Mark reflects on world events during the Red Hot Summer Tour.

Author:  Mark Seymour.

Date: 2 March 2022.

Original URL: N/A.

Article Text

Follow the signage out on Racecourse Road..

‘MAJOR PUBLIC EVENT”.. FEB 26-27.

Detour here..

Inside the tent we loiter over cheese and beer while James R smashes hits through the canvas, the crowd vaguely discernible above the roar just behind the fence. Apart from that it’s tumble weed back here. All other artists have to leave immediately they finish. Those are the rules..

Which don’t apply on the other side. Out there there’s a sea of upturned faces smiling in the twilight, bodies climbing the hill, or pressed against the stage.

eager for release..

We amble on stage. The machine roars into life. the surge of kick and bass as the bodies press closer.

Heads begin to move..

but much is hanging in the balance. Apart from the sheer scale of the exercise, the hundreds of staff, scaffold towers and stage, portable kitchens, bars, toilets.. all thrown up overnight.

Merchandising, ticketing, promotion, flights, accommodation, production staff and then finally the musicians themselves, the last calculated risk, backed up by thousands of rapid antigen tests..

to get the circus up and running..

but long before that, the months of horse trading, managers, agents navigating public liability and a fast moving plague that follows its own rules and even now it’s still not settled.

After two years of silence.

And this week, there are forces at work in the world that are far greater than all of that

that could render a good time superfluous in an instant.

The drums of war are beating hard and by the time we walk on stage the Russian army is rolling across the great European plain as though the last eighty years of human history never happened. There’s even nuclear rhetoric, entirely unimaginable only hours before..

Music is such a tenuous thing. To think that songs themselves are first conceived in the tinkled chord over midnight wine, or the flash of a passing phrase.. an argument.. a telling line.

It only takes a virus to prove the point..

Or a war..

and still the crowd presses in.. eager, singing.

in this moment oblivious to the doom.

Which proves the point. The need for music is ever present. In every crowd, no matter how tenuous its grip on public life, music will erupt somehow. A band on every corner, the jangle of chords, a voice rising in the throng, seeking release.. because that’s what music does.. it brings release.

But the shadow of war is long, broadcast on phones everywhere.. even as we speak.

So much of what we expect from life is either re-inforced or demolished by facts over laid by more facts until assumptions about how the world works must be abandoned.. altogether.

Oh Ukraine..

But is that all we can hope for? Can music offer us little more than celebration?

Are we simply fiddling while Rome burns?

Somewhere mid set it dawns on me.. Love and war..

the two great themes of literature are the hardest to sing of.. because here is where the stakes are at their highest, when people are willing to sacrifice themselves, driven by emotion felt so deeply, no matter how misguided.

Or truthful.

Here is where songs must go to make sense of music itself. To give it ballast so that it can stand up to the blast of tyranny.

Many songs have been written this way. To share the burden of suffering. Life during war time..

songs sung in public places..

We shall not be moved..

to endure the times when the air is starved of oxygen by the very forces that are pressing in on us right now..

Songs of defiance..

Who knows? They may well be singing them in the bunkers of Kyiv..

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