words from Boff Whalley…
I had a meeting today with a friend who’s an independent publisher. We were talking a mile-a-minute about being motivated by belief and about caring enough to do a good job even though you don’t get paid – properly or at all – and about being passionate about stuff because a lot of stuff is just the best stuff in the world, even though the world hasn’t caught on yet.
And on the table was a book that Dunst had sent me for my birthday, a beautiful book of photographs of small, independent, specialist stores and their storeowners – Shutting Up Shop, by John Londei – photographs taken in 1982, all these fantastic straight-off-the-street wonderlands of higgledy-piggledy boxes and packages and floor-to-ceiling shelving stuffed with neatly-ordered stuff (yes! More stuff!), old records, hand-crafted woodworking tools, sweets in jars, locally-produced soap, eggs, knitting wool, second-hand spectacles…
The independent publishers, the specialist shops, they have an aesthetic of fierce individualism which this band (Chumbawamba) has always loved, right from being fans and buying the first Buzzcocks single on the band’s own label. That aesthetic can be carried right across the board from art to politics to sport to shopping to baking cakes and everywhere else in between. It doesn’t have to be wilfully unfashionable or crap but sometimes it is; it doesn’t have to go out of its way to appeal only to handfuls and minorities and ‘selective audiences’ but sometimes it does.
The album we just made, ‘The Boy Bands Have Won…’ (actually the real title is an essay which starts with that phrase) is our attempt to turn ourselves into one of those traditional small stores, fine purveyors of toys, umbrellas, tobacco, fine tailoring and hand-made shoes. All in one room, bang, as you walk through the door. The album also wants to be a milliners, a magic shop, a place to buy organic groceries and fine lingerie.
It’s called The Boy Bands Have Won because it’s saying that, unless we take culture and shape it, shake it, mix it up, make it our own… then we’re pandering to those TV talent shows and their regurgitated homogenous pap. And then the boy bands will have won. And the corner store, the fishmonger, the cobbler, the antiquarian bookshop, the Jewish Deli – they’ll all disappear under the weight of supermarkets, malls and internet shopping.
So, here’s to stuff. To good stuff, clever stuff, stick-your-neck-out stuff, wherever it may be. And may all your local corner stores stay open…
(the MySpace page for excerpts from the album…check out El Fusilado…)
(and where to buy the album, highly recommended by EAP editor Tod who listens to it on the evenings she isn't listening to Danbert Nobacon, Kid Carpet, the Sex Patels, or Randy Newman…)