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I spent the morning catching up on some freelance work and hanging out with Jennie, whose lovely house I’m staying at. Her living room overlooks a verdant park so it’s a very peaceful and calming space to sit and tap away at a computer keyboard. We listened to the latest James album “La Petite Morte”, which I hadn’t heard before and would now highly recommend, then J put on a Paolo Nutini album. I’d never listened to him before and it was fine but not really my cup of tea until I heard a rousing voice towards the end of one of the songs. It was clearly a sample from a film, and a quick internet sleuth session revealed it to be Charlie Chaplin’s impassioned speech at the end of “The Great Dictator”, a film from 1940 (and Chaplin’s first speaking film).
It really got to me. We’re living through a terrible time in humanity. There are always people suffering somewhere, civil wars raging on and people clinging to riches when others have nothing, and that’s awful and should never be ignored, but right now in the Middle East awful things are happening and it has to stop.
The situation is way more complex than is useful summing up here, though these emails between Brian Eno and Peter Schwartz are a manageable way of learning more about it, but I feel we’ve reached a point where regardless of the history and the nuance, international law is being broken. The stronger power is being granted the tacit right to exterminate another race of people without the world powers stepping in, and it makes me sick.
In 2009 I wrote a song about a news story I’d read detailing an incident where Israeli soldiers rounded up Palestinian women and children in to a house and bulldozed it to the ground with them inside. It’s on my first album and is called “NIMN” / “not in my name”. I’m under no illusions that the song will change anything in the real world, but I wanted to make a stand. I was angry and sad at what had happened and really disappointed that humans are seemingly able to bypass empathy, read these stories in the news and feel unmoved, when we should by rights be devastated by them. I wanted to communicate all this and let my listeners know what side of the fence I stood on.
Listening to this Chaplin speech fired me up – especially when I read that this is the part of the film where his character slips away and he seemingly speaks as himself:
“You, the people, have the power, the power to create machines, the power to create happiness! You, the people, have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure. Then in the name of democracy, let us use that power.”
I wonder what Charlie Chaplin would think of what’s happening in Gaza at the moment.
I was pleased to happen across a Free Palestine protest march on the way to do my show in the afternoon, and it was particularly good to see a range of ages there. It’s easy to think that this sort of action achieves nothing when the national press often doesn’t give it any screen time, and politicians ignore it, but if nothing else those people making a stand along Princes Street got in the faces of the hordes of Sunday shoppers and hopefully made them pause a moment and consider how lucky they are.
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Spot of rain today, enjoyed while huddling under the canopy of the best pizza truck in town, slice in hand. I for one feel very lucky.
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