Today, my band The Four Fathers are releasing ‘She’s Back’, our new online single from our forthcoming album, ‘How Much Is A Life Worth?’, which we’ll be releasing on CD soon, hopefully within the next month.

‘She’s Back’ was written by guitarist Richard Clare, first aired in 2015, and recorded in a session last year for the new album. It’s about Pussy Riot, politicized performance artists from Russia, who use punk music to get across their messages, which have involved feminism, LGBT rights and the corruption of Vladimir Putin. We recorded it in July 2016, with Richard on lead vocals and 12-string guitar, me on rhythm guitar and backing vocals, Brendan Horstead on drums, Andrew Fifield on flute and Louis Sills-Clare on bass.

The song is below, on Bandcamp, where you can listen to it, and, if you wish, download it for just £1 ($1.30). We hope you like it!

Formed in 2011, Pussy Riot gained international notoriety in 2012 after five members of the group staged a punk rock performance — a ‘Punk Prayer’ — inside Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior, which was aimed at the church’s support for Putin during his election campaign. Read the rest of this entry »

Check out our existing recordings here, and get in touch to let us know if you’re interested in our new album, out very soon!

Yesterday, I was very excited to put the final touches to my band The Four Fathers‘ second album, ‘How Much Is A Life Worth?’ The album will be available soon on CD and to download on our Bandcamp account, where our existing recordings are still available — our first album ‘Love and War’, the ‘Fighting Injustice’ EP, featuring remixes of three songs from ‘Love and War’ (US and UK versions), and a single, ‘Close Guantánamo.’ Please feel free to like us on Facebook and to follow us on Twitter.

The album features ten original songs — eight by me, as lead singer and rhythm guitarist, and two by Richard Clare (lead guitar, backing vocals), and we recorded it with Pat Collier at Perry Vale Studios in Forest Hill in three sessions from July to November with Brendan Horstead on drums and percussion, Andrew Fifield on flute and harmonica, and Louis Sills-Clare on bass.

My songs include the title track — our most recent song — comparing how white westerners value their own lives compared to the victims of the west’s post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the refugees fleeing the death and destruction in Syria and elsewhere, and the black men — and children — killed with impunity by the police in the US, where the Black Lives Matter movement has been such a powerful force. Read the rest of this entry »

Buy our album here!

On December 18, I gave a talk about Guantánamo, my research into the men held there, the lawlessness and cruelty of the prison, and my writing and campaigning for nearly ten years to educate people about the prison and, ultimately, to get it closed, at an event held at the Deptford Cinema, a community cinema in south east London that I wholeheartedly recommend. I spoke not just about my research and my writing, but also the Close Guantánamo campaign I launched nearly four years ago with the US attorney Tom Wilner (who represented the Guantánamo prisoners in their habeas corpus cases before the US Supreme Court), and We Stand With Shaker, the campaign I launched last November with the activist Joanne MacInnes to secure the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, who was finally freed on October 30 after nearly 14 years in US custody.

With what I hope is an innovative approach to combining politics, education and entertainment, my talk was followed by a set of political songs by my band The Four Fathers, and I’m delighted that a friend, Andrew — who became involved in We Stand With Shaker via his involvement in CAAB (the Campaign for the Accountability of American Bases), for whom I was a speaker at their annual July 4 protest at the NSA’s Menwith Hill spy base in Yorkshire in 2013 — recorded my talk and most of our set, which he has made available via YouTube.

The video of my talk is here, which I posted before Christmas, and on Christmas Day I posted the video of The Four Fathers playing “Song for Shaker Aamer,” the song I wrote that was featured in the campaign video for We Stand With Shaker, updated to reflect Shaker’s release. Read the rest of this entry »