10 Rock Songs That Don't Sound Like The Artists Who Made Them

4. Tubthumping - Chumbawumba

If you say the name Chumbawumba, there's only one song that comes to mind.

Tubthumping is all about drinking and singing and falling down, only to do it all again. A veritable call to arms to the weekend warrior and hangover holidays crowd, there is not a pub in the land where this song hasn't been chanted by a squad of Nandos-fuelled uber-Lads.

But the band are so much more than a three-minute drinking song. Far from being the kind of party boy-baiting group that this single track still has the whole world believing them to be, Chumbawumba are in fact an anarcho-punk outfit with a social agenda.

The 10+-member band released Tubthumping as a joke, but the tongue-in-cheek track ended up becoming their most famous of all, eclipsing the rest of their far more considered and trenchantly political work. They broke the mainstream hard in the late '90s, but any party boys who bought their discography on the back of this will have come away sorely disappointed.

Contributor
Contributor

The definitive word sculptor, editor and trend-setter. Slayer of gnomes and trolls.