The international smash-hit Tubthumping brought Chumbawamba into the charts - and into the tabloids after a memorable encounter with then Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott.

But 11 years on, the megaphones and gold-plated cowboy hats have been packed away and the former eight-piece has reduced in size to a five-strong acoustic group.

Their political and satirical bite has not been blunted, though, as their new album The Boy Bands Have Won... clearly demonstrates.

"The acoustic side has always been there and been part of what we do," says vocalist and brass player Jude Abbott. "But it has always been an element. Now we have got the space to bring it to the fore.

"In some ways it does add something to the bite of the lyrics. It's quieter, so people can hear what we are singing about much more easily. We get more instant reactions to a line in a song."

Among the true-life subjects tackled on the 25-track album, released earlier this month, are the story of Mexican revolutionary Wenseslao Moguel, who survived a firing squad, actress Jayne Mansfield's visit to Armley Prison, Leeds, in 1967, and a song about Gary Tyler, the controversial Death Row inmate in Louisiana who has waited 30 years for his sentence to be commuted.

Also thrown into the mix are tales of a put-upon waitress, a councillor who goes from having high ideals to ditching them for the sake of his career, and a sideswipe at the nutters who inhabit some of cyberspace's darker corners.

"There are some strange people out there," says Abbott. "Most of the people are probably harmless but it is funny that with that song there are always murmurs of recognition."

The band is not anti-MySpace or anti-internet, though - rather attacking those people who try to destroy culture through mimicry or through keeping it in a glass case, as the full 156-word title of their new album states.

"On one hand we have got this whole manufactured band thing going on," says Abbott, referring to the X Factor/boy band pop world. "On the other hand we have stuff like MySpace, which is much more grassroots, with people finding out about bands wholly through networking. It's really great for music."

The grassroots approach has helped Chumbawamba throughout their career, ever since the release of their 1986 Live Aid-baiting anarcho-punk debut Pictures Of Starving Children Sell Records.

It seems a huge sea change that they can now be championed by the likes of Radio 2's Mike Harding.

"People need to get over the narrow definitions of what a band is," says Abbott. "We are a band that changes a lot. We have shifted into the small-town art centre type circuit, which I really like.

"People say you should play the key media areas but I quite like playing places like St Albans. There are people who go to the small-town arts centres who are not always fans of the band, they are just interested in having an evening out, so we get to play to people who don't know a lot about us.

"We have picked up new fans along the way but it hasn't done us any harm. We are a fairly open-minded bunch."

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