Danbert Nobacon has graciously given me some of his time to answer a few questions and I am more than thankful (in fact, I'm pretty fucking stoked). If you haven't heard that name before, see below...
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| Danbert 1983 credit unknown |
Your Discogs page states, "The follically challenged one from Chumbawamba, known for dressing up and shouting a lot. He's famed for drenching the British Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott at the 1998 Brit Awards by tipping an ice bucket over him." I don't know how you feel about that particular profile, but I too am follically challenged and I have never heard the story from 1998 (I was drunk that year). My first exposure to the band Chumbawamba was on 1982's Bullshit Detector Two on Crass Records. Can you describe a typical day for you in 1982 (the who, what, why, when, where, how of the day, so to speak)?
Yep I been shaving my head since I turned 30 ... finally admitting to congenital baldness ... so for over half my life now I was in Chumbawamba from the start. The three original members Boff Whalley, Midge the original drummer , and myself, all grew up in the same town, Burnley, Lancashire, in Northern England, and had been in a band there with other folks called Chimp Eats Banana which lasted around a year and half around the time we were done high school. The three of us moved to Leeds, a big city to the east to go to school in 1980. All we did was go to see bands and wrote songs and played music ourselves, particularly in the form of busking in the street. By 1982 we had dropped out of college and Chumbawamba had its first gig on January 8th 1982. That summer the three of us, along with another Leeds band called The Mirror Boys, we joined forces to renovate a bus and take it to Belgium and France to play music over there. We‑ten people in all—slept on the bus or camped out of we found a camping spot, so a typical day would consist of a lazy morning, getting coffee and croissants, playing music in the streets in the afternoon, and then (kind of the equivalent of dumpster diving) swinging by the local street market when it closed to get and food they were throwing out, and then we would have a big cook-out wherever we were camped up, or if we had actual gigs booked that would be the focus for the evening. We ended up after two months picking grapes in the South of France to cobble enough money to get the bus and everyone back to England.
My first experience with you as an individual artist was in 1987 with the "Bigger Than Jesus" single on Mind Matter Records (listed as your 2nd single). I did not know the folks involved with San Francisco's Mind Matter personally but I was involved with a similar collective in Los Angeles in 1985, which had some connections to that label and the bands Liberté? and A State of Mind. Both the songs on your single spoke to me as a white male at that time when I was in my first year of college in Northern California. So let's go back to 1987, the same year that Mind Matter released Christ On Parade's first LP...how did you get hooked up with Mind Matter Records, what was that experience like?
Back then, before e-mail and the internet and before cell phones, all our communication happened via letters (snail mail) or by regular telephones. After the Bullshit Detector 2, we contacted all the bands who were on that record and invited then to be on a cassette compilation called “The Animals Packet” which came out I believe in 1983. As a result of that we played around the UK with some of those bands and met other bands that formed the UK anarcho-punk scene, and our relationship with “A State of Mind: started the same way, by exchanging letter across the Atlantic. The first thing we did was the split EP with them and Robbie from a State of Mind came to visit England so we got to meet up and hang out. Greg who was in a State of Mind and was coordinating other releases for Mind Matter, I guess ahd heard my solo album “The Unfairy Tale” and asked me if I wanted to put out an EP on Mind Matter, and that was “Bigger Than Jesus.”
Then, fast forward 10 years and there was the Chumbawamba of 1997 (again I was drunk that entire year as well), with Tubthumping and world wide fame. Y'all were on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno, the above vid I found during a rabbit hole adventure on youtube. Looks like Bob Newhart and Howie Long were on that episode of the show as well...classic! You've gotta tell me about what you remember of that day?
Yeh by 1997 we were on the roller coaster of having a big song in the mainstream and were getting invited on the big TV shows in the US. My memory is not good for the actual details of the day but what I remember is the difference between doing David Letterman and doing Jay Leno. WE had this rule of thumb, especially when we were in that mainstream pop bubble, that ordinary human interactions meant a lot and were a good way of assessing if the people we were dealing with were honest, or decent people. Jay Leno seemed relatively down to earth (for someone who was a multi-millionaire and owned a gazillion cars, (*and maybe including your friend’s VW bus?). Leno was friendly, and off camera asked us about our lives and how we were doing and had pictures taken with us. He seemed like he had time for us. By contrast David Letterman was literally very cold ... well he wasn’t but everyone else including the studio audience was. It was December and our record company person stressed we make sure we have winter coats with us. Not a strange request given it was December, but we were going to a plush TV studio in New York. When we got there, we found out why. The studio was freezing. Letterman demanded that the temperature of the studio be kept super low, so that when he was being filmed, he did not sweat under the lights which put out a decent amount of heat. It was the weirdest thing looking out at the audience who were all bundled up in their winter coats and scarves in their seats. Anyway his personality was similarly cold, and he didn’t engage with us except when we were being filmed. That’s showbiz folks!
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| Photo by Mike Hipple |
Yes, I and most of the folks in Chumbawamba have continued to be engaged in the arts in various ways since 2012, with some of us migrating along other avenues like theatre and script writing, as well as continuing to do music. I am currently recovering from open heart surgery (to replace a wonky aortic valve I was born with) so my typical days at the moment are muchly stripped down. I was part time teaching theater in the local high school for the last nine years, but have had to step back from that for now. Likewise, I am on hiatus form the local indie cinema where I worked a couple of shift a week, but prior to the surgery I was working half the time as above and half the time on my own stuff, which is mostly music at the moment. I have a new double album all recorded, (though not fully mixed yet) which will come out in Spring net year, tentatively titles “Kochtopus’s Garden – Now That’s What I call Capitalism — The Musical” ... I just announced it recently on my web-site and have a lot of work to do, working on the post-production side, like writing sleeve notes, co-ordinating artwork and limited CD production, and thinking about how to promote it. Oh, and answering queries about Chumbawamba and the occasional interview like this. (insert smiley face) Since the surgery, (seven weeks ago at the time of writing) I have had a lot less mental energy for this kind of stuff, though it is gradually coming back.
At the moment I have a lot of follow up doctors’ appointments and stuff, and try to get out walking every day which is the main re-hab at the moment. It’s all good. I knew for a while that I would have to get the operation, so it is a relief to be done that side of it, and I feel like I have been given a new lease of life, and am continually amazed by medical science. (Whichever of my grandparents had the same condition as me, lived in a time—the 1960’s—when they had not developed valve replacement, so when the valve wore out they just keeled over and died, in their 60’s, which is where I am now.
I ask this question in a lot of my interviews, and perhaps it's a common one, but what is playing on your real or imagined turntable these days, what's some of your goto's when you want to listen to some good music (old or new)?
Oh, I also have done a local radio show for the last decade or more, which I am also on a break from, but will get back to soon. It is talk radio with music, though I play all five of the characters doing the talking. We talk about what is going on in the US and in the world today with a particular focus lately on the climate emergency, and play all kinds of music. I have a big CD collection I shipped from the UK when I moved to the US in 2007, so I have a lot of stuff the other folks on the radio don’t play. Also, from playing around the US and particularly the Pacific North West these past 15 years I have seen bands, or played with them or stumbled upon them, and am always on the lookout for good stuff. In the past Spring whilst I was out playing I had the pleasure of playing a couple of shows with Sarah & The Safe Word: they had asked me to be on a track on their album last year, so they were touring the release and they have like four albums and they are great. And then I played a punknews.org show in Philadelphia back in May, and Dwarves and Zorn were on the bill which was great, but also a band called Vixen 77 who hark back to late nineteen seventies girl-punk, and they just released their first album “Easy Access” which is great.
I have a whole host of musicians playing on my new album, and they are all from great and varied Seattle bands, not least Kuinka, The Panda Conspiracy, The Bad Things, Trish Savage, and the Polyrhythmics.