Chumbawamba reportedly unhappy with Winston Peters' use of ...

UK punk band Chumbawamba are reportedly wanting to knock down NZ First leader Winston Peters’ use of their popular 1997 hit, Tubthumping.

The Spinoff reported the band have now asked their record company Sony to issue a cease and desist notice requiring Peters to “stop using it to try to shore up his misguided political views”. Chumbawamba broke up in 2012.

The news site reported former lead guitarist Boff Whalley said Tubthumping was written “as a song of hope and positivity, so it seems entirely odd that the ‘I get knocked down …’ refrain is being used by New Zealand’s Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters as he barks his divisive, small-minded, bigoted policies during his recent speeches”.

“Chumbawamba would like to make it clear that we did not give permission for Peters to use the song and would ask him to stop using it to try to shore up his misguided political views,” Whalley said in a statement to Stuff.

“Chumbawamba does not share any of Peters’ ideas on race relations and would like to remind him that the song was written for and about ordinary people and their resilience, not about rich politicians trying to win votes by courting absurd conspiracy theories and spouting misguided racist ideologies.”

Chumbawamba, a band with anarcho-communist political leanings that broke up in 2012, previously expressed outrage after a party conference appearance by then Ukip leader Nigel Farage was accompanied by the same tune.

The Spinoff said NZ First did not respond to its request for comment by deadline.

Peters told Newstalk ZB’s Heather du Plessis-Allan there was nothing wrong with him using the song during his State of the Nation speech, claiming The Spinoff were “leftist shills”.

“It’s a public meeting, we’re not using it for any beneficial purpose in terms of making money for ourselves. And so I’m afraid we’ve got a media outlet that doesn’t know what the law is.”

He said Sony “won’t be calling”.

“Well, we got knocked down, we get back up again,” he told the radio host.

In a further statement, Peters said New Zealand First has not received any cease-and-desist phone call, email, letter, “or anything of the sort from the former band nor any other representative – and we don’t expect to.”

The incident comes after Peters compared co-governance to “race-based theories”, as seen in Nazi Germany, over the weekend.

His comments, made in his State of the Nation speech in Palmerston North, drew warnings from the Holocaust Centre of New Zealand about the use of such terminology by politicians.

“It is actually offensive to the memory of those who died and to those who survived in the Holocaust to start throwing around terms like ‘holocaust’ or ‘Nazi’ willy-nilly,” Holocaust Centre spokesman Ben Kepes told NZME.

“Generally speaking, as we’ve seen society grow increasingly numb to inflammatory comments, people have to get more and more inflammatory in order to get an effect and so I think what we saw today was simply an example of the sort of breakdown of society.”

Asked by reporters what he thought New Zealand’s Jewish community would make of his comments, Peters said: “I think that they would understand entirely what I’m saying.”

Labour leader Chris Hipkins responded by comparing Peters to a “drunk uncle at a wedding”.

“Same old Winston Peters. Using racism and anti-media rhetoric to divide our country. He should be focusing on the real work of leading New Zealand forward, but that would require a plan and a vision. Sadly, this Government is lacking in both.“

In 2017, the National Party was found guilty of breaching copyright for using a track based on Eminem’s Lose Yourself for a 2014 election ad. It was initially fined $600,000, which was reduced to $225,000 by the Court of Appeal in 2018.

The then-Government was accused of knowingly trying to sidestep licensing fees by using the track Eminem Esque.

National bought Eminem Esque from a company called Beatbox, which in turn bought the licence from California-based music library Labrador.

In 2017, the High Court ruled that $600,000 would be the “hypothetical licence fee” that would have reasonably been charged for permission to use Lose Yourself in National Party advertising.