Shouts Interview: Andy Worthington of The Four Fathers Discusses the Importance of Protest Music with Halldór Bjarnason

Check out The Four Fathers’ new album, ‘How Much Is A Life Worth?’ here.

Last month, I was delighted to be approached by Halldór Bjarnason, an Icelandic journalist and musician, asking if he could interview me for his website, Shouts: Music from the Rooftops!, which features interviews with musicians who make political music, including Andy White, from Belfast, Yuca Brava, “a political rapcore band from Puerto Rico”, War On Women, a feminist punk band from Baltimore, and Keyz, a 20-year old rapper from Sudan. The interview is here, and is cross-posted below.

As I noted when I posted the link to the interview on Facebook last night, the “questions, about my band The Four Fathers, and my songwriting, were very interesting — about how we got together, why we perform protest music, and whether I think there’s an audience for protest music these days.”

Introducing the interview, Halldór, noting that I am both a journalist and am musician, wrote that journalists have a responsibility to be voices for the voiceless, to hold power to account, and to be “courageous in seeking the truth.” He also noted that “[m]usicians do not bear the same responsibility exactly, although it can be argued they have a powerful voice” that often has an international reach. He also noted that, although some musicians do not manifest a “socially conscious message,” because they believe in creating music based on their emotions, “Others are more explicit in their lyrics or performance and send a strong message of protest out into the ethos in every single song,” adding, “The Four Fathers are of the latter type.”

My thanks to Halldór for taking the time to interview me, and I hope you have time to read the interview, and will check out our music if you haven’t already heard it.

Interview with Andy Worthington of The Four Fathers

Shouts: For those not familiar with your music, who are The Four Fathers?

Andy Worthington: We’re a group of fathers, from the borough of Lewisham, in south east London, and we got together in 2014 because we had all had various musical endeavours in our youth, and wanted to revisit them. We started off playing covers, but I soon started writing new material, and pretty soon my political consciousness found songs to be a useful vehicle for musical storytelling; protest music, essentially.

Shouts: You are a journalist and an activist as well as a musician. How about the rest of the band?

Andy Worthington: We’re a mixed bag — a gardener, a teacher, an architect and a full-time dad. Fortunately, we’re all left-wing politically, and the other band members have been happy to follow my forays into topical political songwriting.

Shouts: You recently published your second album. Can you tell us about the production process?

Andy Worthington: We found a local studio for our first album, ‘Love and War’ — Perry Vale Studios in Forest Hill, and liked it, so we returned there for our second album, ‘How Much Is A Life Worth?’ We recorded the new album over several weekends in 2016, mixed it in early 2017, and then released songs as online singles until the album’s release in November.

Shouts: How does the state of the world affect your songwriting, i.e. do you find it hard to strike a balance between releasing a song in time with a current issue and releasing it when it is ready as a piece of music?

Andy Worthington: I think there’s something to be said for being very topical, but we don’t have the facilities for that, and, in general, it takes me some time to come up with the lyrics, once I have the tune. (I don’t know where the tunes come from, but they generally come to me while cycling around London on my bike). To give two new songs as examples, one, ‘Grenfell’, was inspired by the terrible and entirely preventable fire that engulfed Grenfell Tower in west London in June 2017. The tune — and the lyrics for the chorus — came to me quite quickly, but I spent the summer working little by little on the rest of the lyrics. For ‘I Want My Country Back (From The People Who Wanted Their Country Back)’, which is about Brexit, the tune — and, again, the chorus — came to me quite quickly after the referendum in June 2016, but I decided the lyrics were too literal, and I wanted something slightly more poetic, and that took me many months to work out. A video of us playing ‘Grenfell’ live for a German film crew is below, and we hope to record both songs in a studio soon.

Shouts: What came first for you, the music or the journalism?

Andy Worthington: I was going to say the journalism, but in fact I’m from musical family, and was in choirs as a child, and in bands as a teenager and in my 20s. I also did some studio-based work in my 30s. I began working seriously as a writer in 2002, when I began writing my first book, Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion, about Stonehenge and the British counter-culture, which was published in 2004, and I then followed up with a related book, The Battle of the Beanfield, in 2005. In 2006, I began researching and writing about Guantánamo, which I continue to do to this day, along with other writing and campaigning, and it was alongside this that I got involved with my friends in what became The Four Fathers.

Shouts: What made you want to use these two mediums to tell stories?

Andy Worthington:I suppose telling stories and/or the desire to communicate take many forms, and people find whatever vehicle suits them. For some people, that’s just one field, but I’ve always been interested in different forms of expression — writing is a big thing for me, of course, and it’s liberating that writing lyrics is in some ways different to journalism, but I’ve always loved singing, I’ve played the guitar since my 20s, I’ve also loved photography all my adult life, and continue to do that in various ways, and I’ve also engaged in other media — in film-making, for example, as the co-director of a film about Guantánamo, ‘Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo’, and recently as the narrator for ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, a documentary film about the destruction of social housing in London, and the residents who are resisting the destruction of their homes.

Shouts: What are some of the stories you care about?

Andy Worthington:I care about human rights and social justice. I want to see Guantanamo closed, as an icon of lawlessness in the “war on terror,” I want to see the rise of racism and xenophobia challenged, and I want to see the horribly greedy and aggressive form of current capitalism that has degraded the world and that is currently beginning to cannibalistically devour all but the rich in the western countries of its origin to be resisted and broken, so we can have a better system. That’s what my involvement in social housing campaigns is about, but it’s just as important here in the UK for people also to find way to, for example, save the NHS, the greatest achievement of the UK, from being destroyed by the Tories.

Shouts: What are the main differences you find between writing a book, a media article or a song lyric?

Andy Worthington: Well, a book is a huge project, in general, and a real challenge — although it is one I hope to do again. As for media articles, because I’ve been writing them for over ten years, often on a daily basis, I find them generally easy to do, especially as I largely self-edit my work, but lyrics are definitely more elusive.

Shouts: Besides the writing, journalism and music (as if it was not enough!), do you partake in other activism or social engagement?

Andy Worthington: I’m involved in various forms of campaigning, as well as writing and playing music, and since 2012 I’ve also been cycling around London on a daily basis taking photos across the whole city. Since last May, I’ve been posting photos once a day on Facebook, on a page called ‘The State of London’, and I hope to expand this project this year.

Shouts: Performing protest music such as yours, do find that it lands on deaf ears so to speak or do you feel there is willingness to take in music with a message?

Andy Worthington: I don’t think that there is, in general, an interest in protest music as there was when I was growing up. As a child of the 70s becoming a young man in the early 80s, politics was everywhere — the Sixties, and the protest music of the likes of Bob Dylan, was like the recent past, and a heady source of inspiration, and in my own teenage years the punk scene exploded into life, with its interesting crossover with the roots reggae scene. Both the singer-songwriters of the 60s and the 70s, aspects of the punk and post-punk scene (the Clash and the Two Tone movement, for example), and the roots reggae music of the late 70s, which I particularly love, and which was, of course, often militantly political, provided the direct inspiration for what I write for The Four Fathers, but I find that in general political protest has been cynically expunged from most modern-day music. It can still be found in aspects of youth culture — in the grime scene, for example — but there’s very little crossover in general between different scenes, so the general situation would seem to be one on which politics have been marginalised by self-censoring rock bands, by a bland corporate pop world, and by a juggernaut nostalgia industry, safely peddling people an aging facsimile of their youth. As a result, we’ve been trying to move more towards taking part in political events, where there’s a guaranteed audience that is probably prepared to listen as well be entertained.

Shouts: Do you find that there is an abundance of protest musicians out there today or on the contrary?

Andy Worthington: There are many, but they tend to be scattered around the country — and around the world. However, I’ve started to try getting some of them together, and in November, at the Birds Nest Pub in Deptford, a celebrated music venue, I put together an evening, under the heading ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’, featuring three bands (including The Four Fathers), two spoken word artists, a rapper and a socialist choir, and it was a huge success, and a clear demonstration that you can be both entertained and politically aware. I hope to do more gigs along the lines throughout 2018. Check out ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ here.

Shouts: Who are some of your favorite protest singers or socially conscious artists?

Andy Worthington: I still listen to many of the artists I grew up listening to, so lots of roots reggae and West African music, which I’m a huge fan of. I love Fela Kuti, I love Bob Marley, and numerous Jamaican artists from the same period, and I also love the conscious musicians of America from the same time — Gil Scott-Heron, for example. Currently, I have  a lot of time of some of the spoken word artists I know here and in the US — Potent Whisper here in the UK, who tells complex political stories in rhyme, and the Peace Poets from the Bronx in New York, who also perform uplifting spoken word pieces rooted in political struggle. I know them from my Guantanamo work, and my annual visits to the US to call for the closure of the prison on the anniversary of its opening, every January.

Shouts: What is on the horizon for The Four Fathers and for you?

Andy Worthington: More playing, wherever we can find what we hope will be appreciative audiences. And more recording, as we start work on our third album. We are always open to invites and suggestions.

Shouts: Thank you very much for participating and for the music you make. Anything else you’d like to shout from the rooftops?

Andy Worthington: Just my mantra from our song ‘Fighting Injustice’: “If you ain’t fighting injustice, you’re living on the dark side.” If everyone who claims to care about the state of the world actually did something, it would make a huge difference. But you have to believe it, shake off your apathy, stop shopping and screen-watching all the time, and actually do something. Remember: we are many, and they are few.

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.