How Much Is A Life Worth? New Album Released Today by The Four Fathers, London Journalist and Activist Andy Worthington’s Band

I’m delighted to announce that today my band The Four Fathers are releasing our second album, How Much Is A Life Worth? via Bandcamp, where you can buy it on CD (which can be sent anywhere in the world), or as a download (either the whole album, or individual tracks). The CD costs £8 (about $10.67), plus postage and packing, while the download of the album costs £5 (about $6.67), with individual tracks available for $1 (about $1.33). These are the minimum prices, but you can always pay more if you want to provide us with extra financial support, to help us recoup the costs of recording and production.

The album features ten original rock and roots reggae songs — eight written by me, as lead singer and rhythm guitarist, and two written by lead guitarist Richard Clare. It follows the release in 2015 of the band’s first album, ‘Love and War,’ and continues to demonstrate a commitment to political issues, with six of the album’s ten songs being protest songs. The band also features Brendan Horstead on drums and percussion, Andrew Fifield on flute and harmonica, and Louis Sills-Clare on bass (replaced after the album was recorded by current bassist Mark Quiney).

Followers of the band on Bandcamp — or those who have seen us live — will already know some of these songs, as six of them have previously been released online, although all of them have now been slightly remastered. Those songs are, in order of release, ‘Close Guantánamo’ (used for the ‘Close Guantánamo’ campaign that I run), ‘Dreamers’ (a song about friendship, written for a friend’s 50th birthday), live favourites ’Riot’ (about austerity and the need for social and economic justice) and ‘London’ (a lament for how the capital’s vibrancy in the 80s and 90s has been destroyed by housing greed), ‘She’s Back’ (Richard’s song about Pussy Riot) and ‘Equal Rights And Justice For All’ (my celebration of habeas corpus, which always gets a laugh when I say live that no set is really complete without a song about habeas corpus).

The album additionally features the title track, ‘How Much Is A Life Worth?’, another live favourite, looking at how white westerners value their lives more than those of others, with reference to 9/11, the current global refugee crisis, and the Black Lives Matter movement in the US, and three other songs that rarely, if ever, get a live outing: ‘Tell Me Baby’, a vibrant garage rocker about love and aging, sex and materialism, which we’re going to be playing more at gigs in future, ‘River Run Dry’, a lament about the end of an affair that I wrote as a young man in Brixton, and ‘When He Is Sane’, a song from Richard’s younger days about mental health issues.

Here’s the full track listing. All the tracks on Bandcamp include the lyrics, introductory comments, and artwork specific to each song, and the CD, additionally, includes a full colour 8-page booklet designed by Brendan Horstead.

1. How Much Is A Life Worth?
2. Riot
3. London
4. She’s Back
5. Dreamers
6. Tell Me Baby
7. Equal Rights And Justice For All
8. Close Guantánamo
9. River Run Dry
10. When He Is Sane

I hope the album is of interest to you, and that, with just four weeks to go until Christmas, it will provide you with some opportunities for presents for friends and family — or for your own wish list.

We’re planning a new recording session soon to record two new songs of mine that are already a fixture of our live set — ‘Grenfell’, about the terrible and entirely preventable Grenfell Tower fire in June, and ‘I Want My Country Back (From The People Who Wanted Their Country Back)’ about Brexit. Please do get in touch if you’re running a campaign and would like us to play at a fundraiser, or if want to offer us a gig or a festival appearance, or if you want to help us make a video, or if you want to be on our mailing list. We’d love to hear from you!

Note: if you don’t already know, you can also follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

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 music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and the Donald Trump No! Please Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2017), 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.