenting with styles and sounds, it probably doesn't sound too different from how we sound today (well, alright, it's a bit rubbish. But you get the gist).

Our first album included a folk song called Nicaragua, written during the Sandinista's opposition to US-funded military and economic intervention. Around this time we also discovered acapella folksong in the form of Swan Arcade, the Watersons and the Wilson Family. Swan Arcade we saw at Holmfirth village hall and were shocked by the power of three voices in a large room. And always with these groups, from Christy and Dick Gaughan to Swan Arcade and Leon Rosselson, plenty of between-song talk about the world we were living in, about Thatcher-Reagan warmongering, about strikes and about unemployment. In the later part of the 1980's we found ourselves utterly marooned in the rock/pop world, as radical bands we had felt affinity to (or were simply inspired by) folded and split. At this time, folk music really was a lifeline in continuing a proud and intelligent radical musical tradition in Britain.

By the time we were deciding to record a third album - during 1987 - we'd had enough of shouting for a while and felt like confounding our audience somewhat with a collection of acapella folk songs dating from 1381 to the present. We listened to old recordings, dug up books of English folk songs from various libraries (and yes, these really were books which were checked out less than once every decade!) and worked out our harmony parts mainly from sheet music. We wanted to present to our young and post-punk audience a definitive body of proof that radical singing didn't start with the Sex Pistols. It was an education for us, too, obviously. In a small stone hut in the Yorkshire Dales that a friend was renting for a year, we struggled like mad with these old songs of defiance, victory and struggle. When the recording was finished we went, eagerly, to Fellside Recordings (real folk music distributors!) and asked if they were interested in selling some copies. They said no. Weirdly, it became our best-selling album in Germany until the mid-nineties, until that one about getting knocked down etc.

Dance music - especially its early buzz of illegal parties, arrests and a drug that seemed to stop our city's clubs being full of white blokes wanting to kick each other's heads in - swept us away for a few years, along with the ongoing discovery of new technology and new forms. Samplers! Sequencers! Hip-hop! This was a time when it wasn't unusual for John Peel to play Nick Drake next to Public Enemy next to Adamski next to Woody Guthrie ...

Through this time and the subsequent years we continued using our attachment to acapella and folk song as a way of injecting something close and human into a rock/pop live set. Two songs from the pre-nineties Chumbawamba remain with us simply because they continue to fit so well into what we're trying to say and how we're trying to say it. The Day the Nazi Died and Homophobia talk about issues that refuse to go away. The Day the Nazi Died has come in handy several times as a simple, clear-cut and memorable way of trying to get an audience to listen - once following a set by Aerosmith at some over-blown corporate radio rock event in New York and once opening an out-and-out rock festival (Who booked us? Why?) headlined by Motorhead in Germany. Homophobia, the issue, not the song, is still something few people have made much effort to sing about, which has made it a common choice for our live set.

For a while during the come-down from that dance scene we worked with firstly the Oysterband and Levellers and then with a girl who did our merch stall called Vic, who'd come from a bona-fide folk family and made cassettes of stuff like Nick Drake, Bert Jansch and Pentangle. Despite never having been to a folk festival* or watched a morris dance in its entirety in our lives, we started to delve deeper into folk and its heritage. Seeing Rory McLeod all those years ago reminded me of the American troubador tradition, then of Country Joe and the Fish yelling "Whoopee! We're All Going to Die!", then of Pete Seeger and Joan Baez and the whole civil rights singalong movement, then back to Bob Dylan, and gently around to Rubber Soul again, Crosby Stills & Nash, Paul Simon, Martin Carthy, Davy Graham. It's all circles of different sizes, some complete, some not.

*Actually, Neil did attend the Lincoln Folk Festival in 1971 (featuring a stellar line-up of Ralph McTell, Dion, Tim Hardin, Steeleye Span, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Sandy Denny with Richard Thompson, Dave Pegg and Gerry Conway (who were called either The Happy Blunderers or The Bunch), Tom Paxton, The Byrds, Martin Carthy and Dave Swarbrick and James Taylor), and started playing in Folk Clubs, where his love of harmony singing was appreciated, and not buried beneath the din of his previous school bands.

When we decided to mimic Moby's sampling of traditional black American blues singers on his album Play, we turned to British folk music and its great voices. Kate Rusby, Dick Gaughan, Coope, Boyes & Simpson, Harry Cox. Our album Readymades was put together in a skewed homage to some of those voices. We half expected criticism from the folk world for messing around with the music, but found that the folk audience is assuredly open to change and diversity. Since then - even in the last four or five years - the modern folk voices and players have multiplied and expanded, folkies are looking younger and cooler and there are loads of new folk albums out every month. Good or bad, the music's often inspiring and exciting. That there's still a radical voice in folk music (and especially in its audience) makes it easy for us to write and play the way we're doing right now. Trying to be part of a radical tradition that, for us, encompasses our own histories (mostly northern working towns, The Beatles and punk rock!) and the history of rebel songs in the places we've lived.

So three or four years ago we decided to re-record the old English Rebel Songs album, because we felt we could do it better and because we wanted an excuse to sit round singing acapella songs; then, having completed the recording, we wanted to sing the songs live, something we'd never done when the original album came out in 1988. Playing at the Grove folk club in Leeds and York's Black Swan folk club, we rediscovered what it is about folk music that can make it direct and honest and enjoyable. Plus, it's cheaper to play and there's no worrying whether the battery in the wah-wah pedal is running out. Becoming part of the No Masters collective has been an entirely logical step for us in Britain. It suits what we want and what we think, both about the music industry and about the world. We feel like we're amongst like-minded people.

In 2003, Boff and Lou represented us at the Radio Two Folk Awards to present an award to the brilliant Eliza Carthy. The last awards show we'd been invited to (of course) had been the Brit Awards in 1998. There, irrespective of the evening's eventual outcome, we'd felt out of place among the glitterati, the pompous, the coke-addled and the smug. At the folk awards, sitting between Mike Harding and Roy Bailey, watching Christy Moore on stage slagging off the Irish government for allowing US bombers to refuel at Shannon airport, seeing performances from John McCusker, Linda Thompson and Oysterband - it just felt more where we belonged.

So. That's the sketchily-recalled version of how we got here, and why. Trying to close up those circles, and work out what's going on. I know (and excuse us) that this is a partly self-congratulatory piece that largely ignores the pretty insignificant part we play in the greater scheme of radical movements. But & but sometimes you feel like explaining yourself, don't you? Without resorting to an analyst's couch. At the moment we're singing more quietly, talking to the audience more, trying different things, working with new people. It's great, it really is - this being in a band, constantly figuring out our position in the real world, and putting our conclusions to harmonies and chords. And when it comes down to it - however we choose to sing about it - our life as a band has been shadowed by two great and nasty US/UK alliances. As the circle of our music comes around again, we aim to outlive them both. And we will.