by Danbert Nobacon
What’s brown and sits on a stage? I just tested this on American born Ms. Nobacon and her pal and they did not get it the joke despite 12 years in England on Ms. Nobacon’s part. So I will explain. The answer of course is show-biz. Biz or business being an English kid word for poop, or at least it was in the sixties when I was a child. And here seems to be the perfect metaphor for the stickier, seamier, more sordid sides of life on stage. And, whilst performers, musicians, actors often seem embroiled in these seamier depths, when their public and professional lives overlap, the actual performing, being on stage, being in role, is if you like, from a performer’s point of view, the real shit. Freudian? Primeval? Darwinian? Could be?
Striving for the real shit is what concerns me here. I did once entertain the idea of telling the above joke and performing the visual act, rather than delivering the punch-line, which will indicate how the performance side of my brain sometimes works. I think my logic at the time in the early eighties for not laying down this particular real deal, was not a fear of exposing or embarrassing myself, rather that I was worried that I would not be able to do it without having to pee, and I had phobias about liquid and electricity interacting and my ending up being electrocuted on stage.
In my immediate post puberty years I’d always been mortally terrified of being in front of people, and avoided it when at all possible, never volunteering and only succumbing to the coercion of the occasional school performance, when there was absolutely no way out. As a class, we had to learn “Mad Dogs and Englishmen” by Noel Coward, and perform it in front of the whole school and parents and whilst hiding in the second row, and strength in numbers enabled me to not be literally calcified to the spot, it in no way enamoured me to consider performing of my own free will. At fourteen or fifteen in the mid-nineteen seventies I was the least natural performer you could hope to come across.
My mum and dad, who grew up in the radio age of the nineteen thirties and forties could play piano and harmonica respectively, and though I did not know it until years later, my dad sang harmony in a barber shop group when he was a teenager. However, in the post-war, post-rationing world of the consumer society of the nineteen sixties England, food and entertainment increasingly became processed and pre-packaged, and in this respect my own exposure to music was at least always once removed. I did harbour some detached fantasies about being a guitar hero, from watching the Glam Rock of The Sweet or T-Rex on Top of the Pops, whilst never having seen a live band performance in the flesh. And, I think particularly because of this latter gaping cultural void in my life, actually being on stage myself seemed as remote and fanciful to my teenage mind as it would for me to be in a position to snog Raquel Welch or Natalie Wood.
In the mid-seventies there was a lad called Phil who we knew at school. He was in the year above us, and did have a guitar and he was in a band, and apparently had been for years. He told us how he was always busy rehearsing, rehearsing always rehearsing, and perfecting the guitar licks, striving for the day when his band would play their first gig …
And then punk rock happened. Coming on like a runaway train tearing into small English northern towns in 1977-1978, punk rock, to an artistically disenfranchised generation of fifteen, sixteen, seventeen year olds, was suddenly something that grabbed hold of us by the scruffs of our necks, firing our latent imaginations, and sparking our slumbering creativity. For those of us who leapt into the rushing waters, this mega-tsunami realigned our peer groups and devoured everything in its path, clearing away all the preconceived notions and obstacles that relate to the hierarchy of music, and musicianship, and who or who did not have a right to get up on a stage. In one swift revolutionary motion it seemed the playing field was suddenly levelled and the punken proletariat of would be musicians and performers were hot-wiring and stealing the thunder of pomp and prog rockers everywhere, from under their very noses. And whilst this, in the scheme of was a momentary turning of the world upside down, for those of us directly involved it was life changing.
Local bands sprang up where there had seemingly been none before, and venues began to flourish, in church halls, youth clubs and upstairs in pubs, often short-lived, all in the manner of a rapidly burning fuse. It was only a matter of short months before me and my close mates had a band and a slot to play our first gig. We were called Chimp Eats Banana, and in the time Phil and his band were still busy rehearsing, rehearsing, rehearsing, striving for the perceived perfection needed to appear in public, Chimp Eats Banana was born, lived and died, writing around fifty songs and playing live eighteen times, and releasing a cassette album.
More than anything, the ideal which emerged from the garbled dialectics punk rock was the ignition of that spark which enabled us to get up and do it and in so doing make it our own. And, in that sense revolutionary is not too strong a word for the empowerment born of these times that still fires me as a performer, and many of my peers from that era, thirty years later.
It could have all been so very different, for the first time I appeared in public by choice, on an outdoor stage of my own free will, on Halloween 1979 in Burnley Lancashire, I could have been scared of for life. As it turned out, because it was a band performance we had each other to egg us on, and when I reached for the microphone that first time I was quite simply blinded. The spotlight shining in my face was so bright I could see no one in the audience, though I could hear them, and all the paralysing nerves and fear where transmuted by that golden warm light into the adrenalin high, which still satisfies my soul like no other.
Chimp Eats Banana were abysmal musically, but had ideas which carried us, by our coat tails beyond what pretty rapidly became trad. punk. And here, I believe, is the quintessence of performance: the transformation of base materials and thoughts into action with a view to transmuting the whole affair into the creative gold of inspiring and provoking thought in others. And in this respect as farmers produce the nourishment we need in the food we eat, artists are equally valuable in producing the brain food that our minds need if they are to remain active and healthy.
In later years I came to realise that achieving any of this relied on the wit and craft of the performance. Like a good actor who can transform himself and bring to life any number of disparate roles and characters, so the medium of a song becomes a challenge to bring to life the ideas which fired it and in doing so create something that reaches far beyond the pure idea. Moreover, simply dealing in songs immediately limits the horizons of performance. From the outset, Chimp Eats Banana and later Chumbawamba became known for the theatrics which accompanied the songs and/or the agit-prop political ideas which underlay the songs.
With Chimp Eats Banana we had this idea of doing what we called ‘concept gigs’, where the way we dressed, what we did on stage, down to some of the songs specifically written for the occasion, all related to a particular theme or idea. One which springs to mind now, was called ‘The Bed Gig.’ We were all dressed in pyjamas, and had a mattress on the floor centre stage. Two of the band remained ‘asleep’ under the covers for half of the gig, which was not a problem musically because we all swopped around instruments anyway during the course of a gig. From our point of view, the idea was probably stronger than the execution, but people in the audience took away a lasting impression of having seen something they were not quite expecting.
It may sound now like naïve unformulated art rock, but the real art happened before we even walked into the venue. Not only had we decided to wear pyjamas whilst on stage, but because ‘we meant it man,’ we dressed before we left our respective houses. Meeting up and walking the one and a half miles to town in broad early evening day-light, three of us were stopped by the cops who thought, to quote them that: ‘we had escaped from a mental institution.’ They were even more stupefied by our explanation of what we were actually doing. It simply did not compute for them.
The feeling of being imaginative leaps and bounds above these two twenty-something cops — who appeared to us as the future incarnations of some of the more conservative and authoritarian personalities of our peers at school — was for us the most sublime justification of our art. Where others of our school mates were destined for the local fall-back apprenticeships in engineering, and careers in aerospace (weapons manufacture), or going down the pit, we had the sense that we were transcending what was expected of us (though perhaps our parents did not see it this way at the time). It was all very in the moment, and we had nil idea then that decades later we would be performing and going through the very same thought processes to pluck ideas from the imaginative ether, and turn them into something that sometimes reaches the heights of performance which plugs in and connects with something of our common humanity.
It was during these teenage years that I discovered, where I may not have had a natural talent, I certainly had a natural affinity for performance. I became hooked on that adrenalin high as a means of expression, and addicted to the rocky road of creativity that leads there. For better or worse, from an audience point of view, I know I cannot go too long without becoming involved in some public display of some sort or other. It is part of my equilibrium. In daily life I am generally a shy and retiring kind of bloke, but performance still holds the explosive transformative experience for me that it always did.
I can quite happily live with both these sides of myself, and find no contradiction therein, whereas people who know me as one thing or the other, are acutely surprised when they see the side they do not know. My own mother was absolutely gob-smakced (and my mother is a talker) when she first saw me perform onstage, eventually saying, in a good way, that she could not believe that it was her son up there on the stage. She quite rapidly became my greatest fan.
The great comedian Lenny Bruce did a bit along the lines people, himself included, get on stage to satisfy the childhood need for “look at me ma” approval. And perhaps for some people it is in our genes that we are born performers. As in my own case, in modern society, unleashing that genie, is not necessarily straightforward, but in evolutionary terms perhaps there are good reasons why performance and art evolved to be part of the human condition.
I have mentioned farming and brain food above, and perhaps with the increasing complexity of human society after the development of agriculture some thirteen thousand years ago, the need for art and performance became part of the social glue which kept societies functioning for the general good of all the tribe. This has proven to be a double-edged sword for sure. The rival Easter Island tribes continued to divert precious resources into carving bigger and greater stone heads to out-do each other, even in the face of the complete decimation of their environment. And down through history, artists and performers have always been conscripted and press-ganged by the prevailing power elites of a particular time, to serve agendas that are against the best interests of the general populace.
In this respect in the early twenty first century, the current powers that be, would have us serving the cause, singing the piper’s tune, shackled to the same old rampantly destructive road, which has carried the alternating Great Powers since Columbus. I would argue that art and performance has a higher evolutionary purpose, thus whilst I tap into my base need to perform, whatever the roots of that need are, I understand that some kind of social responsibility comes with it.
If there is no human connection then the performance is rendered lifeless and dull at best, and ultimately harmful to the human soul in the worst instances. Rather than abdicate that responsibility and simply be part of the band that played on, whilst the Titanic sank, I feel a need to add my weight, no matter how small, to the millions of other artists and performers, in the collective push to steer humanity along the road to a more sustainable future. Thus, whilst it may sometimes seem like I am out there, off the scale, lost at sea in a performing sense, there is some concentrated effort going on somewhere, on my part, to be part of the solutions rather than adding to the problems. As well as still trying to lay that turd right there centre-stage, metaphorical or otherwise …