Did Chumbawamba give the world its most controversial album cover?
Wait, Chumbawamba? Those one-hit wonders with the “I get knocked down” song? They don’t actually matter, do they?!
If you find yourself looking at this headline with sentiments like that, then siddown, you’ve got a lot to learn about looking a little further beyond the surface. Because yes, if you only look at the charts and YouTube view counts, Chumbawamba are the very definition of a one-hit wonder.
They have one addictive, mind-bendingly catchy song that briefly made them a chart concern, then almost immediately rocketed back down into being a cult concern. In most cases, this is because the band or artist couldn’t maintain their momentum. In Chumbawamba’s case, it’s because they genuinely didn’t want to.
Because Chumbawamba have a pretty compelling argument for being one of Great Britain’s greatest ever punk bands. That’s punk with a capital P as well. Rigidly anti-fascist, anti-corporate and defiantly themselves. Despite their biggest splash coming in the achingly boring days of Britpop, Chumbawumba have more in common with Crass and The Slits than they do with Oasis and Blur. If you need some direct poof of that, look no further than the cover of their sixth album, Anarchy.
Released in April 1994, Anarchy was the third part of a trio of albums the band released that saw them broaden their palette from slightly crusty folk punk to the dance-inflected pop-rock that would briefly see them take over the world in a few years. Thus, with the nation’s attention on them more than ever, the band decided to make a statement with its cover.
A statement that got the album banned from most shops, and sold in a brown paper bag in designated record stores.
The most controversial Chumbawamba album
The cover of Anarchy depicts a baby. Nothing wrong with that, you might think. It’s 1994, and Nevermind had been out for three years. Ready to Die was coming out that September. Countless records had babies on the cover, so what made this one such a problem? Well, the fact that said baby was pictured while their mother was giving birth, head freshly out of the birthing canal, and the body still making its way out.
Yeah, turns out this wasn’t exactly the kind of imagery that thrilled British record stores and while the record was released with its original cover, so many stores banned the album that eventually it was released with a new cover. Almost as a parody of “acceptable musical imagery”, this new cover was some flowers, the kind you’d find on your granny’s wallpaper. No real problem there, I’m sure your granny has magnificent taste. However, putting them on an album called Anarchy is a little on the nose.
So, why did they do this? Chumbawamba guitarist Boff Whalley spoke to Bandcamp about this and said, “We thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great to have a picture of someone being born, because it asks questions about obscenity and reality?’ We found a children’s book called How Babies are Born or something, and it still got banned! When we pointed out it came from a book for seven- or eight-year-olds, they said it was obscene, and we had to keep it under the counter.”
They well and truly made their point, and no matter how successful they got over the rest of the decade, they would never stop making their point. All hail Chumbawamba!