Danbert Nobacon (of Chumbawamba - I wonder if he tires of that) and Kira Wood Cramer under the moniker The Axis of Dissent have released their 2nd LP (a follow up to Stardust To Darwinstuff in 2017), “Mesmerica Expect A Circus” on Verbal Burlesque Records. An epic odyssey into the absurdity and frustrations of modern life that bounces along with a deceptively festive tone, all while painting a highly detailed portrait of the American dream turned into a nightmare.
Like the Who’s Quadrephenia, Zappa’s Joe’s Garage or Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, Mesmerica Expect A Circus isn’t so much an album as it is a thematic story. Upon the first listen I liked it. Eclectic and listenable with all the things you want from one of the most politically-driven lyricists around. But after the second and third listen, Mesmerica began to flood over me in all its zany cinematic glory. It’s a remarkable work of art that requires a bit of attention and patience. Not that it isn’t catchy as hell - it is. But to get to those deeper levels I recommend sitting down with it like the good old days. Put the headphones on and take your time with this sprawling double LP. By the end of it you may be asking yourself how in the hell this country got to where it is today. But you’ll be doing so melodically.
Nobacon chatted with me about the album, his creative processes and the current state of our troubled country as seen through the eyes of an outspoken anarchist.
Tell us how about the concept of the album and where the idea was born?
I guess all through last year I had the idea to put out an album in 2020, it being an election year, with the idea that it would be a collection of things I had written since the last election. And for the last three years (pre-pandemic) I had been working with Kira Wood Cramer doing live shows as a duo and it was always part of the plan to translate that to record somehow. Kira was born in Okanogan County and has lived in Twisp for most of her life. We met actually onstage (in a warm up exercise) during rehearsal for a community theatre production of “A Christmas Carol” in Twisp in 2010. We have been in other theatre productions since and are both regular participants in the annual Twisp Trashion Show. I would say working with Kira has inspired and enabled me to bring a whole new theatrical element—which whilst we have dabbled with in a live setting—I have never so fully been able to realize in the recorded form as with this album.
Stylistically, like much of your work, the album is pleasantly a bit all over the map. Punk for sure, but also some Baltic folk, Cash-esque Americana, reggae, swing-country and at times showtunesy. Talk about the musical influences you’ve funneled into your current work.
There is definitely some old English punker influence, which comes in on the fuller songs like “Climate Emergency,” “Building A Wall” and “Corprageddon” which I think comes from working with new guys, for me, Loren Boley on drums and Clay Ashford on bass, both of whom are Twisp-Winthrop locals - and not that they would know it - but the resultant sound reminds me of the English band Culture Shock from the mid-late 80’s. There’s some Baltic folk thrown in, which maybe comes from me being able to play rhythm guitar with a bit more flair and inventiveness from accumulated experience. And having Kira on the record makes me think of early English punk rock. And the slide into a reggae type sound in the second half of “Building A Wall” is reminiscent of the later period of The Slits and Culture Shock that had some of that punk-reggae crossover which The Clash were well known for.
I really do listen to a wide range of music and I think it subconsciously seeps into my writing process. For example, with the track “Mesmerica” which I would call a showtune, I was dumbfounded when Mell (Dettmer), the engineer and producer on the album, said it sounds like the “Miss America” theme from the Miss America contest. Being from England I did not grow up with Miss America, so maybe I heard that theme without really realizing it and internalized it, or something, because the main tune of “Mesmerica” is very much like the opening of “Miss America”. Also, the wordplay is uncanny, being as I coined Mesmerica as a combination of ‘mesmerized’ and ‘America.’ All of which brings me to the idea that I am a sponge for musical influences over all my years of listening to music. The piano/nursery rhyme kind of shorter songs on the record remind me of Ivor Cutler (an eccentric Scottish genius songwriter whom I recommend anyone check out) and the more theatrical bits on the record conjure up Viv Stanshall and the Bozo Dog Doo Dah Band.
“Expect A Circus” is from a bumper sticker which I first saw, whilst I was sipping a beer at the counter in front of the ‘Bumper Sticker wall’ at East 20 Pizza in Winthrop, the full text of which is “Elect a Clown, Expect A Circus,” and refers to our current situation generally since Trump was elected.
Thematically, Mesmerica Expect A Circus is classic Nobacon material. Biting political commentary, comedic satire on serious concepts and a strong stance on environmentalism. As I write these questions I stare out the window at a mushroom cloud from the exploding Colockum Fire. As a self-proclaimed anarchist, where do you think we should start as a nation to head in a better direction?
As I mentioned, the albums are kind of a culmination of what we have been experiencing politically in the US since the 2016 election, so I was trying to include that with the omnipresent specter of the Climate Emergency never far from the frame. We started recording in August 2019 and were done mixing in February 2020, which was actually way longer than planned. During which time it grew from being a regular album into a double album, which was never part of the original plan. I think there is an influence from the Extinction Rebellion movement in terms of their mission to get us all to recognize we are in an emergency, and I cover this in detail by satirizing how culpable the corporate mainstream media are in hiding this fact when, as you say, it is staring us in the face. In your case literally with the apocalyptic looking plume you can see in the form of the Colockum fire. And I have certainly seen similar scenes, having lived in Twisp these past thirteen years and having been evacuated during the Twisp River Fire of 2015, and been on evacuation notice two other years.
So part of the album’s original plan was to release by April 2020 on the 50th Earth Day celebration and protests. And then the pandemic happened—seemingly out of the blue, but a long recognized and long predicted threat by scientists in the field—and we were in lockdown so those protests were virtual and online, and the album release got pushed back anyway by other circumstances.
As a self-proclaimed anarchist, and unusual for me, during the making of the album I did campaign on behalf of Bernie Sanders (the only major candidate I have endorsed in all my adult life either in the UK or the US) and we saw him speak in Tacoma before the lockdown when he was on a roll, so there is a chorus on the track “G.O.P. Spells …” which is “vote progressive, act imperative,” which is meant a call to support candidates who refuse corporate money but also, as Bernie acknowledged, that people taking to the streets - and if necessary breaking the law - has always been part of genuine democracy, and has been instrumental in bringing any real progress we have had down through history.
Bernie is on record saying that even if he had been elected we would still have had to get out and protest to usher in meaningful change. And we hear this on the very last track of the record, echoed by the podcasters who are part of the cast of characters on the record. So my attitude has been that real change has to come from below and neither “we the people” nor the intelligence agencies whose job it is to predict and suppress social movements, can know where or when that is gonna happen. As was the case with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Soviet communism, and the CIA whose job it was to predict that stuff had no clue whatsoever. My prediction on the record of climate revolt is eclipsed by the reality with the pandemic in full swing and the Black Lives Matter protests erupting, seemingly out of nowhere.
Of course, there are hundreds of years of reasons why the BLM protests would erupt at some point, and not just in the US but around the world. Looking at the current protests with a little hindsight we can say that because we could see George Floyd being murdered, because someone filmed it on their phone and it can be broadcast around the world within minutes or hours of it happening - we are finally seeing what has been done mostly covertly for hundreds of years by those who are employed to protect white privilege.
The instant outrage at the brutal injustice was the touch paper that set off the powder keg. And, the deployment of secret police by Trump to Portland, as we have seen in recent days, has only escalated the situation. Of course the powder keg or powder kegs have been there all along, built into the foundations of this country by slavery and what came after it. And in the recent history sense by forty years of the failed neo-liberal experiment (which I do talk about in detail on the albums) with the increasing wealth inequality and mounting injustice of the 1% and their lackeys in government becoming ever increasingly distanced from, and indifferent to, the actual daily needs of we the people.
So, I think we are headed for a lot more global protests, and not least in the US, because the mainstream media and the corporate wing of the Democratic party, successfully collaborated to derail Bernie Sanders. The many tentacled protest movements will not simply go away because the oligarchs want them to. There are many more battles ahead. No one knows what will trigger the next upheavals but as we head into high fire season, high hurricane season, the high possibility of some extreme globally warmed weather events hitting when we are still firmly in the grip of the pandemic, could trigger some other protests and uprisings like we have never seen.
And this could go either way; Increasing authoritarianism from a president who just this week suggested delaying the November general election. I think the GOP these last three and a half years and especially during the pandemic, have demonstrated over and over they are basically at war with we the people, in the sense that we are completely expendable in the daily scheme of things and they shortsightedly think having control of the levers of power, not least the police and the military will protect them, when the inevitable (in their vision of the future) climate lockdown happens.
The other version is more along the lines that we the protestors will eventually turn the tide in defense of the planet and our ability to live on it. My experience of the ‘not me us’ movement and my witnessing the recent protests, mostly from afar—though we did have BLM protests in Twisp and Winthrop, and then Blue Lives Matter counter protests and us BLM protestors counter protesting the Blue Lives Matter protest—gives me hope in this respect. I do think there will be a lot of back and forth on this but certainly if we do not continue to mobilize and protest against injustice and the destruction of our life support systems then the climate will make the decision for us and wipe out humanity as a failed experiment.
Were there elements of politics in Britain you liked more than what you see in the US or is it shit as well?
There are many elements that are similar as the UK especially since Thatcher from the late 1970’s onwards has continually tried to emulate the American way of doing business and has kowtowed to the US at every juncture, not least the supposedly progressive Tony Blair signing up for all of Bill Clinton and George W’s wars. There is a false idea that political debate in the UK is somehow more sophisticated because we have the BBC and The Guardian newspaper etc., but they are simply a part of a different way of marketing Neoliberalism. Tony Blair spent most of his tenure as Prime Minister attacking the BBC for supposedly being biased against him (they actually supported nearly everything he did) and by rubbishing them and threatening to take away their funding etc. he made sure they towed the line. The result was that the BBC forever fell into aping the UK model of the Rupert Murdoch (Fox News) dominant narrative, - which is that the capitalist way of doing things - remains above and beyond question. Both the BBC and The Guardian, along with their more right-wing leaning counterparts, were highly culpable in derailing the popular and genuinely progressive Jeremy Corbyn’s election campaign, in a similar way to which Bernie was derailed here. And, the whole Brexit debacle shows just how unsophisticated and stupid the ruling elites and the UK’s version of the white power nationalists are. After Brexit, a friend posted words to the effect of “it’s official, the British are now more stupid than Americans,” … and then a few months later America reclaimed the title by electing Trump. And then the UK elected Boris Johnson, the worst possible choice in generations. In some ways Britain is worse because in its adopted role as chief side-kick it legitimizes all the very worst of US economic and foreign policy around the world and in so doing gives it a veneer of respectability.
Would you say most of your albums are concept albums? Or are they simply a collective reflection of the times?
Yes, I think they are all pretty much concept albums, though many of the songs do start out as independent unrelated entities. Of course, the end product of the album is because my creative brain works in the now antiquated way of thinking in terms of ‘making an album.’ I grew up with vinyl albums, and in Chumbawamba we experienced first-hand the switch from vinyl to CD, and whilst I write songs as individual entities there comes a point where I have a bunch of individual songs that begin to coalesce and form groups along thematic lines usually relating to lyrical content.
For example I have three or so different groups of songs now which could form the basis of three distinct future albums. Once a few songs form a solid grouping then I actually write songs with that thematic background in mind. In this respect I compare it to a visual artist who makes several paintings of the same thing but each is a different interpretation of the original inspirational thing, person, event. So the reason this really grew from one album into two was because I kept experimenting and adding parts, specifically the dialogue which is spoken by the robots or ‘Smartbots’ on the record i.e. me putting words or half words or part sentences endlessly into “Google Translate” and recording and editing the resultant audio, over many long, long hours, and then coming up, in most cases with some form of musical backing. Once I got lost in robot world there was no way it would stay a single album.
Talk a bit about your writing process. Was picking that guitar part of your evolution as a songwriter? Do you typically start with lyrics and then build the music around them or the other way around?
I have always used guitar to write probably most of my songs since 1979. In Chumbawamba my contribution to songs was I mostly wrote lyrics and not tunes, so that was more like writing poetry, though sometimes I would use lyrics I had already set to a tune on guitar (but not submit the tune) and the other guys would come up with a new tune. Or they’d ask me to rewrite the lyrics so they fit better with the new tune. So, whilst I have always played guitar as an individual, I never played it in Chumbawamba because I was one of the three front people. I did some solo gigs in the 1980’s but I only really started to perform with a guitar in the post Chumbawamba (post 2004) years, most of which have been here in the US.
Usually I mess around on guitar, almost aimlessly and I will come up with a chord sequence or refrain and then experiment with a melody, and maybe then one word, or a sentence pops up in my mind (maybe days later) that fits, and it may be nonsense or it may be some pertinent hook like the phrase “Building A Wall” (which originally appeared on “The Library Book of the World” 2007 album) and that gives me something to build on. I have no real musical training, so it really comes from the education of just listening to music my whole life, by the feel of whether something sounds right or whether the elements go well together, which is all through the matrix of my particular experience of exposure to whatever (mostly western) popular music has crossed my path.
Another mostly new dimension was a lot of the fully formed songs on this double album were written knowing I was going to sing them with Kira, so there is a call-response element to some of them. Which makes them difficult to sing solo as I have had to do during lock-down for various virtual performances that I have done these past few months. A couple of the songs were written specifically for Kira to sing, which is also a different approach for me, writing with someone else in mind to sing the song.
Further, I wrote differently for this album as some of the tunes like “Crazy Demons Play” were written on piano, and much of the backing for the robot dialogue was written on a MIDI keyboard where I’d come up with a tune, and then work out the bass part separately. Because of my limited piano skills, in most cases, I would record the right hand and the left hand separately. I have never really used keyboards or piano in composition before. And for this record, again because I knew Kira was always going to be a central part of the vocal side of the record, I worked out some limited vocal harmonies which is also a new approach for me that I am only beginning to explore. We had a lot of harmonies in Chumbawamba but I was never the one who worked them out or even sang them.
With the characters, themes and spoken word elements that so often pop up in your records, have you done or thought about creating a stage musical?
I have actually written two plays with songs with student input during my first two years (2014-2015 ) as High School Drama coach here in the Methow Valley. There were strong musical elements but most of the dialogue was spoken rather than sung, so they were not strictly musicals. Since then we have performed a number of existing musicals with the High School Drama class, so I have thought a lot about ‘the musical’ as an art form and think maybe one day I will do that.
Regarding the characters on this new album, they inhabit what for my creative self I call the “Brain Circus” universe. The second play I wrote with students was called “Brain Circus NY 2025” and used some songs from “Library Book of the World” as well as some half songs that became actual songs on “Stardust to Darwenstuff” (2017). As the CD sleeve notes to “Mesmerica – Expect A Circus” highlights, “Brain Circus’ is a yet to be completed novel. And if you go to the Bandcamp version of the albums or my webpage there is more prose narrative alongside the album lyrics relating to the songs in the context of this ‘universe.’ I do have a few draft chapters written so my creative brain often defaults to that universe, and it was kind of central to the final formulation of Mesmerica – Expect A Circus.
Obviously nobody is touring right now, but are there plans for that once the virus is at bay?
Yes. We had tours booked in the Northwest, Canada, the Mid-West, the East Coast and the UK and they all had to be postponed, and rightly so. I know some of the places want us back when things are safe but I know at least one of the venues we were going to play has gone under during the pandemic. Unfortunately, for lovers of music and the performing arts - both as participants and audience members - my feeling is indoor music gigs will be the last places to open up. The evidence suggests that singing in enclosed spaces is a particularly ripe environment for the virus to spread. Back in March of this year there was a church in Mount Vernon where a choir practice went ahead right before the Washington State shut-down orders and many choir members were infected, and some died. Ditto the idiocy of riling up a crowd at an indoor political rally like Trump did in Tulsa.
As someone that’s been in, out or around the music industry since the 1980’s I’m curious on what your thoughts are about the current situation. On the one hand it’s never been easier to put your own music out to the world, on the other - the business itself has become harder for many artists to be self-sustained. Thoughts on labels, streaming and the current record industry?
I think it is way harder now. In 1979 when we first started doing music, the world population was less than 4.5 billion (it is now 7.8 billion). Back then there was no internet or cell phones and the competing digital universes were barely a pipe dream. You could put out a record (in our case our first releases were cassettes) and build up an audience by playing shows and connecting and personally interacting with our audience. There are so many more people making music in 2020 and that is great but it is so much harder to register on the radar.
To be fair Chumbawamba grew out of youthful energy and a bunch of peers who were ready to commit (after ten years of doing it part time) to being a full-time touring band and there is no substitute for that in terms of making a living. We went from playing a handful of shows a year to playing 120 shows a year. We’d built up an underground following over the previous ten years, and at that level were both making money from touring and selling more albums (and for the first time really making any money from records). Then after having been a full time touring band releasing albums for a further five years, we had the big song which briefly catapulted us into the mainstream. Even then with “Tubthumping” the time period 1997-1998 was still firmly entrenched in the pre-digital era.
Now anyone can make music and pay $50 and have it on all the major digital platforms but it is a much more uphill struggle to stand out and gain any kind of recognition. The most difficult part is even more difficult, and that is alerting people to the fact one’s music is available. And even when people are aware of it, more and more often they are less willing to pay money to own it, whether it be a hard copy or a download. I saw a meme recently which said you needed 20,000 streams on Spotify to make $100 but you only need to sell $10 CD’s, so maybe there is still some financial sense in hard copies?
For my last three albums I have been my own record company, and business is certainly not my strong suit. I hired a publicist for three months so the albums like this new one goes to all the major music press and some radio but even with my musical history and limited name recognition as an individual, my albums barely register.
For example, over my years here in the Northwest. I have had a couple of mentions in The Stranger in Seattle, but I have never been able to get on KEXP. Having a deserved reputation as a political artist enables some recognition in limited circles, but immediately closes many more doors because the music press by and large, even during these Trump years, have nil interest in politics and opinions which challenge the status quo. Whilst that sometimes annoys me, the inherent conservatism of the mainstream organs of dissemination of information surrounding music does not surprise me. Also, as an older mostly non-touring musician I only have limited capacity to build awareness that way, though I do do much more in the way of D.I.Y. music videos released via YouTube. And even more so now because of the lock-down brought by the pandemic.
Very occasionally my history will enable some connection to what I am doing currently but most often the interest is in Chumbawamba history and usually a very specific chapter in Chumbawamba history relating to the big song. That is fine and I am very proud of what we did in Chumbawamba, but as someone who continues to write and release new music, the history of where I have come from is not my first concern. Very very occasionally a fellow artist will use some of my work alongside theirs. Filmmaker Alex Cox has used my songs “Jamestown 2007” over the end credits of his movie “Repo Chick” (2009) and my song “Nixon is My Dentist” over the end credits of his movie “Tombstone Rashomon” (2019) … when all is said and done, I still get to make music and art and put it out there so I feel a huge satisfaction on that.
How often does a Tubthumping royalty check show up?
All that said above, I do get royalties checks. Performing royalties (which tend to be less) are paid every quarter and Record and Publishing royalties twice a year. Bearing in mind Chumbawamba have 11 studio albums and I have 5 solo albums, 98% of my royalties are from the one song. The Chumbawamba royalties are split ten ways, and are much less now that at the height of our dip into the mainstream (21 years ago now) but are still considerable. I am divorced and have two children in college so I only have around half of whatever my royalty check is to live on and play around with. These past few years the royalties have not been enough to live on so in theory I have spent 20 hours a week as a self-employed musician/artist, and I have worked around twenty hours a week in more regular part time jobs; High School Drama coach, working in our local indie Barnyard Cinema (both of which have been shut down since March due to the pandemic). I have been getting some unemployment.
I feel pretty lucky to be in my shoes. I know very few artists or musicians who ever get any kind of royalties, and I would say without a doubt my royalty checks have enabled me to fulfill my fantasies of continuing to put out albums. Thus far it has been a loss-making business for all the time I have lived in the US. I don’t try to make a loss but that is how it has worked out thus far, but that benefits me in the sense. For the time being, I now get mostly free health insurance, and considerable financial aid for my children going to college. And I am lucky that (compared to many other states) Washington is generous in these respects. I get to do mostly what I want to do, and part of that is to use my limited platform to urge social justice, not least in the form of a living wage and/or basic universal income for all.
What’s one or two albums we might be surprised to find in your record collection?
The Andrews Sisters “Rarities.” Talk about old showtunes influence. Also Nelly Furtado “Whoa Nelly.” I have a soft spot for certain trends in female voiced pop.
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