DANBERT NOBACON … A BEGINNER'S GUIDE

October 2004 - Danbert Nobacon celebrates twenty five years in showbusiness!, Well actually I only just realised it was so long when I came to write this biography.

… A member of Burnley band Chimp Eats Banana 1979-80, not least with Boff and Midge. After nine months at Leeds University, spent mostly going to local gigs and following The Fall and Patrik Fitzgerald around, the three of us dropped out in 1981 and after a summer of busking in the streets of Paris formed Chumbawamba in a basement in Royal Park Road, Leeds 6 and we played our first gig on Elvis's birthday on January 8th 1982. That particular corner of Leeds 6 remains a mix of student living and an Asian community, giving birth to many bands over other bands such as The Parachute men and Onion and the Bhaji men, as well of being the home Leeds's only remaining independent Hyde Park cinema and the much loved Brudenell Social Club. Nearly twenty five years after Chumbawamba first plugged in their fall apart guitars, barely a quarter of a mile down the road, on the same square in the Leeds A-Z, the 7/7 London bombers would rent an upstairs flat which became their bomb factory.

Within a year we had squatted a rambling, ramshackle house in Armley, Leeds 12 and Chumbawamba and over the next year had blossomed into a seven piece Brechtian dance troupe with the sucessive additions of Dunstan, Lou Watts, Alice Nutter, Harry Hamer and Mavis Dillon (even though we did not know who Brecht was nor did we dance much in those early days). Our own cassette label (Sky And Trees) which soon thereafter morphed into Agit-Prop records, and an increasing number of gigs around the country, resulted from the experience.

During the 1980's in between signing on and doing crap part time jobs, being in Chumbawamba, squatting a house in Leeds and playing gigs, playing solo gigs and being involved in anything from Hunt Sabs, to Stop The City, to the Miners Strike, to Troops Out (of Northern Ireland) was pretty much a full time series of passions. Our first single the Revolution vinyl EP released in 1985 ended up at number 6 in John Peel's festive 50 and was the catalyst in us being invited by the Dutch band The Ex to tour Holland in .These two events probably did more for the longevity of Chumbawamba


Chumbawamba released the vinyl albums Pictures of Starving Children Sell Records (1986), Never Mind the Ballots (1987)," and English Rebel Songs (1989) and a host of singles and EP's. I released the Danbert Nobacon solo album The Unfairy Tale (1985) ("don't look for it … it’s not there") and a two EP's Bigger Than Jesus (1987) and Why Are We Still in Ireland? (1989) I had a very, very brief career as a stand-up comedian under the name of Frank Nobacon. We generally eeked out a happy existence, being able to finance a transit van, and later on a computer and always being able to raise enough money to be able to put the next record out.

Most of us in Chumbawamba became thirty-somethings in the early 1990's and a world where it was time to get proper jobs beckoned. Instead, we took a sharp left turn and jumped off the cliff to became a full time 'professional' band in early 1992. This meant playing in excess of one hundred gigs a year, mostly in the UK and Europe to make a living, and being able to subsidise knowingly loss-making gigs in the old East (East Germany, Poland, Hungary and Czech) and trips to places where we were supposed to break even and didn't such as Japan and the US. Chumbawamba released Slap! (1990), Shhh! (1992). Paul Greco joined in 1992 on bass stepping in days before we took off on our second US tour, a six week jaunt driving ourselves and driving ourselves crazy from taking in both coasts on a figure of eight crash course in off the map Americana.

In 1993 we moved to the big independent label One Little Indian, and the world of the CD, on which we put out the albums Anarchy (1994)" and Swingin' With Raymond (1995) and a photo-book entitled I-Portraits of Anarchists providing a music CD to Casey Orr's photographs. The solo career had fallen into disrepair and it was no great loss to the world of music.

At the end of 1995 Mave retired from Chumbawamba and Jude Abbott joined in early 1996. By late 1996 financial mismanagement (though we did not quite realise the sources of the turmoil at the time) had made One Little Indian an uncomfortable place to be, and we left them in November of that year — a week before they laid off half their workforce and sacked half their bands (amongst whose number we would have been). We took with us a half finished album which would become Tubthumper by mid-1997. Bizarrely we found ourselves in a position of being courted by major labels from Germany and the US (we were still far too politically toxic for most UK bigger labels). We ummed and aaahhed, had endless band meetings, and in the end jumped off the cliff again thinking, this will last a year before we are dumped, but we will have a right royal blast in the bargain. To our surprise it lasted a bit longer than that.

Older and wiser than most bands thrust into the mainstream limelight, and having shared a house together and then shared vans and tout buses together for the best part of fifteen years, we were better equipped than most to deal with the situation and to use it to our advantage. Having talk show queen Barbara Walters ask serious questions about Anarchism on prime time network US TV, and seeing David Letterman's staff in a complete flap because we changed one of the chorus's of the song, to "Free Mumia Abu Jamal!" was quite spectacular from where we were standing, in the situationist sense. Prescott's face close up, giving 70 grand to anti-General Motors activists from a song of ours being used to advertise a GM car, gave us some sense of dignity in the capitalist workplace.

The new millennium saw Paul Greco leaving the band to live in Germany, with Neil Ferguson, the long time engineer (of all Chumbawamba 's recorded output bar one obscure 12") us with job security, having families and artistically back in the shadowlands with net-loss making albums WYSIWYG (2000), Readymades (2002) and Un (2004) and accompanying loss making tours, and a documentary film Well Done Now Sod Off. (2001). Boff wrote a humorous and poignant account of twenty odd years in Chumbawamba. I used to write a series of reminiscences of some of the weirder aspects of life in the road , for chumba.com, which perhaps I will at some point post as an archive page on this site.

With the luxurious cushion of the royalties from one international hit song we kept the whole show on the road and paid living wages and M.U. rates for anywhere between eight and fifteen people right up until the end of 2004. At this point, after 22 years, Chumbawamba the electric band went into artistic deep freeze. The four member Acoustic Chumbawamba continue to tour and released an album A Singsong and a Scrap (2006).

I started playing solo again in 2005 after what was a fifteen year hiatus and have recorded a new album as Danbert Nobacon entitled The Library Book of the World, due for release hopefully later this year. I am also currently writing a history/current affairs book provisionally called Smart Lies, Secret Wars and Climate Revolt hopefully to be published in 2007.