The Four Fathers Release New Album, ‘Songs of Loss and Resistance’, on CD and as a Download

The cover of The Four Fathers’ new album, ‘Songs of Loss and Resistance’, designed by our drummer Brendan Horstead.

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I’m delighted to announce the release, on Bandcamp, of ‘Songs of Loss and Resistance’, the new album by The Four Fathers, marking ten years of our existence as a south London-based band playing mostly original folky, rocky, reggae-inflected protest music.

The album, our third, and a belated follow-up to our second album, ‘How Much Is A Life Worth?’, released in November 2017, was recorded, sporadically, over the last six years, in sessions in July 2018, December 2019, July 2022 and January 2024, with the great Charlie Hart, a multi-instrumentalist and producer, best-known as a member of Ronnie Lane’s Slim Chance in the 1970s and ‘80s, who also plays electric piano and accordion on three of the songs. Do check out Charlie’s work if you don’t know it, as he is currently involved in two very worthwhile musical projects — the Equators, an epic collective of talented players of African-tinged jazz and r’n’b, and a revival of Slim Chance, mostly featuring musicians who played with Ronnie in the band’s bucolic heyday, following Ronnie’s exodus from the excess of the Faces.

The long genesis of the album was caused by personnel changes, the huge disruption of Covid in 2021 and 2022, and the difficulty of getting everyone together to rehearse, and, most specifically, to work on arrangements of the songs in the gaps between work commitments and, more recently, the kinds of family illnesses that begin to afflict those of us in our 50s and 60s with ageing parents.

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The Four Fathers Release ‘Warriors (Freedom Version)’, Marking Julian Assange’s 50 Days as a Free Man

The cover of ‘Warriors (Freedom Version)’ by The Four Fathers, designed by Brendan Horstead using a photo made available by Stella Assange.

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Thursday August 15 marked 50 days since Julian Assange landed in Australia as a free man, after five years in HMP Belmarsh, a maximum-security prison in south east London, fighting his proposed extradition to the US for publishing — with some of the world’s most prestigious newspapers — classified US files leaked by Chelsea Manning. Prior to his time in Belmarsh, he had spent nearly seven years confined to the Ecuadorian Embassy in Knightsbridge, where he had successfully sought asylum in June 2012, until his asylum was abruptly withdrawn in May 2019.

To mark the occasion, The Four Fathers have released ‘Warriors (Freedom Version)’, an amended version of our song ‘Warriors’, about Julian and Chelsea, which we first released in February, with the last two lines changed to celebrate Julian’s 50 days of freedom.

In the original, I sang that the price of Julian’s actions was “Extradition and life imprisonment and the end of the freedom of the press”, while the new version changes that to “Five years fighting extradition in Belmarsh until a plea deal set him free” — the plea deal that he signed in the US District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands, a US Commonwealth in the Pacific, prior to his arrival back in Australia on June 26, where he was reunited with his wife and his sons.

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Photos and Review: This Year’s Glorious Sunny WOMAD Festival Once More Confirms Music As One of Humanity’s Greatest Gifts

Children playing on one of the WOMAD signs at the WOMAD festival in Wiltshire in July 2024 (Photo: Andy Worthington).

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In a world wracked by climate collapse and a uniquely shocking western-backed genocide in the Gaza Strip, reasons for believing that there is an essential goodness to humanity can be difficult to perceive, beyond the actions of brave climate activists and the millions of ordinary people who have repeatedly protested to try to bring an end to Israel’s indefensible industrial-scale slaughter of Palestinian civilians.

Ii may have been a small gesture in response, but, in its 42nd year, WOMAD, the world music festival founded by Peter Gabriel and colleagues in 1982 and located, since 2007, in the grounds of Charlton Park, a stately home in Wiltshire, brought its usual vivid and vibrant reminder that human beings, for all their failings, are also capable of great creativity and love.

I’ve been attending WOMAD every year since 2002 (with the exception of the COVID years, in 2021 and 2022, when it was cancelled) as part of Dot to Dot, a children’s workshop crew run by my wife Dot in the World of Children area, one of the festival’s great examples of inclusivity from its very earliest incarnation. As Chris Pritchard, one of WOMAD’s founders, explained in the liner notes for ‘Live at WOMAD 1982’, released last year, “A huge procession of children opened the [first] festival, wearing masks and wielding musical instruments made with the help of the teaching pack. Giant Indonesian puppets, created by Welfare State International, led them to the main stage.”

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On Gorilla Radio, Chris Cook Plays ‘Warriors’, and We Discuss Julian Assange, Guantánamo, Genocide in Gaza and George Galloway

The cover of ‘Warriors’ by The Four Fathers, and the poster showing the 16 men approved for release from Guantánamo who are still held.

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Thanks to Chris Cook for having me on his Gorilla Radio show in Victoria, in western Canada on Wednesday to talk about a number of topics. The one-hour show is available here, on Chris’s Substack account, and my interview took part in the first half.

Chris began by asking me about the recent by-election victory, here in the UK, of George Galloway, the former Labour MP, who destroyed both Labour and the Tories on a platform opposing their unconditional support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza, which, of course, is also opposed by a majority of the population. As he stated in a tweet after his victory, “Gaza is the moral centre of the world right now.”

Chris asked me about the government’s hysterical response, with Prime Minister Rishi Sunak delivering a special address to the nation to complain about the threat posed by a democratically-elected MP, but with, of course, a darker undercurrent of groundless suggestions that British democracy is under threat from “Islamist extremists” — all part of the desperate, flailing efforts of the British establishment to criminalize all criticism of Israel’s actions as anti-semitic.

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The Four Fathers Release New Song, ‘Warriors’, About Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning, To Coincide With Julian’s Last UK Appeal Against Extradition to the US

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Yesterday, The Four Fathers released ‘Warriors’, my song about Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning, which we released to coincide with the first of two days of hearings at the Royal Courts of Justice in London, marking Julian’s last UK appeal against his extradition to the US. If extradited, he will face espionage charges relating to the classified US files, leaked by the US whistleblower Chelsea Manning, which were released in 2010 and 2011, in conjunction with some of the world’s most prominent newspapers.

It’s available below via Bandcamp, where you can listen to it for free, and buy it as a download if you like it.

I worked with Julian and WikiLeaks as a media partner on the release of classified military files from Guantánamo in 2011, which were hugely important, as they revealed the shocking extent to which the US’s so-called “intelligence” was based on statements made by profoundly unreliable witnesses — prisoners subjected to torture and other forms of abuse, or bribed with better living conditions.

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Photos and Report: WOMAD 2023 – Amazing World Music, and Two Elephants in the Room

Khushee the elephant in the children’s area at WOMAD on July 28, 2023 (Photo: Andy Worthington).

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From July 27 to 30, WOMAD, the world’s biggest world music festival, once more occupied part of the 4,500 acres of land belonging to Charlton Park in Wiltshire, the ancestral home of the Earls of Suffolk since the late 16th Century, whose Grade I listed mansion stands a safe distance away from the annual invasion of around 40,000 people in search of extraordinary music from around the world.

This year, 41 years since the festival began, there were two elephants in the room. The first, designed by my wife Dot, was a delightful cartoon elephant, Khushee (meaning happiness in Hindi), a representation of a young female Indian elephant who sat in the backstage catering area, charming the artists, when she wasn’t being promenaded around the children’s area, delighting children and adults alike.

Khushee was accompanied by Oke, a cute little puppet mouse, also designed by Dot, who made his first appearance last year, when, after years of doing children’s workshops, Dot came up with the idea to, instead, create a large animal figure to draw the attention of WOMAD’s children by processing through the children’s field on a daily basis. Last year, marking WOMAD’s 40th anniversary, that creature was a lion, Zaki, based on the lion in the festival’s logo, and it was so successful that this year it was Khushee’s turn.

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The Triumphant Return of the WOMAD Global Music Festival on its 40th Anniversary and Reflections on its History

The WOMAD 40th anniversary lion, designed by Dot Young, leading the children’s procession at the WOMAD festival in Charlton Park, Wiltshire on July 31, 2022 (Photo: Andy Worthington).

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Check out my photos from this year’s WOMAD on Flickr here.

It’s hard to believe now, when hundreds of festivals take place every summer in the UK, but back in 1982, when Peter Gabriel set up the first WOMAD (World of Music, Arts and Dance) in Shepton Mallet, only a handful of festivals took place on a regular basis; primarily, Reading Festival, which had evolved from a jazz festival first established in the 1960s, and which was, by the early ‘80s, dominated by heavy rock, Glastonbury Festival, revived in 1979 after its hippie origins in 1970 and ’71, and the Stonehenge Free Festival, which had been taking place since 1974, and which was growing larger every year — eventually prompting the Thatcher government to suppress it with unprecedented violence in 1985 at The Battle of the Beanfield.

Promoting music from around the world was a bold move back in 1982. Although Bob Marley had firmly put reggae and Jamaica on the map through his extraordinary global success in the 1970s, few other performers from Jamaica or elsewhere had crossed over prominently into the western mainstream.

Gabriel, however, as he explained ten years ago, on WOMAD’s 30th anniversary, became fascinated by world music after the murder of the black activist Steve Biko in apartheid South Africa in 1977. As he explained to the Guardian, he “was thinking of writing a song about Steve Biko, the anti-apartheid activist who died in police custody in 1977, when he came across a Dutch radio station playing African music”, and “was sufficiently entranced to explore further and work these influences” into his subsequent record, ’Biko’, released in 1980, a ”graceful, haunting” song that “became one of the first songs about apartheid by a major western artist.”

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Keeping Live Music and Performance Alive in a Covid Lockdown Culture

The Four Fathers’ gig on October 31, 2020, successfully completed before the second Covid lockdown starts on November 5.

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I was preparing to play a gig — yes, an actual gig! — on Saturday evening, with my band The Four Fathers, when news of a second lockdown in England was finally confirmed by the government. It wasn’t surprising, because infection rates had been steadily rising, but the government — as indecisive as ever — had missed the opportunity to impose a two-week “circuit breaker” lockdown to coincide with half-term, as recommended by medical experts, and was now, belatedly, announcing a four-week lockdown instead, starting on Thursday, November 5, and lasting until December 2.

Unlike the first time around, though, the government announced that schools and universities were to stay open, even though what are regarded as “non-essential” shops and businesses will be required to shut, imperilling the future of countless small businesses, who had just begun to find their feet, and who must now be facing, in numerous cases, a fatal loss of business in the run-up to Christmas. Even if they are allowed to reopen on December 3, it seems pretty certain that Amazon and a host of other online retailers — many in the “fast fashion” business, and many with dodgy employment practices — will be making a fortune while nailing shut the coffins of high streets across the land.

To impose this kind of sweeping lockdown for an entire month while leaving schools and universities open is exactly the kind of muddled thinking on the government’s part that — even putting aside for a moment their cronyism, corruption, and obsession with incompetent, overpaid corporate service providers to do jobs that should be provided by health professionals — will enrage and alienate people, whilst also failing to actually tackle the problems of rising infection rates.

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Covid Lockdown: Video of My Band The Four Fathers Playing at a Small Party in a London Park That Would Now Be Illegal

A screenshot of The Four Fathers playing in a park in south London on August 29, 2020.

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On the August Bank Holiday weekend, my band The Four Fathers played a largely acoustic set — and then joined other musicians in a jam session — as part of a little party in our local park in south London, parts of which were filmed by our bassist’s daughter, and which now constitute a record of what London looked like five months after the government first declared a lockdown to prevent the spread of the Covid-19 virus.

The party normally takes place in a friend’s house, but this year, because of Covid-19, everyone concerned recognised that even a well-behaved house party wasn’t acceptable at the time, and so the proposal to move it to our local park was suggested instead.

In the earliest days of lockdown, London’s parks were patrolled by the police and local officials to make sure that no one stopped or mingled during their allotted one hour of exercise a day, but, as the peak of the panic passed, parks then became the focal point of human interaction, and while there were some obvious examples of slightly reckless behaviour — parties of young people drinking late into the night, provoking the wrath of the curtain-twitching brigade — for the most part people were aware of social distancing, and were simply trying to balance the need to avoid spreading the virus with an equally important need to socialise.

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Check Out The Four Fathers’ Video Trilogy from Our Pre-Covid Charlie Hart Sessions

A screenshot from The Four Fathers’ YouTube channel.

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Since the coronavirus hit, my band The Four Fathers have, like most musicians, been unable to do much at all. Initially isolated from each other — and with our bassist Paul having moved to San Francisco — we didn’t get together until June, when we played a few songs for my friend Neil Goodwin’s Virtual Stonehenge Free Festival, available on YouTube here.

Paul then returned from San Francisco, which was good news for us, and we’ve rehearsed a few times since, but, unsurprisingly, we haven’t played any gigs, although we did manage to release three new studio recordings, which we recorded in December with the great Charlie Hart, who, in a 50-year career, has played in Kilburn and the High Roads with Ian Dury, and in Ronnie Lane’s Slim Chance, has produced music for the legendary Congolese singer Samba Mapangala, and currently plays in a revived Slim Chance and in his own band The Equators, an extraordinary world-jazz-blues group of extremely talented musicians.

The recordings were of three new songs that I wrote in 2018/19, all available on Bandcamp, where they can be purchased as downloads: The Wheel of Life, a meditation on mortality and living in the moment, This Time We Win, an eco-anthem inspired by Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion, on which Charlie plays Wurlitzer piano, and Affordable, a punky blast of rock and roll about lying politicians and the housing crisis.

We also followed up the release of the new recordings with experimental videos using found footage that were made by our drummer Bren Horstead.

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Andy Worthington

Investigative journalist, author, campaigner, commentator and public speaker. Recognized as an authority on Guantánamo and the “war on terror.” Co-founder, Close Guantánamo and We Stand With Shaker, singer/songwriter (The Four Fathers).
Email Andy Worthington

CD: Love and War

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The Guantánamo Files

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The Battle of the Beanfield

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Stonehenge: Celebration & Subversion

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Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo

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