It may take more than Chumbawamba throwing a bucket of water over British Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott to dampen the relationship between politics and music. Wherever there are politicians looking for votes, there are rock bands looking for publicity and a photo-opportunity with Noel Gallagher has become the 1990s equivalent of kissing a baby.
It's a rags-to-respectablility fable and now that the babyboomers have taken over, expect more "Fleetwood Mac perform for Bill and Hillary at the White House," "Simply Red entertain Tony and Cherie at 10 Downing Street" and "The Corrs serenade Bertie and Celia at Leinster House" nonstories.
But the arranged marriage between politicians and musicians is already experiencing difficulties in Britain. It was fine and dandy when Tony Blair was in opposition and promising rock 'n' roll for the masses but now some musicians are asking for a refund over his government's attitude towards single mothers, pensioners, the possible introduction of US-style "workfare" schemes and its refusal to recognise a long-running dockers' strike in Liverpool.
Already Damon Albarn from Blur has asked that the £5,000 donation he gave to New Labour in the run-up to last year's election be returned; Noel Gallagher is on record as "regretting" attending a post-election Downing Street drinks party for Labour luvvies, and millionaire record company boss Alan McGee has said that the party won't be receiving his annual £50,000 donation if it continues with its social security cuts.
When Danbert Nobacon of Chumbawamba leaned down as far as he could into Cherie Blair's face at last week's Brits music awards to sing the line "New Labour have sold out the [Liverpool] dockers", have the differences become irreconcilable?
Ever since Harold Wilson got chummy with The Beatles in the 1960s, politicians with an eye on the "youth" vote have loosened their ties and their language in a desperate effort to "get down" with the young people.
From Garret FitzGerald and Bono to Ronald Reagan and The Beach Boys, the practice of politicians and musicians pontificating on subjects outside their normal sphere of influence has led to more sob stories than a Barry Manilow song.
The basic problem is that politics is about power but music (or rather, the best music) is about powerlessness. Ever since year zero about 40 years ago, rock music has always prided itself on being a problematic voice of dissent, using a lingua franca of despair, alienation and nihilism.
A lot of this has to do with rock music's roots in the immediate post-slavery experiences of American blacks - which is reflected in the 1990s by Gangsta rappers and their trenchant criticism of authority figures like the police and judiciary - but even nice, white, middle-class boys who buy into rock's disaffected myth can plunder their depths of angst to beat the band.
With their free-floating lefty political sensibilities, musicians have habitually aligned themselves with the going concern of the day, whether that be the Vietnam War or apartheid. And while most are happy to subscribe to the ideals of Greenpeace or Amnesty International, they stop short of party political involvement.
That changed, though, in Britain, with the rise of Margaret Thatcher and the 1985 miners' strike, when the Labour Party actively canvassed the services of The Smiths, Paul Weller and Billy Bragg under the Red Wedge banner to play a series of benefit concerts for the striking miners. Since then there have been more formal links between the party and rock musicians.
The benefits of having your political party sponsored by a group who can sell millions of records and have a huge influence over their fans can best be appreciated by the unseemly scramble by all British political parties to claim the Spice Girls as mascots in the election run-up.
Irish politicians tend to do a Stephen Roche by turning up and issuing congratulatory statements whenever an Irish group wins a Grammy or sets a new record for album sales.
Apart from Bono's brief dalliance with Garret Fitzgerald in the early 1980s when the singer attended a government-sponsored meeting about long-term employment, the closest U2 have come to an overt party political statement is the odd favourable statement directed at Democratic Left.
Maybe it's the civil war nature of the politics, or more likely, the sheer tedium of it all, but politicians and musicians here kept their meetings to the backstage bar of the Point Depot.
Chumbawamba's dousing of John Prescott this week - over his refusal to recognise the Liverpool docker's strike as "official" - was also, the band says, "An act of agit-prop and it is dedicated to single mothers, pensioners, sacked dock workers, people being forced into workfare, people who will be denied legal aid, students who will be denied the free university education that the whole of the Labour front bench benefited from, the homeless and all of the underclass who are now suffering at the hands of the Labour government."
If there is an irretrievable breakdown in the relationship between politicians and musicians, at least it frees both sides up to get back to their traditional roles: the politicians to govern and the musicians to provide the opposition.
