When Thatcher was wreaking havoc on our nation artists rose up to resist but shockingly there’s no sign of a similar fight back as Callmedave and his posh cronies slash vital services
So thank god for veteran local anarchist Boff Whalley and his mates in Chumbawamba who are staging Big Society! A Music Hall Comedy kick-starting artistic resistance in our city to make us think about the attacks on our communities.
‘Big Society is actually a play fashioned on the idea of a 100 year old music hall show with various acts coming and going, but it’s all built around a story why those people are there,” says Boff.
“The whole point is to draw very easy and quick parallels between 1910 where it is set and 2012. They may be100 years apart but we still have the same problems, and the same things we can sing, dance and shout and talk about.
“It’s The Good Old Days, but it is not the cleaned up nice pearls and feather boa version from the TV. It’s actually what music hall was really like – the cheap vulgar, drunken, chaotic wild party that was working people’s entertainment. Our version is the murky, dirty one.”
Even better they’re recruited Never Mind The Buzzcocks captain Phill Jupitus to head up a quality cast as blustery impresario George Lightfeather. Jupitus may have just come off huge touring productions as the male lead in Spamalot and Hairspray, but he was once better known Red Wedge’s Porky the Poet drumming up votes for Neil Kinnock (under 25s…ask your parents).
But is Big Society really just an excuse for a bunch of tired old lefties to have a po-faced rant at the Tories and their Lib Dem mini-mes?
“I think people in general think Jupitus, he’ll be funny, but Chumbawamba they’ll just bring you down a bit. They’ll just be on the stage handing out leaflets and discussing the dialectical Marxist approach to comedy and music hall.
“That isn’t true at all about Big Society and this show is a good old loud out, singalong night out. If there are politics in there then it deserves to be in there with the humour rather than the other way round.”
So there will be lots of fun and Boff has penned 12 news songs for this production with radical theatre group Red Ladder. But does anyone really expect that Boff Whalley would be involved with a show that had no politics, especially as his band are famous for dumping an ice bucket on John Prescott’s head.
“Chumbawamba was 30 years old this month and I remember when we first became a band it was in the middle of the whole Thatcher thing and the Falklands. I remember looking around and thinking who we were inspired by and it was all the people in the charts like the Specials, Elvis Costello and the Clash. They were popular but singing about the world and politics.
“Fast forward 30 years and we’ve got is this awful government and nothing in the charts that is saying anything at all about our world.
“We need culture to catch up with the students protests, the occupy movement, the pension strikes which were big, well attended events. It seems culture needs to catch up, and I think it will.”
* Big Society! A Music Hall Comedy runs until 4 February at the City Varities. Tickets priced £10 – £17 available on 0113 2430808 or www.cityvarieties.co.uk.
Photo Credit: Tim Smith.