The Comedy of Errors: Chumbawamba - Nothing That’s New (12 June 1992)

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NOTE - The video for this track has been mistimed, the song is only 3:06 long.

Chumbawhamba, as Peel pronounced them, released an album in 1992 called Shhh.   The route to market was a bumpy one.  In its original form, the album - originally titled Jesus H. Christ - was packed with samples, while other tracks saw the group directly quote lines and musical passages from songs by the likes of Free, ABBA, Fleetwood Mac, The Beatles, Pet Shop Boys and many more.
Permission was not granted for all of them meaning that material had to be re-worked, re-titled and in some instances rejected such as their version of the 30s standard, Don’t Fence Me In.

The over-use of samples and liberal musical quotation which peppered the album have been attributed to its theme attacking censorship (as in the album’s best known track, Behave) and advocating the sharing of musical ideas.  What’s the point of getting uptight about plagiarism when, as Lou Watts sings at the top of Nothing That’s New, ALL musicians whether they be megastars or still stuck in their bedrooms are limited to the same seven notes and by 1992 that formula had been pretty much wrung out.  Set to a country and western waltz, Nothing That’s New is a concise summation of Shhh’s central thesis - musically, it’s all been done.  All that’s left is to stir up the existing pot, pick out what you like and create anew.  The dance and hip-hop genres had been unabashed about this for years, but rock music tried to maintain some kind of superfluous integrity about originality which led to much beating of breasts whenever plagiarism cases went to court.  Not for the first time, Chumbawamba were putting out a message which needed a more media-friendly figure to articulate before plagiarism became something to loosen up about.

The subtext of Nothing That’s New passed Peel by or at least he made no reference to it in the studio.  Instead he was more tickled by the cough at 1:38. “Nice to hear coughing creeping back into pop music. Oliver Mtukudzi* did it better than anyone else.”  The band were due to record a session which would be one of the most infamous in the programme’s history.

*Mtukudzi died on 23 January 2019, the same day that I heard Nothing That’s New for the first time in this programme.

Merry Christmas.

Video courtesy of 123beefy123