The British pop collective Chumbawamba has asked Spain’s Vox to stop using their best-known song to promote “its small-minded, hate-fuelled agenda” after the far-right party chose its 1997 hit single Tubthumping to soundtrack a social media post railing against migration.
Santiago Abascal, who leads Vox, visited the north-eastern Spanish town of Caspe last week in the run-up to this weekend’s regional election in Aragón. He posted images of the visit to Facebook on Friday, along with the caption: “Great welcome yesterday in Caspe … for a street press conference. The locals are sick of the migratory invasion. And we stand with them.”
Abascal – or his media team – decided to accompany the photos with Tubthumping, whose famously defiant chorus runs: “I get knocked down/But I get up again/You’re never gonna keep me down.”
The post has since come to the attention of Chumbawamba, who said Abascal had profoundly misunderstood the song and its message.
“When we wrote Tubthumping it was as an anthem for the underdog, for those fighting power,” the band said in a statement.
“It sickens us that Spain’s far-right Vox party would use the song to promote their small-minded, hate-fuelled agenda. We have asked Facebook to take down the video from its platform and we demand that Vox never use our song – a song of hope and community – again.”
The writer Alice Nutter, a former Chumbawamba member, described Abascal’s post as “vile and racist”, adding that the collective was “much more in tune” with the Spanish government’s recent decision to regularise half a million undocumented migrants and asylum seekers.
Vox has been contacted for comment.
It is not the first time Chumbawamba has felt compelled to speak out over the misappropriation of the song. In an article for the Guardian last year another member, Boff Whalley, criticised the populist New Zealand politician Winston Peters for using it.
“Let me be clear. The song Tubthumping was written to celebrate the resilience and tenacity of working-class folk who keep fighting when the chips are down,” he wrote. “It has nothing whatsoever in common with wealthy politicians with extremist anti-liberal agendas.”
Whalley also said Chumbawamba had had to send its own “‘cease and desist’ when a pre-president [Donald] Trump thought he could use Tubthumping without realising we would loudly object”.
A number of musicians have objected to Trump using their songs at his rallies in recent years, including Beyoncé, Neil Young, the White Stripes, Foo Fighters, and the estates of Leonard Cohen and Tom Petty.
The Welsh rock band Manic Street Preachers discovered in 2009 that their hymn to the anti-fascist International Brigades, If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next, had been used by the British National party to accompany a web post bemoaning the “great multicultural experiment”.
