Here is a snapshot of the set list for the Insulting Cabaret

Well it's another year and so it's another chance to revisit the musical legacy of protest music from around the world, which is my contribution to the Insulting Cabaret taking place on April 17th at the Southwark Playhouse in London.


The Insulting Cabaret is part of P.E.N.'s Free The Word event,
click here for more information. The Insulting Cabaret is an irreverent and highly entertaining evening of song, poetry and performance which celebrates how words underpin our freedom of expression. That all sounds very lofty where in fact the cabaret is very much a raucous night of entertainment. My humble role is to fill in the gaps between the evening's great line up which includes the phenomenal talents of Jason Yarde and Karen King-Aribisala to mention only two.


I might well throw in more tunes than are listed here so if you join us at the Southwark Playhouse and notice an awkward looking Irish man on the decks playing music that peaks your curiosity feel free to come and chat.

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Here is a sample of the nights music:


"Disorientation" - This is an early collaboration from the now defunct hip hop quartet the Antipop Consortium. This New York group was formed in the autumn 1997 under the credo "disturb the equilibrium". The Anti-Pop Consortium came together with one purpose which was to create an alternative universe to the fast growing world of 'Gangsta' rap and commerical hip hop. Three vocalists, Priest, Beans and M.Sayyid merged their wordsmithery with the aural alchemy of producer E.Blaize when they met through their interest in the downtown off-shoot of the Nuyorican Theatre entitled "Rap meets Poetry" hosted by poetry slam stalwart Bob Hollman. In a living out of their credo i.e. disturb the equilibrium, member Priest almost landed in jail for posting Xerox'd posters for their early cassette only releases around New York just as the draconian anti-graffiti laws introduced by Mayor Giulliani began to be inforced. Here is a video of their release "Ghostlawns" from 2002, on MTV can you believe it, not really your typical 'Jay-Z' style affair as you will see.





"King Kong" - Frank Zappa is perhaps the most vilified popular composer and musician in contemporary American history and proud to be so. I will be playing a selection of Zappa tunes on the night but this sample from the track King Kong from a BBC session in 1968 is a nice optimistic note to kick things off. In the clip below Zappa literally thanks the BBC for letting him play and explore music in a way that was impossible on American television at the time. These improvised sessions under the title King Kong where to form the back bone of the album Uncle Meat released the following year. So in that sense the BBC's remit to educate as well as entertain (happy days) informed one of Zappa's great recordings.





"Ufikizolo" - This is an early song by one of the greats of Township Jazz in South AfricaDorothy Masuka. Dorothy's compositions had serious themes and were banned by the authorities. She was in Bulawayo in 1961 when the Special Branch seized the master recording of one song and she was was expelled from South Africa. Between that time and 1965 Dorothy was in exile, working in Malawi and Tanzania. She eventually returned to a newly independent Zimbabwe in 1980 where her family hailed from. She performed in London as recently as 2002. Here is a recording of another of her hits Teya Teya.





"Buka Tiende" - Loosely translated the title of this song translates as "my way" and is by another famous Zimababwean Thomas Mapfumo & and his band The Blacks Unlimited. Mapfumo's early music supported the struggle for independence and the eventual presidency of Robert Mugabe, however Mapfumo's strident independence eventually attracted the ire of the Mugabe regime and the strong arm of the official censor in his homeland. In 1989 Thomas Mapfumo released the album 'Corruption' and from that point on Mugabe was to hound and harass him until he was exiled to the U.S. in the late 1990's. Here is a 2004 interview with Mapfumo in which he tells of his hope that change will come to his country so his people can live in freedom and perhaps he can return.





"Munchausen" - No Bra aka Susanne Oberbach is a German electronic musician who performs with no bra, hence the moniker. She is a less then polished performer but somehow when I saw her last year I was blown away by the courage and honesty of her music. Munchausen is probably her most witty release to date, lampooning the male ability to compete over everything on earth. Here is a live performance.





"Self Evident" - Ani Difranco pulls few punches in this live recording of one of her most pointed political songs written in the aftermath of the 9/11 disaster and taken from her album So Much Shouting, So Much Laughter in 2002. Her anger and how she expresses this, so reminiscent of The Last Poets, gets a huge reaction from the audience. Of course some die hard fan will go to the trouble of putting a video together in dedication, so here it is.





"Tapha Niang" - This is a song taken from Toumani Diabate's Symmetric Orchestra album Boulevard De L'Independance from 2006. It's a beautiful record, Toumani is the leading virtuoso on the Kora, the album brings together Malian traditional music and blends in jazz, rai and other world music forms. All good, well no, he also uses references to Q'uran in the lyrics and it was these references that made Sony hit the stop button on the release of their game LittleBigPlanet. The track was used in the game and in the present climate the suits did not want to offend.


"Canto Libre" - This is a song by the great Chilean poet, playwright and songwriter Victor Jara. The song title translates as 'Freedom Song'. Jara was one of a number of singers and songwriters to breath life into the Chilean folk tradition which became known as the Nueva Canción Chilena or New Chilean Song. Jara's floating dreamlike voice and the beauty of his writing was to connect deeply with his country men and women. It was this connection and his political activism which led to his torture and execution in 1973 at the hands of a U.S. backed coup led by General Pinochet. Jara's influence only grew after his death and the suppression in Chile of his musical legacy. They are still re-issuing his albums and somewhere in Hollywood a film script or two is floating about. Below is a montage of archive footage set to the song.





"Don't Call Me Red" - This is a song written by Ry Cooder. Latin America and in particular Cuba has been a source of inspiration and musical collaboration for this legendary guitarist and composer for much of his musical career. Considering that Latin America has been such a hot-bed of social and politcal unrest during Cooder's lifetime it seems strange that his most overtly political music should happen in recent years. Cooder's album 'Chavez Ravine' 2005 is a record that remembers the struggle by L.A.'s Latino community to retain an informal town known as Chavez Ravine which was forcibly repossesed in the 1950's to make way for the L.A. Dodgers baseball stadium. The reposession of the land revealed the contempt with which the authorities treated the Latino community. I chose the song 'Don't Call Me Red' as it traces the story of the public housing planner Frank Wilkenson who tried to build low-rent housing for the citizens of Chavez Ravine but as part of the repossession process was hounded out of his job, accused of being a communist and eventually sent to jail. Click here to find out more about this song and the record. Here is a short report about the story of Chavez Ravine.





"Amazing Disgrace" - this is a song by the great jazz collective the World Saxophone Quartet. Sung by the great gospel singer Carla Amba Hawthorne. "Amazing Disgrace" is a post-Katrina cry of pain and anger, Carla reverses the lifting nature of the original spiritual and renders it as a cry of desperation, exacerbation. Not surprisingly this song was not given much radio play in the U.S. In this interview with WSQ David Murray and his fellow musicians outline why there music has taken an overt political turn.





"Mother Earth" - The great Muddy Waters probably came up with the first ecologically aware pop song in history recording this song in 1950, first for Premium then for the great Chess Records label. There's no documentation of Muddy singing this great song but there is this little 'credit-crunch' ditty from UK television in the 1964.





"Waist Deep in the Big Muddy" - This is a song written by Pete Seeger in 1967 during the Vietnam War. The song is the story of a platoon that's waist deep in the Mississippi River in Louisiana on a practice patrol in 1942 but the captain orders the platoon to continue, until they're finally up to their necks. The song was an obvious metaphor for the Vietnam War as a whole, and how the United States kept getting deeper and deeper into the war and eventually became so drawn into it that withdrawal was nearly impossible, but kept pushing on anyway. It's contemporary resonance is glaring. Pete Seeger sang the song on the taping of the CBS show, the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour in September, 1967. However the CBS top brass objected to its political tone, and censored the song prior to broadcast. CBS later relented, and allowed Pete to come back and sing the song on the Brothers' February 25, 1968 show. Unfortunately the original footage has been withdrawn from Youtube, but here is a later version of the song, sung of course with the same bite.





"Requerimento A Censura" - This is a song by the great Brazilian iconoclast Tom Ze. The song is actually written as an appeal to the state censor to approve the song. Ze and many of his generation of musicians lived under the military rule of the National Renewal Alliance Party which over threw the Joao Goulart presidency and brought a period of severe state censorship. Ze along with Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso amongst others. Tom Ze fell into obscurity until the great David Byrne revived his recordings and career by making him the first signing to Byrnes label Luaka Bop. Click below to see Ze in action, this is another overtly political song from the same album, Companheiro Bush, enjoy.





"Thanksgiving Prayer" - William S. Burroughs produced a number of musical collaborations, setting extracts of his work to music. This is from Dead City Radio produced by Hal Willner and Nelson Lyon arguably one of the best musical explorations of his work. This is the famous alternative thanks giving prayer which was in keeping with Burroughs kick against conservative and intolerant America which he helped to fight against til his last breath.





"Hip Hop Cubanesi" - From the undeground Hip Hop movement in Cuba Las Krudas/ Krudas Cubanesi (meaning 'The Crude or Crude Cubans') are a trio of Cuban musicians from Havanna. Being a woman in the machismo driven underground culture of Hip Hop is hard enough but Las Krudas are black, from Afro-Cuban extraction, lesbian and all big girls. Any one of these elements of their identity would be perceived as a disadvantage but not for Las Krudas who use the power of the word and music to expound their pride in being women, afro-cuban and gay. Their music has the wonderful verbal velocity and virtuosity reminiscent of the late Anti-Pop Consortium from New York. Here is a video of their track 'La Gorda' where the ladies celebrate the joy of being "phat".





"Tchourt Sanna" - This is a stirring song by the Ensemble Aznach from the Pankissi Valley in Georgia, home to a large community of Chechen exiles. The song tells of Stalin's mass deportation of Chechen people to Siberia and Kazakhstan in 1944. The song's title translates as "Like A Gravestone" and is sung from the perspective of a refugee remembering his homeland. Many of these traditional songs fell foul of officialdom during several waves of Sovietisation of Chechnya. It is only in the last two decades that musicians have had the freedom to sing songs such as "Tchourt Sanna". Aznach is the Chechen word for voice and it is with song that Chechen identity has begun rebuild it's collective voice in a post-soviet world.


"Baghdad" - Kadim El Sahir is an Iraqi legend and across the Arab world he has sold millions of records. His very first hit "Ladghat El Hayya" in 1987 ( which was a allegorical critic on the Iraq-Iran war) was banned and eventually Kadim had to move to the more liberal Lebanon where he is now based. This song is an obvious lament for his country and the city where he began his musical career. Here is a live version of the song he performed at the Opera House in Egypt.





"Iraqi Businessman" - This is a track by the composer and pianist Vijay Iyer in collaboration with the composer/producer and poet Mike Ladd. The song is from a collaborative project titled 'In What Language' from 2003. The song and album tell the story of the pre-9/11 experience of an Iranian filmmaker, Jafar Panahi. In 2001 while traveling from a festival in Hong Kong to one in Buenos Aires. Transiting through JFK, he was detained by INS officials, shackled to a bench in a crowded cell for several hours, and ultimately sent back to Hong Kong in handcuffs. Panahi's description of this ordeal was widely circulated online. He wanted to explain his story to fellow passengers: "I'm not a thief! I’m not a murderer! ... I am just an Iranian, a filmmaker. But how could I tell this, in what language?". The piece includes a monologue where an Iraqi Businessman ruminates on common thuggery and how power can turn to casual violence and in turn to torture.


"Television The Drug of The Nation" - The Disposable Heroes of Hipopracy is just one of the musical vehicles for the singer/songwriter/mc Michael Franti. Franti has brought a political elequence to Hip-Hop and this track is an acid comment on the connection between mainstream media and right wing politics in the U.S. It is a very contemporary protest song indebted more to the writings of Noam Chomsky and social theory then anything found in a folk song tradition. This track was not censored as the U.S. authorities had found out by this point that when it comes to rap and hip-hop the surest way to create a plantinum selling record is to ban it, as was the case with Ice-T & Body Count's "Cop Killer".





"Fuck or Kill" - This is short and to the point, which is what the Canadian artist Peaches has built a reputation on. It goes without saying that neither this track nor many of the songs from 'Impeach My Bush' made it onto the mainstream radio and television. Instead other artists have tended to sanitise her lyrics but 'reference' her musical style. I was at one of Peaches earliest London concerts at the ICA in 2001, where people walked out. This was the ICA! For some reason people found, and still find, her androgyny and sexual directness offensive. The song chants the line "I'd rather fuck who I want then kill who I am told to", a long way from Pete Seeger and Victor Jara but as a protest song it is a song of it's time.





"Zombie" - Fela Anikulapo Kuti alongside inventing Afrobeat and merging jazz with his West African musical roots, was a charismatic and forceful critic of the Nigerian government during the 1970's and 80's. This track is the title track from his album 'Zombie' which was his direct musical attack against the Nigerian millitary. His punishment was a serious of brutal attacks on his studio/commune, but this only hardened Kuti's resolve to use his music as a powerful tool against the authorities. His motivations and role in Nigerian history and the history of music is complex. Here is a great documentary about Fela Anikulapo Kuti.





"I Wanna Be Free" - One of the great early punk rock records by the band The Rings, from the wonderfulChiswick record label. "I want a society, where a man can be, what he wants to be" which in the opening part of this song is simply the right to wear brown shoes with pride. A seemingly small freedom yes but this track is delivered with such gusto it is as though the wearing of brown shoes is a call to arms in the French revolution. Recorded in 1977 there is no footage of the band performing the song but here's a youtube homage to this great record.





"Niggers are Scared of Revolution" - This is a blistering chant by The Last Poets from there eponymous album of 1970. It is still an uncomfortable listen, a provocation, a challenge. It's force was directed inward, within the African American community pointing out communal dithering around the ongoing campaign for civil rights. At the same time Umar Bin Hassan's diatribe is a powerful attempt to reclaim a word which has always acted as a lightning vain for hatred and prejudice. Powerful stuff.





Well that's a selection of the tracks that will be played on the night, don't miss it. For tickets and information click here.