First day of rehearsal, proper. Tension, fear and awkwardness balanced against joy, commitment and anticipation. This is not like being in a band. With Chumbawamba we’ve long since learned to know each other’s ways, learned how to approach every situation, whether it be recording a new album, boarding a plane to fly abroad for a festival concert, or talking to a breakfast show DJ in Plymouth. But in theatre, you don’t have the luxury of being in the same ‘gang’ for umpteen years – you have to constantly switch between groups of people, and (as in this case) you’re thrown into an incredibly intense situation and are expected to find a way to produce something together from scratch. “Hello, pleased to meet you, now let’s attempt to make great art together.”
That intensity is ironed out over an initial couple of hours of rehearsal-room exercises, games, funny voices, stumbling, fumbling, bumbling warm-ups and whatever other words for ‘warming up’ I could muster here.
I tell you, these actors, they know how to focus. They’re here to work and damn you if you’re not ready to be part of their show. Focus, focus, focus. From the point of view of a musician, the concentration level is admirable. I love it. These luvvies, even at this level, in the words of Johnny Rotten, They mean it, maaan.
So anyway, down at the Red Ladder rehearsal rooms there’s a big bunch of people and Phill Jupitus. There’s no getting away from the fact that Phill is the star of the show, so I won’t pretend. He says that as he goes for some lunch in Leeds city centre, people shout out “That’s him from the telly … that Phill Jupiter bloke”. Phill Jupiter. We should re-advertise the show: “Big Society! Featuring that Phill Jupiter bloke off the telly.”
Any star billing of course very quickly becomes irrelevant. All the actors, along with their Red Ladder-inspired sense of community, equality and “this is not about me – it’s about the message”, have obviously got their own egos, they’re driven; but everyone in the mirrored, too-warm rehearsal room is aware that this is a group thing. This whole escapade will only work if we’re there for each other. If we have a sense of togetherness.
Now one of the big songs in the show is based on a chorus of “We’re all in this together…”, and that song is a heavily-sarcastic comment on Cameron’s blueprint version of an idealised Tory tea-and-cakes Britain. So it could be a little ripe of me to be writing about the cast of the show ‘pulling together’. It could be, but it’s not. We have a large poster of David Cameron on our rehearsal room wall which is there to remind us not only that public school life gives you the rosy cheeks of a well-smacked arse but also that the Tories are (let’s be blunt about this) the enemy.
During the Labour Party years, Chumbawamba were criticised (admittedly, often by coke-addled music journalists yearning for a past when rock ‘n’ roll didn’t try to engage with the real world) for being so anti-Blair when (in the words of David Quantick) “17 years of Thatcher … I don’t remember them ever saying anything about that.” In fact our band spent the entire 1980’s singing, demonstrating, writing and, in fact, physically fighting – in terms of the Thatcher-loving Nazis on the streets – against that hated woman. If I can think back to 1981, in Leeds, going on the anti-Nazi Carnival and seeing The Specials playing ‘Ghost Town’ – which was number one in the charts at the time – it felt like a time when popular culture really was reacting to politics, to our lives. It was stuff like that carnival that fired up Chumbawamba, gave us a raison d’etre.
And so now we have Cameron and it’s so easy to see the links back to that time, to the eighties, when the divisions and the battlefield seemed much more obvious. Now, as then, we have the old school tie in sharp focus. The absolute dismissal of the vast majority of people who live without the safety-nets of family legacies, old boys’ networks, careerist leg-ups and the confidence of the privileged. Go and smash up the restaurant, boys – Daddy will pick up the tab and the police constable will make your excuses for you.
I could, of course, go on in this vein all day. But I won’t. I’ll bring this piece back, back, back to that hot and workmanlike rehearsal room somewhere three storeys above The Wardrobe Club in central Leeds and with the afternoon sun streaming in through the windows. Rod Dixon, the director, is bouncing around on the balls of his feet, ideas fizzing and buzzing around in his head, hands constantly gesturing. Assistant director John Ward sits behind him, constantly scribbling in a book, watching, tapping along.
The actors are going through the same scene again and again, changing it as they go along, working out where to stand; in Kyla’s case, at what point to bend over right in front of Phill. Ah yes, the intricate structure of comedy, it so often comes down to a lewd gag. It’s rehearsed again and again, but it doesn’t mean we don’t laugh every time …
Us musicians, arranged as if by accident in one corner of the action, we sit with our instruments poised, ready to leap in with accompaniment at a second’s notice. Always ready with a D chord. You might not believe me, but it’s exciting. It really is. We get to watch these amazing artists working their way through their craft, building up their characters, picking their noses. Changing from the everyday into something spectacular and showy. Something worth seeing. The discipline is extraordinary; especially knowing that the whole show will run with an amount of utter indiscipline. Chaos. Making It Up As You Go Along. That’s the trick, of course. To rehearse something so well that you can then change things as you go along.
Right, that’s your lot, it’s time for bed. Half past midnight and my brain is getting carried away with this first day of rehearsal. I won’t sleep, of course. Not for a while. Because, like a kid, for me this is all exciting and fascinating. Weird, interesting and unpredictable. Frankly, it’s how I want life to be.

Yours until the next one (look out for an Xmas Special …) Boff Whalley 16 December