The scruffy camper van in the drive looks promising. Apart from that though, there’s little to suggest that this handsome former vicarage on a sleepy cul-de-sac in a working-class area of Leeds is home to an anarchist. One who once, along with some of her bandmates, very publicly poured a bucket of icy water over the deputy prime minister’s head. There’s even a festive wreath hanging on the front door – that’s practically bourgeois isn’t it?
To be honest I’ve been doubting Alice Nutter’s continued anarcho-punk credentials since speaking to her on the phone, when she tipped me off that for an extra £20 I could upgrade to first class on the train. First class?! What, so I can attack the enemy from the inside? No, because it’s easier to get some work done …
“Everyone thinks that somehow we’d be preserved in aspic, you know, like aged anarchists,” she says after letting me in. “I think everybody should have the right to first class, I don’t think some people should have it and some people shouldn’t. I think everybody should have the right to what’s good in life – I’m not embarrassed about that.”
Alice Nutter offers me a latte. A FRIGGING LATTE! (He drinks a whiskey drink, he drinks a latte drink.) Her 19-year-old daughter, Mae, comes into the kitchen to make toast. She knows “embarrassingly little” about Chumbawamba, or Tubthumping. “I’ve always known mum as a writer,” she says. Because that’s what Alice Nutter is now. A writer of plays, and a TV screenwriter, most recently on Trust, the entertaining drama series about the kidnapping of Jean Paul Getty III.
Alice always knew she was going to be a writer, ever since a teacher told her mum and dad that their daughter had an extraordinary command of the English language. But Nutter (or Anne Holden as she was before she punked herself up by deed poll, taking the name of a woman who was hanged in 1612 for witchcraft) didn’t get off to the brightest of starts. Born to a working-class family in Burnley, she had a bad relationship with her dad, got involved with drugs and left school with only a couple of O levels. Fortunately, she started hanging around with a more aspirational group of kids and that basically saved her. Together they became Chumbawamba. (I get knocked down, but I get up again.)
Alice, now 57, was with the band for 22 of their 30 years in existence, singing, playing percussion, jumping around. “I’m not particularly musical,” she admits. “I’m a good dancer and I’m theatrical, I could get away with it.”
For 20 years they lived in a squat in Leeds, sharing (very little) money, and ideas, becoming vegans (long before everyone became a vegan), getting involved with political causes – South Africa, Northern Ireland, the miners’ strike. More than anything, they were friends. Still are.
Were they anarchists? “I don’t think it matters what you call yourself. What you need to do is align yourself with what’s most useful for change.” She says inequality was their main beef: “You can bring everything down to inequality and injustice. And it can be about class, or race, or whatever. At the time we were really anti-parliamentary because we thought they were all the same.”
These days Alice knocks on doors for the Labour party, for Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell. “Promoting co-ops and cooperation, saying they’ll pledge £100m a year to help the homeless, I’ll knock on doors for that,” she says. “I was lucky, I came up through the postwar settlement, I screwed my education up, but I had those opportunities.”
She feels that working-class kids today don’t have the chances she had. “I’d never be where I am today without the dole. That paid for me to have a creative life.”
She describes herself as “a sort of communist-Marxist. Not a party political Communist, but in the sense of all things in common for people and the idea of sharing. I know I’ve got a lot but I’m totally willing to have less.” There’s a bust of Karl Marx on the mantelpiece, along with one of James Dean. We’ve moved into the cosy living room, with a wood-burner, a Christmas tree and biscuits.
Chumbawamba’s big hit, Tubthumping, an anthem of defiance for the ordinary and the oppressed, came out in 1997. It didn’t win anything at the Brit awards ceremony, but that was where John Prescott got his soaking. Chumbawamba were angry about the government’s failure to resolve the Liverpool dockers’ strike. (They were not fans of New Labour or Blair.) They were also drunk, and disappointed – not so much about their own failure to win but about the fact that winning would have given a platform to the sacked scouse docker they’d brought along.
Tubthumping also, for the first time, provided Chumbawamba with a bit of money. Ironic perhaps, but equally shared. Alice left the band in 2004, because “if you’re jumping about in your mid-40s, you look fucking stupid”. And because she knew she wasn’t really a musician, she was a writer. “I’d been planning it, in my head, all my life.”
At the age of 28, while in Chumbawamba, Alice took an English A level. Plus she’d written short stories, a play for a Bradford anarchist group, and – with the band – a pantomime for the kids of striking miners in south Wales. “We didn’t know owt about theatre, we were making it up as we went along. We’d heard of Brecht, didn’t know fucking anything about it. I’d only been to the theatre twice before I started writing for it. I saw Hamlet and I thought, I can do that.”
It wasn’t as easy as that. She soon realised that though she might have the right muscles she didn’t have the craft, and sitting at home trying wasn’t working. There needed to be a plan, focus. It was going to take time and a lot of graft. She started a screenwriting MA but quit when she began to feel it was more about getting a qualification than learning to write.
Then she got on a so-you-want-to-be-a-writer course at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, which meant cancelling a holiday. That led to the offer of a three-week run in the Playhouse courtyard of her play Foxes, about a group of asylum seekers in Leeds. “I had a budget for a ladder and bucket, but there were actors, and I was so unbelievably thrilled.”
Then came another course, this time with Jimmy McGovern, after which he asked if she would like to pitch to write an episode of The Street. She got it, and would have written more episodes if breast cancer had not got in the way. “A hiccup,” she says.
Through another project she met Simon Beaufoy (“Boofoo, Bow Fort, Bow Fowey … I still can’t say his name”), who wrote The Full Monty and Slumdog Millionaire. He wasn’t immediately overjoyed by his writing partner for this project, which was about undercover cops. “He said to them, ‘Whatever you do, don’t get an activist, get a writer,’” says Nutter. “And they got me, and he said, ‘They got a fucking activist.’ But then I handed the script in and he realised I was a writer.”
That one didn’t work out, but the pair realised they saw eye to eye. So when he created Trust, the big-budget TV series for FX directed by Danny Boyle (Oh Danny Boyle, Danny Boyle, Danny Boyle) among others, he hired Nutter – first to write one episode, then another, then to be involved in the whole thing.Trust rigorously explores money, family and power structures. And not just regarding the dysfunctional Gettys, but also the Italian kidnappers. Is the subject matter, the super rich, surprising for a Tubthumping anarchist to be involved with? No, she says, because it’s full of political themes. “And if you look at really rich people, there’s a socialism in the rich, they share everything with each other. It’s just no one else gets it.”
It was also the most fun Nutter has ever had at work. “I just kept thinking: I can’t believe my luck.” Now she’s working on another series with Beaufoy – about happiness.
Two decades of Chumbawamba was, she says, the perfect training for being a screenwriter. “Because it’s collaborative. And because people clapping [what you do] for 20 years gives you a lot of confidence. I realised I had the rigour to start something and finish it.”
It’s time for photos. Where does the photographer want her? Somewhere that looks bourgeois, like the flash kitchen, I suggest. “You’re obsessed,” she says. She would give me a lift to the station, but her car has a puncture. Is there an Uber service in Leeds, I wonder? Yes, but she doesn’t use them, on principle. “Once they’ve got the prices down they drive everyone else out.” She calls a local cab company instead. Credentials, credibility, dignity – all remain intact.
