WRITING IN TODAY’S Guardian newspaper (23 March), Boff Whalley rebukes the attempts of right-wing politicians to appropriate Chumbawamba’s single Tubthumbing for their own nefarious, disingenuous ends.
Whalley’s statement comes day’s after the band’s representatives announced they were issuing a cease-and-desist order against New Zealand’s populist, rightist deputy prime minister Winston Peters, who’d adopted the song as an election anthem – without approval or permission.
Tubthumping was written “to celebrate the resilience and tenacity of working-class folk who keep fighting when the chips are down,” Whalley insists. The song has – along with other material by progressive artists – become a target for theft by right-wing demagogues because, he explains: “The bigots don’t have any good songs of their own.”
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.
Boff Whalley
Boff Whalley. 2024. ‘Chumbawamba wrote Tubthumping as a working-class anthem. We won’t have it stolen by the right’. The Guardian, 23 March. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/mar/22/my-band-hit-tubthumping-is-the-latest-working-class-anthem-to-be-co-opted-by-populist-politicians
The Hippies Now Wear Black 
Nice 1 Boff.These scummy bastards are creeping in everywhere and need taking down.