What is the historical background for 1997’s most catchy British protest song, Tubthumping?

Chumbawamba were an anarchist collective/punk band who claim to have formed in 1982. They released music on their own record label, Agit-Prop (including their first album Pictures Of Starving Children Sell Records: Starvation, Charity And Rock & Roll - Lies & Traditions, in 1986) for about a decade. They started integrating dance music into their music in 1990 or so (when every British indie band was doing that after discovering ecstasy/discovering how successful the Stone Roses and Happy Mondays were). Eventually, Chumbawamba signed to the independent record label One Little Indian in 1993. One Little Indian were most famously The Sugarcubes'/Bjork's record label, but before 1998 they also made waves releasing the ecstasy anthem 'Ebeneezer Goode' by The Shamen, along with the mid-1990s black lesbian feminist-fronted punk band Skunk Anansie. Which is to say that Chumbawamba weren't particularly out of place on One Little Indian. Not that they had quite as much success on One Little Indian as The Shamen or Skunk Anansie (let alone Bjork): their biggest release on the label, 1993's 'Enough Is Enough', got to #56 on the UK charts.

Anyway, after a few years of not-success, the band wrote and recorded the song 'Tubthumping' in the English winter of 1996, and were pretty sure they had a hit on their hands. However, when they presented the song to One Little Indian (essentially the label of a former anarchist punk band member, Derek Birkett), the record label turned down the chance to release it, (according to a kickstarter post by a former member of Chumbawamba trying to pull together funds for a documentary and a 2012 piece in the socialist magazine Jacobin). According to the Jacobin piece, Birkett wanted the song to sound more punk.

1996-1997 was a time when the alternative revolution started by grunge was still in full swing, and loud bands singing songs about working class pursuits like cigarettes and alcohol became stars. As a result, the band were offered $100,000 by EMI to release the song. As an anarchist collective, they inevitably argued about it for a while before ultimately saying yes. According to Alice Nutter (the sweet-voiced singer of 'pissing the night away') in a 1997 interview with Sorted magazine:

"My reasoning for doing it isn't how we're going to get our message across to more people, it's nothing to do with that. It's because my experiences with One Little Indian and the music industry have convinced me that they're all the fucking same. There's small business men and big business men and they have got a different agenda to us. There's no good or bad capitalism."

In interviews of the time, Chumbawamba seemed to have two priorities with 'Tubthumping'; firstly, they wanted to point out that class struggle could be fun, and that being an anarchist collective didn't mean you didn't have a sense of humour ('don't cry for me, next door neighbour') or that you had to be making difficult tuneless punk music. The group's sense of humour about itself can be seen, according to a Miami New Times article from 1998, in the band wearing shirts saying 'one-hit wonder', 'sold out', and 'shift units' during American television appearances playing 'Tubthumping' - video of which can be seen here.

Secondly, the song was partially a reaction to their perception that Blur - one of the most popular pop groups in Britain at the time - had built a career around writing condescending observational songs about the working class, something which they wanted to set straight.

From the Rolling Stone interview:

"What I hated about Blur was the way the music press said it was social commentary about England in the '90s," says Nutter. "I just thought they were looking down on people. I hate the idea that Blur talk in really condescending tones or about people who play bingo and watch telly. Well, we play bingo and watch telly, and it doesn't mean we're stupid."

However, perhaps it's fair to say that the politics of 'Tubthumping' and how exactly it showed that people who play bingo aren't stupid weren't entirely clear over all of the shouting about alcohol. Despite their claims quoted earlier, it's likely that the band simply wrote a pop song that was very catchy, and then, because it existed and they were a band that released music, decided to use it as a platform for getting their politics heard in the mainstream media - they certainly succeeded to some degree in this respect. Nutter appeared on Politically Incorrect in the US saying that she didn't care if fans shoplifted their records from Virgin megastores. Similarly, at the 1998 Brit Awards, the band changed the lyrics of 'Tubthumping' to reflect their support of striking dock workers, and at the event lead singer Danbert Nobacon poured a bucket of icy water over the head of Labour Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott (the group predictably saw the New Labour phenomenon as a betrayal of the working-class Class Struggle). So they did indeed use their prominence to try and get their message out, even if it wasn't explicit in the music at that period in time.

Of course, Chumbawamba were a genuine one-hit wonder in the US, where the follow-up single 'Amnesia' hit #101 in the charts, but 'Amnesia' was a top 10 single in the UK and Canada. The group apparently made EMI angry by releasing a doo-wop-styled protest song attacking Tony Blair titled 'Tony Blair' via their mailing list (rather than on EMI), and the first (and only) single from their follow-up album to Tubthumper in 2000, 'She's Got All The Friends Money Can Buy' received little support from EMI or British radio. The band kept going until 2012, though, because presumably 'Tubthumping' had set them up well enough to be able to continue doing the same old anarchist collective thing in a capitalist world they'd been doing, essentially, since 1983.