Dipping my head back up from the sea of embraces, I’m met with the clearer sound of Open Fly no longer muffled by my ear smushed against rib cages and crowded by hair.
To smiling, excited faces, I’m reminded of why I’m here and how I came to meet these incredible people.
No Band Is An Island, like the John Donne poem it riffs off, explores interconnection and collective responsibility. Formed in January of this year, the project grounds itself in community, bringing local artists together to fundraise for charities such as Medical Aid for Palestinians. However No Band Is An Island doesn’t just stop at fundraising; it is actively creating a space for musicians to come together and oppose a paradoxical music industry pumping out the voices of artists, but when they use their same voices for non-commercial purposes to stand up for what they believe, suddenly the executives prefer their silence.
Speaking to a friend of mine and a member of No Band Is An Island, she summarises the intrinsic connection between the music she makes and the politics that guides her:
“The arts are a conversation of their surrounding culture and history. The arts are political. They always have been. To claim to be ‘apolitical’ or to be silent in times of injustice is a political act.”
Kicking off the night, Open Fly through heady guitar and the layering of vocals and yells offered a cathartic release as soon as you entered through the doors. With a sheer amount of energy that never ended, they were the perfect openers for the evening. Following them came The Scuttlers, their music bright and clean, with the vocalist engaging the crowd in singing along through reciting lyrics before the next song kicked in. Their sound constantly ebbing and flowing, pulling and pushing, waves of varying tones moving the crowd.
True to their ethos, before the final band came on stage, No Band Is An Island welcomed my friend and a speaker from Youth Demand to the mic. The audience are reminded in this moment of the ongoing genocide in Palestine and our governments' hand in it. Grounding us on a local level and our responsibility as a community, he tells us: “You don’t even have to drive an hour up the road to Blackburn, where you can find a factory that’s producing F-35 parts that are dropping bombs on children in Gaza.” But this isn’t a speech purely on the atrocities, but one of hope, one calling people to take action, one that knows what collective power can bring about. To a chorus of raucous shouts and whoops, he lists the ways Youth Demand has shown up against our complicit government, from crashing this year's Eurovision to taking a shit in Rishi Sunak’s lake. Through a message of hope and solidarity, he leaves the stage to chants of “Free Free Palestine!”
As testament to just how engaging the speech was, the final band came up on stage asking, ‘How do we follow that?’ But follow it, Shaking Hand did. Standing in a crowd surrounded by friends, by people who have all shown up for Palestine in a myriad of different ways, I’m reminded of why we do this as Shaking Hand play their last song. Over their music, they play the beautiful and raw performance of Palestinian poet Rafeef Ziadah’s ‘We Teach Life, Sir’. Rafeef’s words collide and pull at the space in the room, repetition after repetition compounding on one another, reminding us again and again why we sought out this event connected by art and solidarity. Before the band launch into the heart of their last song, the closing line of the poem plays “we Palestinians wake up every morning to teach the rest of the world life, sir.” And this is exactly what the Palestinians are doing; they are showing us what life, love, community, and courage truly look like. Through projects like this one, we can hope to give some of what they have taught us back in whatever way we can.
Having friends scrambling to get their hands on tickets after not being quick enough to snatch them up on first release, this is a project to watch out for! No Band Is An Island is blooming and it's only at the start with many more gigs to come. They additionally hope to expand in a variety of ways, including creating resources for local artists facing accessibility issues.
No Band Is An Island takes their time to look around at the local bands that make up their continent and cast their gaze further ashore to the other clusters of continents, reaching out to them through their fundraising and solidarity. As while they play their music and we sway along with drinks in hand to the welcome sound of soft guitar rifts and thumping bass, the people in Palestine fall asleep to sirens and wake to bombs flattening their earth.
No band is an island.
No man is an island.
Free Palestine.
Ella Wilson-Coates
Image: Poster from @nobandisanisland's Instagram