by Alice Nutter
When I was a kid I was ashamed of my family with its silences, violence and weird little wars. I wanted to be normal, have the life that I thought other kids at school had. Then I grew up and realised that fucked up families are the norm. The kids whose greatest sorrow was a rabbit or a grandparent dying were the weird ones; the majority of us were closing the curtains each night and breathing in various forms of misery.
I loved my Mum and my Mum loved me, but I got away from my childhood home as fast as I could. I was always looking for groups to replace the family. First it was Northern Soul and speed with the instant companionship that loving the same music and being off your head brings, then it was punk and communes and discovering politics with other messed up working class kids. I moved to Leeds to squat a house with the rest of Chumbawamba. We were a gang. People used to visit us and comment that we had chosen our family, but that always made me feel slightly queasy: families have parents and unequal power relationships. We were peers, our strength lay in that. We were young and not bad looking, so obviously we got crushes on each other. Groups are driven by lots of divergent forces but sex is usually somewhere near the top of the list. We were out to impress each other, and there were enough of us to realise whatever mad scheme came up, which is one of the reasons we were so productive. Last but not least, we made each other laugh.
My experience of family had been warped and insular, it had shored up its paranoid walls with moral reasons why we should all live in divided little units. There was no toleration of difference in our house, and there was always a reason why I wasn’t supposed to play with other kids from the area – generally my Mum thought they were too ‘common’. We lived in a tiny two-up-two down terrace house but we weren’t common because:
A) My Dad was a working class conservative
B) We had an inside toilet
C) My Mum was a district nurse.
D) We had a telephone
Home was an unhappy place but there was always a double standard, an assumption that the only people you could trust were blood relatives. Whittlefield, where I grew up was a slum clearance area. My Mum wanted us not to mix with the natives for our own good. We were isolated in the name of love, it didn’t matter that there wasn’t much love on show, blood ties rather than demonstrations of affection were supposedly what counted. I had to get away from ‘family’ to learn that love is by its nature expansive. And although the nuclear family predates capitalism in Britain – with nuclear families operating from the 1300’s – organising us in small mistrustful units suits the needs of capital. During the Miners Strike scabs never went back to work, not because they didn’t care about their fellow workers but because they were taking care of the needs of their family. [Editor’s note: see Sean Watkin’s Queerpool 4: Family Life for a description of that conflict in his own family.]
My Mum once told me that in the end the only people you could ever really rely on were family…yet it has always been friends who have provided me with much needed safety nets, friends who helped me through bereavement, miscarriages and all the other bits of crap that I never saw coming. The friendships that have nurtured me throughout my adulthood are for the most part those I formed in Chumbawamba. We look after each other’s kids, ride out problem periods and generally want the best for each other. But I do not think of these friends as family. The relationships are still based on choice, rather than by accident of birth or who happened to be around when the band was formed – and I say that because there are a couple of former members I haven’t seen for years.
Sometimes I think Chumbawamba lasted so long because the ‘front people’ weren’t the talent. We might have got all the media attention but we knew that we couldn’t make music without the rest of the band shoring up our musical deficiencies. I remember throwing strops in the early days and realising that I was dispensable and bad behaviour might lose me a good thing. If I had the voice of an angel they might have put up with more shit in the short term, but it wouldn’t have helped the group dynamic or given me such lasting friendships. And those that did have real talent, like Lou – who does have a beautiful English folk voice – weren’t extraverts, so she was never big headed about her voice because she was always aware of what she couldn’t do. Generally bands break up because one of the members gets it into their heads that they are more deserving than the rest; we had the opposite idea. Plus we all had a sense of having escaped the fairly grim life that was mapped out for us in various small working class towns. We’d run away to sea together and the ship had never sunk.
Now I have a family of my own, more than ever it seems important not to have my daughter grow up trapped in a tiny blood related group. I don’t live a wildly exciting unconventional life, I’m in a nuclear family on a street full of semis filled with other nuclear families. Right now I don’t want to go back to living in a commune, but I am still scared of how insular and debilitating the nuclear family can be. I can despise capitalism and still have to live under it, I can know that the nuclear family is not particularly healthy and still inhabit one. My daughter is growing up knowing that right now her Mum and Dad are the constants, but she has other relationships that sustain her too. She thinks it is normal to grow up surrounded by a loving circle of friends, she believes that when she’s older she can be a writer or an archaeologist or a mathematician because she sees her parents and her mates’ parents having creative lives and she thinks it’s her right. If there were one thing that I could wish for her it would be that she would surround herself with allies because I know the difference that can make to a life.