Chumbawamba Are The Heroes We Need, Have Started A Feud With Clive Palmer
Clive gets knocked down, please don't get up again.
2018 has brought its fair share of bizarre beefs. Who cares about Drake and Pusha T when there’s Robbie Williams and Led Zepplin guitarist Jimmy Page? Or Azealia Banks and Elon Musk? Or Elon Musk and cave divers? Or Queer Eye‘s Antoni Porowski and this website?
Now, we have one more to add to the canon: Clive Palmer and Chumbawamba, the British band behind the delightful song ‘Tubthumping’.
Chumbawamba has taken umbrage at Palmer for using the song in promo videos for his recently revamped (but still shitty) political party, Australia United. As seen by The Guardian, the band sent a letter to Palmer in which they demand he remove the video, calling Palmer a “Donald Trump-lite egomaniac”.
In the short 10-second video shared on Palmer’s Twitter and the YouTube channel back in June, a group of workers sing the song’s classic line, “I get knocked down, but I get up again”. It’s a really poor effort, honestly — they clearly haven’t practiced it.
I get knocked down, but I get up again, you're never going to keep me down.#MakeTownsvilleGreat #3000jobs #PutPoliticsAside pic.twitter.com/gurZ5JpgwM
— Clive Palmer (@CliveFPalmer) July 17, 2018
In the letter, the band said Palmer was antithetical to ‘Tubthumping’, calling it “a song written to champion the resilience of working people, not to further a billionaire’s political ambitions.”
They also say it’s “badly sung” with a “bunch of embarrassed ‘workers’ who clearly don’t know the words”, which, ahem, is extremely true.
The video remains on Twitter, but has been taken down from YouTube. The band are also concerned about some of United Australia’s billboards in Queensland which appear to riff off the song’s lyrics, and threatened legal action if they weren’t removed.
When approached by Junkee for comment, United Australia had no comment, but they told The Guardian that is was “being dealt with by the lawyers”.
The band, who were born out of North England’s anarchist punk scene of the ’80s, have a history of speaking out against right-wing political parties using ‘Tubthumping’. When UK right-wing party UKIP used the song at a conference in 2011, the band didn’t mince words and called them a “grubby little organisation”. Two years ago, the band told One Nation to keep their mitts off their music, too.
Looks like they keep getting up again. No one is gonna keep them down.