i was asked by the guardian to explain why i wrote my last record and a bit about it because they weren't that aware of what i was up to. they then posted it as though it was a blog which was slightly annoying, as it looks like i just spontaneously started to write about what i'm up to rather than a response to a question they asked.
anyway, to see the piece
click here.
--
Politics, even in the slenderest sense of the word, is going through a fascinating and challenging period. British society is faced with some of the biggest challenges since the middle of the 20th century: climate change, financial meltdown, an abusive addiction to oil, distant but bloody wars and significant stresses on all the factors that subsidise, support and underpin our consumer-led society.
So you'd think that musicians may be inclined to tell a few of these stories. After all, who wants to hear about someone else's relationship when your house is being repossessed? Bizarrely, the music industry is almost perversely silent on virtually all of these subjects. Historians looking back from the future would struggle to find, in the last five years, even a handful of pieces of music in the mainstream that mention the war in Iraq. Of course, music serves many purposes and not all music needs to comment on the state of the planet or these seismic shifts in our society, but it would be nice to find evidence of a movement, an impulse, a pulse, even. For all its flaws, if punk was around today, you'd suspect it would be out there pointing fingers.
Knowing for some time that the world is heading in the wrong direction has meant I've felt compelled to tell these stories in music. Sometimes it feels like a curse, but I almost feel I have no choice now. You can't read about the Israeli blockade of Gaza and not want to amplify that story. Besides, I'm not sure there's much going on in my own world that could trump the abuses of power in Israel, in Iraq or Guantanamo. A piece of music about my holiday in Devon doesn't seem important enough to ask 300 people to bring it to life.
There's Me and There's You is the record I've just finished with my big band, and I have rather foolishly stuck my neck out once again and tried to document some of the more pressing failings in our contemporary society. There's even a love song on there too, albeit sung by 100 strangers from around the world singing one word each. And there, for me, is the joy of music; it's not a newspaper article, it's not a film, nor is it a book. But we can use everyday objects and sounds to bring the every day, and the political, to life in music. So to protest against the Pope's position on contraception and Aids in Africa, we scraped condoms along the floor; to protest at Britney Spears' unimaginative use of her global reach, we squirted 70 bottles of her Curious perfume, and to mourn the explosion in bottled water, blew over 70 empty plastic water bottles.
The result is a piece of music, a place to invite collaboration, exercise control, discipline and playfulness. So while I may be telling the story of Bisher al-Rawi's torture in Guantanamo, I've invited 128 other people to join me. Bisher was arrested at Gatwick airport for possession of an Argos battery charger, apparently because it can be used as part of a car bomb. So to bring his story to life, we used the same model of Argos battery charger and 128 batteries, along with a Filet–o-Fish for the snare part (it's what Bisher ate when he met with MI5 at McDonalds), a Casio digital watch (allegedly one of the ways US intelligence officers identify Islamic terrorists), a garden chair for the bass drum (captives were seated on garden chairs during the military tribunals in Guantanamo) and a can of Coke (it's what Al-Rawi heard while being tortured). We recorded vocals in the High Street Kensington branch of McDonalds down the stairs and in the booth on the left (the location of Al-Rawi's meetings with MI5), and a choir of 28 sung his testimony. Seventy volunteers (it was supposed to be 100, but in a demonstration of democracy only 70 showed up) joined me in the entrance hall of the British Museum, a place itself not immune from charges of historic abuses of power, to further amplify this and other stories.
After trying to gain access to the Houses of Parliament the legitimate way for nearly a year, I ended up sneaking in during the 42-day detention debate to record the literal corridors of power. Standing between Portcullis House and the house itself, I took out a box of matches and shook it. With each match representing 100,000 people dead in Iraq it was supposed to be a small but subversive moment on the record. As I was finishing the recording, I noticed John Major had been standing next to me in conversation, an ex-prime minister who in 1991 had a taste for war in Iraq himself. Beneath the deathly rattle of matches you can just make his voice out. In that one sound is the coming together of the political, the artistic, the accidental, the subversive and the silly.
In 2008, why would you limit yourself to a drum machine and a few synths, or even a guitar and a mic, to try and protest against the war in Iraq when you could use John Major, the Houses of Parliament and a box of Swan Vesta? A quiet revolution has happened in music. Following the invention of the sampler, we are now no longer limited to abstractions: we can record the real thing. Why use rolling string lines like Elgar to suggest the English countryside when you can nip out with a tape recorder and record the actual environment; listening in on dairy farmers going out of business, or the silence of disappearing species?
In an age of such infinite and brilliant possibilities of technique, combined with the urgent politics of now, why have music and musicians lost the urge to challenge, investigate, invent and unite? Without the backbones of principle and enquiry, music is sounding more and more like the background to a non-stop Ford commercial and less and less like the soundtrack to the revolution.