In London, Andy Worthington Discusses Shaker Aamer and Guantánamo, and His Band The Four Fathers Play Three Gigs

If you’re in London — or nearby — and interested in hearing me talk about Guantánamo and the campaign to free Shaker Aamer, and/or to see my band The Four Fathers play our mix of politically-infused rock and roots reggae, then I’d be delighted to see you at any of the events taking place in the coming weeks in south east London.

First up, on Saturday December 12, is a free 20-minute set at Brockley Christmas Market, on Coulgate Street, next to Brockley station, in London SE4. This is a free gig, as part of an afternoon of music to accompany the market’s plentiful stalls selling great food and drink, and arts and crafts for Christmas. We’re playing at 2pm, and amongst the other acts playing is my son Tyler, who will be beatboxing at 3.30pm.

Two events are taking place on the following Friday, December 18. First up, at 5.30pm, is a free half-hour set at the Honor Oak Christmas Experience, a Christmas event on the Honor Oak Estate, at 50 Turnham Road, London SE4 2JD.

We then rush down the road to Deptford to set up for an event at the Deptford Cinema, a great community cinema at 39 Deptford Broadway, London SE8 4PQ. There’s a bar, and the doors open at 7pm, when there will be some mingling followed, at 8pm, by me delivering a talk, “Shaker Aamer, Guantánamo, Torture and the Struggle for Human Rights,” followed by a Q&A session. The Facebook page for the event is here, and if you can come, please sign up. It costs £5/£3.50 concs.

My talk will be based on my work on Guantánamo over the last ten years, and, in particular, the We Stand With Shaker campaign that I launched last November with an activist friend, Joanne MacInnes, which played a big part in securing the release from Guantánamo on October 30 of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison.

I’ll also be talking about the Close Guantánamo campaign that I launched in 2012, and which I’m hoping will play a part in working towards the closure of Guantánamo in the coming year, which, of course, is also President Obama’s last year in office.

I’ll also be talking about accountability for torture, following the first anniversary of the publication, on December 9, 2014, of the executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report about the CIA torture program.

At 9pm, The Four Fathers will be playing a set including four of my political songs — “Song for Shaker Aamer,” which was used in the campaign video for We Stand With Shaker, “81 Million Dollars,” about the US torture program, and “Tory Bullshit Blues” and “Fighting Injustice,” a roots reggae anthem that deals with the need for solidarity to combat the Tories’ lies about austerity. We’ll also play our cover of Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War,” and I hope that we’ll also be able to play some new songs that I’ve written recently that we’ve been rehearsing over the last few months.

We’ll also probably be playing some of our political songs at our earlier gigs along with other covers.

Please note that our album “Love and War” is available here on Bandcamp, where you can listen to it, and buy individual songs, or the whole 8-track album as a download. You can also buy it on CD, which features two extra tracks — our covers of “Masters of War” and “I Will Survive.”

Please also follow us on Facebook, and check out our YouTube channel – and, of course, if you organise gigs and would like us to play, then we’d love to hear from you!

Please also check out my interview with Kevin Gosztola about protest music and The Four Fathers on Shadowproof and this post by Kevin making “Song for Shaker Aamer” Shadowproof’s “Protest Song of the Week.”

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, whose debut album, ‘Love and War,’ is available for download or on CD via Bandcamp — also see here). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign, the co-director of We Stand With Shaker, which called for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison (finally freed on October 30, 2015), 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.