"the writing, recording, touring cycle"

Music Chumawamba are one of the few bands that I'm able to say that I was there before most people, having been introduced to their Anarchy album at uni, just a few years before Tubthumper made them a household name and infamous almost overnight.  For my money it's still their best.  Banned from loads of record shops thanks to its sticky cover, Anarchy was an album which lived up to its name, full of rage against the establishment.  There are few better songs about intolerance than Homophobia. Anyway, after thirty years in the business, they've decided that after a few concerts at the end of the year, it's all over, they're retiring:

"We felt we’d got to a point where what we did as a band – and specifically the writing, recording, touring cycle – wasn’t doing justice to what Chumbawamba set out to do in the first place. We were always as much about ideas as music, and that meant doing more than writing, recording and touring songs. It meant trying to be relevant and active and up-to-date, while trying to avoid the dreaded rut of routine or repetition. being up-to-date meant giving plenty of time and energy to the band, constantly, for those thirty years; a constancy we plainly couldn’t keep up with in the end."

One of my many regrets in life is missing them perform at the Town & Country in Leeds in about 1994 on a night when (I seem to remember being told later) the police were called. Hard to imagine that happening at this gig in Warwick in 2008:



("the worst disease, you can't love who you want to love in times like these")