Buy It Here! Love and War, the Debut Album by Andy Worthington’s Band The Four Fathers Launches Today

I’m pleased to announce that I’ve just taken delivery of the first batch of CDs of ‘Love and War’, the debut album by my band The Four Fathers. Featuring ten tracks — seven originals, two covers and a radical reworking of an old English folk song — ‘Love and War’ is available to buy for just £7/$11, plus postage and packing (£1.25 in the UK, £2.95 for Europe and £3.65 for the US and the rest of the world). Copies can be sent anywhere in the world.

The album, recorded, mixed and mastered in south east London from November 2014 to June 2015, features six of my original songs, including ‘Song for Shaker Aamer’, which is featured in the campaign video for We Stand With Shaker, the campaign calling for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, which I established with the activist Joanne MacInnes last November — and see here for our open letter to President Obama for US Independence Day. For anyone who doesn’t know, I have been researching and writing about Guantánamo and campaigning to get the prison closed down since 2006.

Also included are other new songs I have written recently — ‘Tory Bullshit Blues’, which was made available via SoundCloud just before the General Election in May, the love song ‘Sweet Love and Ever After’, and ‘Fighting Injustice’, a storming roots reggae number that also fulfils the band’s description of itself as playing “Rock, folk, blues and roots reggae. Not afraid of political engagement.”

Another new song of mine is ’81 Million Dollars’, about the Bush administration’s torture program, $81m being the amount that the architects of the program, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, were paid by the US government to develop the cruel, pointless and illegal covert program for which no one has yet been held accountable. The song is a rallying cry for campaigners calling for those who authorized and implemented the torture program to be prosecuted.

The album also features the London country blues number ‘City of Dreams’, which I wrote while living in Brixton in 1987 — and completed last year! — and ‘Rebel Soldier’, an old English folk song that I first set to a reggae rhythm in Brixton in 1986.

Guitarist and backing singer Richard Clare’s love song ‘Sea Shanty for Helena’ is also included, as are versions of Bob Dylan’s ‘Masters of War’ and a folky, groovy take on the disco classic ‘I Will Survive’.

The Four Fathers are: Andy Worthington (lead vocals and guitar), Richard Clare (guitar and backing vocals, lead vocals on ‘Sea Shanty for Helena’), Bren Horstead (drums, bongos and percussion), Andrew Fifield (flute and harmonica) and Louis Sills-Clare (bass).

To order ‘Love and War’, please click on the drop down menu below, which provides costs for the UK, Europe and the US and the rest of the world. Postage and packing costs are included in the totals below.

The account is set up for pounds sterling, but PayPal will convert it from whatever currency you use to pay — and you don’t need to have a PayPal account to use it. For the US, the cost works out at $16.60.

If you’re in the UK and want to send a cheque, please send a cheque for £8.25 to:

Andy Worthington
164A Tressillian Road
London
SE4 1XY

Note: For those wishing to download the album, or individual tracks from it, please follow us on Facebook, where details will be announced soon.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers). He is the co-founder of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, the co-director of “We Stand With Shaker,” calling for the immediate release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US).

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, and “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.