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Bob gets knocked down, but he gets up again. Nothing's ever gonna keep him down.
Except maybe the ire of anarchist British rock bands. Dornan has been using copyrighted material on his website.
Until last week, if you loaded the site up, you would have heard a 12-second audio clip from the film Braveheart, the one of Mel Gibson's William Wallace character screaming "Freedom!" as he's being tortured to death.
Following that came the chorus of English band Chumbawamba's megahit, "Tubthumping"--"I get knocked down/But I get up again/They ain't ever gonna keep me down!"--apparently swiped for what he (or, most likely, his people—we just can't picture the defeated Congressman listening to a lot of pop radio) thought was the song's John Wayne-esque, never-surrender message.
It may seem cute, but Dornan evidently didnt get approval from Paramount Pictures, which owns Braveheart, or the Chumbawamba camp. Alan Heppel, Senior Vice President of the legal department at Paramount, told the Weekly that neither the studio nor Mel Gibson's production company granted the Dornanistas permission.
More intriguing, though, is Dornan's leaping into bed with Chumbawamba. "Tubthumping" is hardly the rabble-rousing, inspirational anthem it appears to be. It's actually about getting really, really drunk--sloshed, blotto, plowed--a message we doubt a family-values chap like Bob wants to project.
Juicier still is that Chumbawamba are self-proclaimed anarchists. They've made recordings with the likes of Noam Chomsky and the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a troupe of gay men who dress in Catholic nun garb. They encourage fans to steal their CDs from corporate chain stores like Tower and Virgin. And they're playing the San Francisco Gay Pride Festival at the end of the month, something homophobe Bob would certainly scowl upon.
Reached from a German tour stop, Chumbawamba's Boff told the Weekly that they don't plan to go after Dornan, though they easily could.
"We think that if everybody starts trying to censor everything they don't like, then the people who'll get censored the most will be people with radical ideas, rather than people with ridiculously right-wing, conservative ideas. It totally bothers me (that he's using our song), but it's a double-edged sword. My main problem about this is that these politicians are the first to want to censor other people, yet they'll go around and just lift somebody else's music, take it out of context, and use it for their own ends."
Instead, Boff says he'd like to get back at Dornan by getting hold of some of his more inflammatory spiel and use it on Chumbawamba's own site. "We'd love to be able to take some sort of speech or something he's done and do something with it. That'd be a real nice way to answer back."
It might be a moot point, though. When we checked into Dornan's site last Friday, both the Braveheart and "Tubthumping" clips had been deleted from the automatic download. However, if you click on the banner that reads "For Faith, Family & Freedom," the Braveheart clip is still there.
Really, if Dornan wants to use a current pop song to describe himself, we suggest he contact the band Everclear and ask them if he can borrow a line from "Everything to Everyone," the one that goes "I think you make yourself a victim/Almost every single day."
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