My friends,

I’m off to WOMAD, the wonderful world music festival in Wiltshire, for the 15th year running, with a posse of good friends and their families. I’ll be back on Monday. My wife has been running children’s workshops since our kids were tiny toddlers, when WOMAD was still by the river in Reading, and now our kids are young men and the festival is happily settled into Charlton Park near Malmesbury, a wonderful site.

I never quite know who’s going to be on. One of the great joys of WOMAD is being surprised by wonderful musicians from all round the world — and, for me, especially, Africa — so I’ll report back later on my discoveries. I do know that Asian Dub Foundation are the welcoming band on the Friday night, and that George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic will be wowing us at some point.

I also hope that my band The Four Fathers (on Twitter here!) will be playing the Open Mic at Molly’s Bar at some point over the weekend, and I already know that my son Tyler (The Wiz-RD) will be beatboxing and providing some spoken word pieces at the Hip Yak Poetry Shack. Read the rest of this entry »

Today, London-based band The Four Fathers release the Fighting Injustice EP online, via Bandcamp, in two versions: one for the UK and one for the US.

The EP features three reworked songs from the band’s debut album, ‘Love and War’, released last summer, written by lead singer Andy Worthington, a journalist and human rights and social justice activist, who has spent the last ten years focusing primarily on the US prison at Guantánamo Bay Cuba.

Please feel free to listen to the EPs below — and please support us by buying them, or by buying individual tracks, if you like them. Later this month we will be in the studio making the first recordings for our second album, to be released in 2017.

Read the rest of this entry »