January 1941: Bonzo, the great dane is growing increasingly restless. He’s plodding up and down the train carriage, ambling into passengers, slobbering all over their laps, knocking over luggage, generally just seeking attention. Attention however, is the last thing his owner wants. She’s sat further down the train in a crowded compartment surrounded by the full menagerie she has insisted on bringing with her. Glonglon and Mica, the monkeys keep rattling their cages, much to the consternation of the passengers crammed into the compartment beside them. She also has mice, a snake, and a few other boxes from which the steady stream of growls, grunts, and squeaks keep their faceless occupants very present for those who can hear them.

Far from being a quick commute, this nightmare would continue for 48 hours as the train slowly meandered its way from Algiers to Casablanca. The animals were actually part of a fabulous plan conceived and hard fought for by the woman sat amongst them. She was of course Josephine Baker, and she had been charged with carrying secret documents to Casablanca, where she would then set up a transmission hub to help provide Jewish refugees with passports to flee France. From there, she would head to Marrakech to expand the resistance network. Baker’s French intelligence handler Jacques Abtey had advised an incognito approach: travelling alone, dressed down, drawing as little attention as possible. Baker knew however, that if even a single onlooker had recognised her, they would know something shifty was afoot. In the eyes of the general public, and crucially, those of France’s collaborationist government, Josephine Baker famously never travelled without her beloved animals. She eventually convinced Abtey that the menagerie would provide the perfect cover, and of course, she was right. She made it to Casablanca without so much as a sideways look.

In part one of this series, we discussed Édith Piaf who smuggled a small handful of Jewish friends to unoccupied France in her touring entourage. In part two, we learned about Germaine Sablon whose fame and popularity kept prying eyes averted as she carried out secret resistance missions around Southern France. Today, we will be chatting about Josephine Baker, the entertainer who perhaps did more for the French resistance movement than any other. Although details are still blurry today, it’s likely she did even more than we will ever realise. When she was symbolically inducted into the Panthéon in 2021, then-president Emmanuel Macron delivered a 20-minute eulogy in which even he mis-attributed her involvement in the war effort, perfectly demonstrating how shrouded in mystery her work remains to this day. Focussing on the period of 1940-1944, I will today give you a collection of small vignettes which will help illuminate some of the work she carried out, first as an undercover resistance member, then as an enrolled soldier, not to mention the relentless performing. Apologies if you came here hoping for banana skirts, minstrel shows, and rainbow tribes, these have all been written about ad nauseam elsewhere. I’m also keen to discuss some of the brilliant music she performed, although I have picked the specific period during which she only made very few records! Surprisingly for such a popular entertainer, I’ve found that the actual content of the entertainment (the songs) is often overlooked in tellings of her story. So make sure you swing by the accompanying playlist, you’ll be pleasantly surprised!

It’s 1939, on la Ligne Maginot, the French army’s first line of defence against the approaching German army. Maurice Chevalier is growing restless, eyes flitting between his watch and Josephine Baker who’s on stage, where he should be. She’s overrunning. A big misstep in group shows like this, but what’s more, the soldiers are loving her. They should be calling for him, the headliner! The two had been touring together for a while now keeping the troops entertained both in London and here at home, but Baker’s ubiquitous popularity wherever they went was getting on his nerves. He should be the national treasure, not her, an American. These performances would mark the turning point in Baker’s career from highly popular music hall entertainer to active participant in the war effort. Chevalier on the other hand went into career-preservation mode after occupation, praising Marshal Pétain and performing all over occupied France. In June 1940, when the Germans took Paris, Baker fled to the Dordogne and famously declared she would not perform in the capital as long as the Nazis were there. A vow she upheld.

At some point in 1939, just as Baker was making a name for herself on the frontlines, Jacques Abtey, the head of the Paris counterintelligence bureau, was put in charge of recruiting ‘honorables correspondants’. These were volunteer agents who might use their normal social, professional, or public standing to travel around freely, both geographically and socially, without garnering suspicion. It wouldn’t be long before Baker’s name crossed his desk. He was initially reticent as her image at the time was still that of a slightly chaotic entertainer, known predominantly for her nudity and extravagant exoticising dances. So he gave her a test: She was to infiltrate a cocktail party given for Japanese officials at the Italian embassy, she was to retain some sensitive information and report back. Beyond the obvious difficulties, Abtey had conceived this test quite deliberately. He was keenly aware of what we might now brush off as a misguided comment Baker had made back in 1935: she had given full-voiced approval to Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, in particular with regards to his invasion of Ethiopia. He needed to know if she was still liable to fall for Axis propaganda.

Baker however, jumped at the opportunity to serve France, the country she loved so much, her adopted home. She effortlessly charmed her way into the party. There, she found a weak Italian attaché, plied the lad with Champagne, and extracted information about (then ostensibly neutral) Italy’s plans to seek a pact with Germany. In an amusing coda to the story, Baker was so excited when telling Abtey about her information, that she ran the car she was driving off the road. When the police appeared at her window, she flashed her dazzling rock star smile and was let off. Watching her melt and brush off a uniformed official with such ease, Abtey understood the powerful asset Baker could prove to be. She was hired.

Since writing the last two instalments of this series, I’ve treated myself to a viewing of Antonin Baudry’s epic cinematic diptych La Bataille De Gaulle (simply De Gaulle in English). The shamelessly hagiographic account of De Gaulle’s rise to power during WWII. As long as one doesn’t take the uncritical portrayal of the Général too seriously, these are superb films. In particular, they do a relatively solid job of illustrating how the Free France army built itself up from nothing by recruiting soldiers from the French colonies. General Leclerc (fabulously played by Niels Schneider in the films) was dropped into Chad in August 1940, where governor Félix Éboué became the first colonial leader to pledge his territory to Free France. A huge step, as colonial territories fell by default under the Vichy régime, led by Marshal Pétain. Incidentally, Éboué would enjoy the distinction of being the first black person interred in the Panthéon in 1949. From there, Leclerc moved swiftly, taking Cameroon and French Congo by force. Seeing this, Pierre de Saint-Mart, the Vichy governor of Ubangi-Shari (modern day Central African Republic) quickly declared his support for De Gaulle, thus completing Free France’s control of Equatorial Africa (barring Gabon who held out in their support for Pétain until November 1940). This entire operation took just four days and gave Free France its first actual territory as well as an unfathomable increase in manpower. Suddenly, De Gaulle had legitimacy.

This was all going on in the background as Baker was based in her now famous château Les Milandes in the Dordogne. Much like Germaine Sablon further south, she made the most of her notoriety and massive house to hide Jewish refugees who were fleeing occupied France, providing them with shelter, food, money, forged documents, and clothes. Le Milandes also served as a meeting place and smuggling hub for local resistance fighters. Having spent the previous year rubbing shoulders with German, Italian, and Japanese officials in Paris, gathering information, and even acquiring a pilot’s licence, Baker was now in a particularly strong position to take her espionage further. Around this time, she began reporting directly to MI6 in London. Using her performances as cover, she started smuggling intelligence about German troop movements, airfields, and harbours to Spain and Portugal from where she could transmit her findings safely. She famously pinned documents to the inside of her underwear and wrote notes in invisible ink on her sheet music.

In 1941, Baker and Abtey were sent to Vichy-controlled Morocco in order to help establish and coordinate the nascent resistance networks there. Baker leaked the story that she was travelling to North Africa to convalesce after a bout of pneumonia as explanation for the relocation, and after a nice stay in Algiers, she hopped on the train with which we so colourfully opened this article.

In June 1941, just a few months after arriving in Marrakech, Baker suffered a near-fatal illness that put her out of action until December 1942. She was forced to travel the 560km of bumpy road to Casablanca lying in agony in the back of a station wagon Abtey had borrowed especially. Once there she was able to seek the private care she needed from Dr. Henri Comte. She endured multiple operations, once joking with doctors that they should just install a zip in her skin. She made a gradual recovery as she entertained a revolving cast of diplomats, friends, and well-wishers. One such visitor was erstwhile music hall rival Maurice Chevalier who was turned away at Dr. Comte’s door. He reported to the French press that he’d seen Baker dying in a small room in Morocco. The story quickly snowballed culminating in a beautiful obituary penned by Langston Hughes in The Chicago Defender. Baker quickly corrected the record: “There has been a slight error, I'm much too busy to die.” Imagine, not just having your obituary written by one of the greatest poets of the 20th century, but also being able to read it! We mere mortals may dream…

In November 1942, as Baker was reaching the end of her recovery, allied forces disembarked just a few blocks away, carrying out the so-called Operation Torch. Led by General Dwight D. Eisenhower, American and British troops hit Casablanca, Oran, and Algiers simultaneously in order to establish control over the Mediterranean. After initial resistance, Vichy characteristically crumbled and signed an armistice. Admiral François Darlan and General Henri Giraud switched sides, giving their armies to Free France, who were now in control of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia as well as Equatorial Africa.

After her illness, Baker redoubled her resistance efforts, but also began leaning more seriously into the ostensible reason for her presence in North Africa: entertaining the troops. Indeed, since Operation Torch, there were thousands of French soldiers all over North Africa. Free France had no official entertainement programs, so Baker was forced to organise and coordinate her own visits to camps and barracks. A task she took up with great alacrity as she took genuine great pleasure and fulfillment from these shows.

There’s no solid record of what Baker was performing during these shows, but we do know that she was constantly working on her set-lists. The mainstays were her crowd pre-war favourites such as J’ai deux amours. Originally, a song about Baker’s divided love for her home country (the US) and her adopted home of Paris, but during the war, it took on greater meaning as she was performing it to soldiers far from their own home countries, with Paris perhaps standing in as a symbol for the unified free France for which they were fighting. Another huge song was La petite Tonkinoise, one Baker’s earlier hits, it is set to the colonial backdrop of France’s occupation of Indochina. An apt song for the locations of her shows was Sous le ciel d’Afrique. In spite of the song’s lyrics describing the dreariness of an unidentified French town, its melancholic, yearning aire perhaps ironically drew out fond memories of home for the soldiers. Alongside these popular hits, Baker incorporated an ever-changing rotation of newer songs which she picked specifically for these shows. One notable example was O mon Tommy! a love song lusting after a dashing British soldier. O mon Tommy! had been recorded in 1940, and released with the equally lovely Mon cœur est un oiseau des îles on the B-side. Baker also performed the WWI British music hall staple It’s a Long Way to Tipperary. And of course, after 1943, she integrated Le chant des partisans, although sadly, she never recorded it.

For a long time, it was believed that Baker’s war effort was limited to these performances. But it wasn’t until much later that we understood quite the extent of the espionage role she played. Whilst bits and bobs were known beforehand, the depth of her work became clear. There is no doubt that Baker absolutely loved the concerts however. Never is this more starkly exemplified than when one compares her memoirs with Noël Coward’s diaries. The two occasionally shared a bill in Algiers and in Cairo. Where Baker waxes lyrical about the fabulous welcome, charming officers, brave soldiers etc., Coward’s notes read like an entirely different event, sinking his biting wit into squalid living conditions, incompetent military brass, the sweltering heat, and his own exhaustion, he does however speak of the fulfilment he feels from turning the morale of frontline soldiers who he respected greatly. He also had an apparent fondness and professional respect for Baker

The two shared an enduring acquaintanceship, if not quite a friendship. Their mutual respect for each other dates back to the 1920s when they moved in the same elite circles, and stretched all the way to the 1970s when Baker was in talks to contribute to a documentary on the playwright. She also tried to convince him to write a play for her to perform, but he never took her up on the idea.

Throughout 1943, Baker embarked on a gruelling and seemingly endless tour of French, British, and even American troops from Casablanca all the way to Beirut. She used these shows to raise funds for the war effort as well as for the Red Cross, although she insisted no attendee should ever be made to pay. Her shows for American troops were particularly fraught as strict racial segregation was enforced in the US Army. An aspect of American life she despised and had led her to leave for France initially. She therefore refused to perform for segregated audiences, thus giving a taster of the civil rights work she would go on to carry out back home after the war.

In August 1943, during a gala in Algiers, Baker finally got to meet her hero, Charles De Gaulle. Apparently, she was so overcome with emotion that she fell to her knees on stage, weeping. At the end of her performance, she unfurled a huge French flag adorned with a Cross of Lorraine, the official emblem of Free France. In recognition of her work, De Gaulle pinned a small golden Cross of his own to her lapel. The two remained in contact throughout their lives, until De Gaulle’s death in 1970.

In her exceptional book Josephine Baker’s Secret War, Hanna Diamond paints a hilarious picture of Baker and De Gaulle’s epistolary relationship. Imagining the exuberance and persistence of Baker’s countless and overly personal missives landing on the austere desk of one of French history’s most serious army men brings me no end of joy. She apparently offered the general political advice and wild conspiracies alongside personal updates.

In 1944, Baker officially joined the army, becoming a sub-lieutenant in the Free French Air Force’s women’s formations. She was primarily used as a writer in propaganda production. She also continued relentlessly touring and performing. After Leclerc’s liberation of Paris in August 1944, Baker was finally able to return having kept the vow she made after its occupation. She received a veritable hero’s welcome as crowds of adoring fans came to greet her on the Champs-Élysées.

Back in Paris, Baker was able to start recording music again. In the next few years, we were treated to some of my favourite Baker tunes. An excellent take on Sam Manning’s saucy calypso classic Don’t Touch Me Tomatoes for example, later made famous by rocksteady star Phyllis Dillon. In 1945, Édith Piaf wrote her most famous song, La vie en rose, which Baker later covered as an explicit tribute to “the greatest singer of our age”. A favourite of mine is her take on Brazil, released with the superb Besame mucho on the B-side. Originally called Aquarela do Brasil and written by Ary Barroso, it was later made more famous in France by Django Reinhardt who first recorded the song in 1947. It is now perhaps best known as Geoff Muldaur’s lilting whistled theme used in Terry Gilliam’s film of the same name.

After the war, Baker lobbied to be recognised for her service, but as much of her work was secret, her case was repeatedly dismissed. She was eventually awarded the Croix de Guerre in 1961 shortly followed by the highest order of merit available in France, the Légion d’Honneur. And of course, she was pantheonised in 2021.

I’ll leave the final word to Hanna Diamond whose book on Baker’s war effort has served as the backbone to my research for this article. In this short excerpt from her conclusion, she is reflecting on what Baker unknowingly gave to France and its leaders.

“Macron, like the Gaullists during the war, recognized Baker’s enormous symbolic potential to promote an “idea of France.” Her race was as valuable to Macron in projecting a commitment to diversity and republicanism as it had been to de Gaulle in 1943–45, and this evidence of her civic commitment to the Republic operated as forcefully at the time of her Panthéonisation as it had during the war. Both Macron and de Gaulle saw in Baker a valuable political icon, and both were able to capitalize on her transnational identity.”

Further Resources!

Books

• Fearless and Free (1949), Josephine Baker

• The Noël Coward Diaries (1983), Noël Coward

• Josephine Baker’s Secret War (2025), Hanna Diamond

Films

• De Gaulle: Part 1 - Résistance (2026), Antonin Baudry

• De Gaulle: Part 2 - Liberté (2026), Antonin Baudry

Podcasts

• Tour de Chant - series: Josephine Baker, l’étoile noire de Paris

• Les Grandes Traversées - series: Joséphine Baker, l’insoumise

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I fully intend on keeping the Sunday long-reads entirely free as I want the knowledge, history, stories, and excellent music to travel as far as possible. The research behind each article however requires a lot of time and resources (books, research trips, film rentals, gig tickets, exhibition tickets… etc.), not to mention the countless hours of dyslexically writing and editing myself.

Paid subscriptions help cover those costs and allow me to dedicate more time to producing richer, better-researched articles week after week.

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Knats began as a friendship in 2010s Newcastle when King David-Ike Elechi and Stan Woodward met and became chums. As they grew into their teen years together, their bond grew around a burgeoning love for playing music. Covers of classic rock tunes, dodgy house beats, Arctic Monkeys butchery, maybe even the odd spot of jazz… They mucked about gently finding their feet in the music they loved and gradually settled on rock-inspired jazz. Initially, rather ambitiously, they tried playing everything themselves, but quickly found they’d be best served opening up the lineup. As the lads tell it, they saw a video online of the Jambone youth big band in which a young chap in a Russian hat was killing it on trumpet. They then spent the next few months attempting to track him down. Eventually, they succeeded and were put in touch with Ferg Kilsby. The three now make up the core of Knats with the addition of George Johnson on saxophone and Sandro Shar on keys.

The Knats show at my sad festival was a Show! Capital S and exclamation mark included. The band were on stage for about two hours. I’ve made no secret of my lack of patience for anything lasting longer than about 45 minutes, but here, I was enthralled. Woodward and David-Ike Elechi’s playing is virtuosic, delivered with the confidence and synchronisation only available to people who’ve played their whole lives together all day, every day. The very best of friends. The two are so tight that they’ve pushed through the skill levels, affording themselves the opportunity to play around, improvising and sauntering into epic flights of fancy, flirting with the brink of structural collapse, but never losing sight of the song beneath. They always land with unfathomable precision. Amongst the music, we were treated to all manner of silliness, from dance-offs to Johnson attempting to smoke and play sax at the same time, Woodward being told off by security for lighting a cigarette of his own, David-Ike Elechi running off stage to high-five every single person in the audience, and some top-end Geordie banter soaring high above this Suffolk audience’s straw hats… but of course the music was the driving force that allowed such levity to be indulged.

A Great Day In Newcastle, Knats’ second album, was released in May this year. It is substantially more poised than their live sets. The chaos of the on-stage improvisation is replaced by measured, incredibly tight composition. The playing is still fiery but the soul of the music is in the detail. Here, they’re also joined by mainstay of the Geordie poetry scene Cooper Robson, who’s spoken word elegises the working class history, nightlife, folk tales, and youthful scrapes of their native city. As Robson weaves his word-play through the album, he gives the band’s hometown a vivid voice and a distinct local accent to the music they’re playing.

The album was produced by former Black Midi frontman Geordie Greep, for whose live band David-Ike Elechi also occationally plays drums. In light of recent allegations however, I’ll leave his involvement to a simple production credit.

At this point, I feel I should address the WWII-shaped elephant in the room. What happened to the awesome series on spies and protest songs you ask? I know, you’re terrified I’ve abandoned it. Fret not, I’ll be back with Josephine Baker next week. You may see this article as a light jazzy interlude, but there is actually a tangential connection with Knats: Woodward has spoken at length about finding inspiration in the music of Olivier Messiaen (who we discussed at the beginning of the series), a fascination that has made its way into the band’s approach to compositional structure and underpins the whole album. Using Messiaen’s pioneering modes of limited transposition, they’ve applied a very restrictive and unusual approach to their music. Woodward has discussed such tracks as Wor Jackie and Carpet Doctor making use of Messiaen’s Mode 3, a symmetrical nine-note pitch collection which only allows four transpositions before repeating itself. Played on bass, the effect is a seemingly off-kilter, slightly ethereal vibe which lays wonky terrain off which the rest of the band can bounce joyous pops of colour, riffs, and thrilling trills. If you’re curious to explore this further, other examples of Mode 3 we’ve discussed recently on Noise Melt include Messiaen’s own La bouscarle from his piano cycle Catalogue d’oiseaux, as well as large swathes of John Coltrane’s Giant Steps, which uses a similar nonatonic structure to Messiaen’s Mode 3.

Two more highlights of Messiaen’s magic include my favourite track on the album Azure Blues, a ludicrously tight riot of a tune which sprints around in a whirlwind of a dance in which Woodward has described the Messiaen-esque superimposing of an E-flat minor triad over C major, once again bringing tight classical theory to his bass tomfoolery. Finally, the excellent Messy-In is named for both the composer and a bleary night out on the town.

I especially enjoyed the choice to end the record on a version of Farewell Johnny Miner, a 1960s folk song decrying the increasing mine closures in the North of England. With this, they land beautifully back in the beating heart of the city that formed and informed the band’s unique sound. Knats may channel the punk rock energy of their youth, the compositional experimentation of Messiaen, and the deep legacy of both the New York and London jazz scenes, but their soul remains unmistakably Geordie.

Are Knats the best band in Britain, as my cheap clickbait title suggests? Come on team, you know by now that there’s no such thing. They do however embody everything I value in new music. Their brand of so-called ‘Geordie jazz’ refuses to be homogenised or even categorised. In reality, it’s only nominally jazz, or any other genre for that matter. Like many great bands, they refuse to stick to a formula, instead, poking away at the boundaries until they’ve been re-shaped in their own image, taking from the old and making new things unimagined by others. Knats have absorbed centuries of musical innovation and processed it into something wholly original and hyper-personal. I love it, but that’s not the point. My opinion here is irrelevant. Knats are making the music they want to make, and it’s up to the rest of us to keep up.

And this, my valued subscribers, is why I believe they should be awarded the Mercury Prize this year.

(Although if they give it to Dave or JADE, that’s also fine.)

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I fully intend on keeping the Sunday long-reads entirely free as I want the knowledge, history, stories, and excellent music to travel as far as possible. The research behind each article however requires a lot of time and resources (books, research trips, film rentals, gig tickets, exhibition tickets… etc.), not to mention the countless hours of dyslexically writing and editing myself.

Paid subscriptions help cover those costs and allow me to dedicate more time to producing richer, better-researched articles week after week.

My ambition is to deliver 52 substantial pieces a year as well as the odd bonus. If you reckon this is worth supporting, please sign up for one of the suggested amounts, or enter a custom number.

If on the other hand, you can’t stretch to financial support right now, no worries, Noise Melt will remain free. This isn’t a transaction so much as collective support. Those who can afford it, help keep it accessible for everyone else.

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If you’re already subscribed, I greatly appreciate you. Thank you.

We meet our three heroes huddled in a ditch just outside La Jonquera. As the snow falls deep around them, a faraway church bell is striking midnight, ushering in Christmas Eve 1942. Taking a moment to breathe, they remind themselves they have a long way to go, but they enjoy a second to appreciate the fact they’ve successfully navigated the most treacherous part of the journey, the French-Spanish border crossing. Their next stop, Barcelona is some 160km away. They’ll need a car for that. An anonymous ally known to the history books only as ‘José le Catalan’ was fetching a motor, hence hiding in a ditch in the snow. From there, they’d need to get to Lisbon, then find a crossing to Britain where they intended to officially join Charles de Gaulle and his Free French forces. But one thing at a time, the journey would eventually take them over a month to complete.

Leading the pack was Joseph Kessel, a renowned journalist, novelist, screen-writer, aviator, adventurer, and general bon-vivant. Kessel, born to a Lithuanian Jewish family in Argentina and growing up in Russia, gained French citizenship after volunteering in the artillery and aviation division of the French army during WWI. After the war he became a journalist. His first reporting mission was documenting the rise of Sinn Féin for La Liberté in 1920, aged just 22. During this period he published his first novel L’Équipage, followed by Belle de jour, arguably his most famous fiction outing (later made even more famous by Luis Buñuel’s 1967 film of the same name). He had last been in Spain in 1938, covering the Spanish Civil War for Paris Soir. In 1920, Kessel’s brother Lazare took his own life leaving behind a two-year-old son Maurice.

This kid, Maurice Druon (who had taken the name of his adoptive father René Druon) was the other man huddled in the ditch that Christmas Eve. The young Druon, now 24, had started writing for newspapers when he turned 18 and he’d just staged his first play Mégarée a few months earlier. Kessel and Druon both enlisted in the french army at the outbreak of WWII, but as France fell in 1940, they returned to civilian life. That is until our third member of our little group dragged them back into combat.

Germaine Sablon had been singing and acting since 1915. By the time WWII broke out, she had become one of the most beloved voices in France, producing herself in packed-out cabarets all over the country. Amongst her most popular songs were Qu’aves-vous fait de mon amant ? (on a similar themes to the Piaf song we discussed last week), Içi l’on pêche (with Django Reinhardt) and the sublime Un jeune homme chantait which she recorded with the Russian Cathedral Choir in Paris. She also put out the regrettable Grand voyage du pauvre n****, a nominally anti-slavery tune in which she makes liberal use of the N-word and stereotyped speech. In 1935, she met Kessel and the two began a fiery affair, one of Kessel’s most enduring. Inevitably, the couple’s high profiles attracted the attention of the press who started jokingly calling Kessel “Monsieur Sablon”, much to the consternation of both Kessel and the real M. Sablon, Germaine’s brother who was also a prominent singer in his own right.

If you’ll indulge a short tangent: Sablon (frère) was one of the first French singers to explore the newfangled music drifting across the Atlantic they were calling “jazz”. He was also the first person in France to perform using a microphone on stage. Before spending the war doing quite well in the US, he recorded a lovely album with Django Reinhardt in the mid-1930s. This features the delightful Un amour comme le notre and La petite ile, both duets with his big sister.

Sablon (sœur) joined the resistance effort almost immediately after the fall of France in 1940. She packed up her fabulously jazzy stage costumes and retired to her villa in Saint-Raphaël on the Côte d’Azur (just along the coast from Cannes). Here, she set about making the villa into a safe house for refugees fleeing the country and gun-runners smuggling weapons and intelligence in from Britain, as well as a popular meeting spot for resistance organisers. One of the people she helped to flee France during this time was André Gillois, who we’ll be introducing a little later on. Her fame kept the eye of suspicion averted. For a while anyway. She eventually convinced Kessel to join the effort, and with Kessel came Druon. And so, the three lived in the villa for a while, resisting. I’d love to elaborate but the inherent secrecy of their activities means we don’t really know what exactly they were getting up to.

Now, the Kessel and Druon stories have been written about extensively. Both by the men in question, and by myriad historians since. Far fewer words have been given to Sablon’s experience. Reading between the lines in my research however, I’ve developed a sneaky suspicion that she was much more of a driving force behind this story than we’ve been led to believe. Whilst the lads absolutely played an active part in the resistance, I feel that, as the two professional writers in the group, they’ve been given much more of a voice, a voice which a times risks talking over Sablon’s.

Sablon was undoubtedly driven by her deep-held convictions. For example, whilst Kessel was busy writing the admittedly excellent L'Armée des ombres (the definitive resistance novel) on personal orders from De Gaulle, in the relative safety of London in 1943, Sablon had signed up as a volunteer nurse with the Hadfield-Spears Ambulance Unit.

Sablon’s activities in the resistance resulted in her fleeing to neutral Switzerland in 1941 before leading our trio of heroes to Britain in late 1942. Whilst in Suisse, she recorded two excellent Charles Trenet songs Serenade Portugaise and Pret de toi mon amour. By the time she’d returned, Kessel and Druon were primed for departure. Their affiliation with the resistance and Jewish heritage had put a target on their backs, a target Kessel’s fame prevented him from ignoring. By the time Sablon picked them up, they really had no choice but to flee.

During Nazi occupation, underground networks began linking up all over France. These complex webs of railways, safe-houses, footpaths, roads, and paid off German and French authorities enabled several thousand French people to flee the country. Irrespective of the trail taken, one would inevitably find oneself eventually having to cross the Pyrenees on foot. This part of the journey was incredibly treacherous, as the scrabble through the mountains would typically take place under the cover of night through areas particularly densely populated by border guards. Once in neutral Spain, migrants would be either funnelled through Gibraltar or Lisbon to catch a boat to Britain or later in the war, to Casablanca (like in the film!). Some very lucky individuals would even enjoy an RAF extraction. The Brits welcomed these migrants by donning balaclavas and setting fire to their hotels. I’m kidding, of course. Although I have found a number of Daily Mail articles from that period warning of Nazi sleeper agents posing as asylum seekers to sneak in to Britain. Based on historical evidence, this was pure fabrication.

I have a final anecdote to relate before we move onto the song at the heart of this article, and given what I’ve told you so far, this is a frankly astounding detail of the story. When our fleeing trio eventually made it to Lisbon in January 1943, they were given the opportunity to make the journey to London by seaplane. The only catch, the plane had just two seats. You guessed it, the men gallantly left Sablon alone in Lisbon to fend for herself. She wouldn’t manage to make the crossing for another two weeks.

I’ll leave Kessel and Druon soaring above the Atlantic, and Sablon trudging along the Tagus for a moment as we travel a few years back in time and a few 100 kilometres north to another very different border crossing.

It’s 1918, a Russian aristocrat named Anna Yurievna Betulinskaya is approaching the Russian-Finnish border in her mother’s arms. She’s just turned one. A few days earlier, her father had been executed by the Bolsheviks so her mother had rounded up her two daughters and with a small group of fellow White Russians (the right-wing faction of the Russian Civil War, as opposed to the milky vodka drink), they had started on the long journey from Petrograd to France by cart and on foot. After bribing their way across the Finnish border, they eventually settle in Menton on the French Riviera. Here, Anna grew up enjoying a relatively normal life. She was gifted a guitar for her 13th birthday and she immediately fell in love with it. As luck would have it, another Russian refugee living in France at the time was Sergei Prokofiev (of Peter and the Wolf and Romeo and Juliet fame), who agreed to give her some music lessons. I suspect more has been made of this than actually happened. Prokofiev only ever lived in Paris during his time in France, although he did spend a few months in the South when composing his Piano Concerto No. 5 in 1932, so the two did probably meet and he likely did give her a handful of lessons.

In 1934, young Anna moved to Paris and joined the Ballets Russes as a dancer. Here, she changed her name to Anna Marly and pivoted into composing music and writing lyrics. She enjoyed the distinction of being the youngest female composer to ever register with la SACEM. By the time WWII rolled around, she was a mainstay of Parisian cabarets. It’s likely she unknowingly crossed paths with both Kessel and Sablon during this time. There is no record to suggest they ever met in Paris, but I like to imagine the two singers giggling over a soixante-quinze cocktail, chatting long into the night, manifesting a distant future where every school kid in the country knows their songs. Little did they know how close they were to the truth (in this imagined scenario of mine).

In 1940, Marly and her husband, the Dutch aristocrat Baron van Doorn began the journey to London to escape the invading Nazi forces. They eventually landed in early 1941 and immediately joined De Gaulle’s Free France effort. Marly was put to work in the bomb-clearance squad and in the canteen of the French servicemen's centre in Carlton Gardens.

In 1942, Marly read a news story about the Battle of Smolensk (which had taken place the previous year) in which the Axis powers inflicted huge casualties on Soviet civilians. Whilst she’d never been back home since leaving aged one, she felt deeply moved by the event and was so overcome with the bravery of the Soviet partisans giving their lives to save their country, that she wrote a song in their honour. She would call her song The March of the Partisans (Марш партизан / marsh partizan), but the Brits to whom she initially sang it would call it Guerilla Song. Having grown up in a Russian community in France, Marly was deeply aware of the long-standing tradition of Russian marching songs, a tradition in which this tune follows.

One of the tunes to which Guerilla Song is often compared is Through Valleys and Over Hills, the turn-of-the-century revolutionary Russian march. The story of this song is too fascinating and important to skim over, but also too long to include here so I’ll resist the pull of the tangent and give it to you as a stand-alone article in a few weeks. As a teaser: get ready for both the Red and White armies, French Anarchists, Vanessa Paradis, Kurdish resistance, the Nakba in Palestine, Ukrainian folk music, and more exceptional moustaches than one can reasonably fit into one article…

Back in London, Marly used to sing songs to the soldiers as she served their food. One night in early 1943, she was singing it to her friend Luba Krassine, when her friend’s husband overheard. A high-ranking resistance leader, the husband was Emmanuel d’Astier de la Vigerie, then mononymously known as Bernard. Bernard had been toying with the idea of creating an anthem for the resistance movement, something to bond the disparate networks, create unity amongst the fighters, and offer a symbol to be recognised across the maquis. When he heard Marly sing her new partisan song he knew that was it, its marching rhythm, the mournful vocals which crescendo to a full-throated chant of rebellion and assertion of belonging. This was the song he’d been looking for. There was one small problem though. It was in Russian. Not to worry, he knew just the guy. The next evening, he introduced Marly to his friends Kessel and Druon. As a native Russian speaker, Kessel was able to translate the lyrics and re-write them to suit the French resistance cause with help from Druon who was a very skilled lyricist (in fact he’d written a couple of songs for Sablon, not least Le galérien, Château Bleu and Tant pis… tant mieux inspired by their time in the South of France). On 30th May 1943, they sat down and in no time, they had written Le Chant des Partisans! Sablon was definitely present at the writing session as she took notes, but she’s often been written out of the encounter. If she is mentioned, it’s essentially as little more than a secretary. Knowing Sablon as we do however, I find it hard to imagine she didn’t contribute at least some thoughts to the lyrics.

One little detail that appeals to my inner-birder: The opening line of the song was apparently originally going to be “Ami entend-tu le cri sourd du hibou sur nos plaines?” (Friends, can you hear the owl’s muffled cry over our plains?), but deciding the owl was far too beautiful and majestic to represent the Nazis, they changed it to the “black flight of the crow” we know today.

The next day, Sablon performed the new song for a propaganda film entitled Three Songs of Resistance by Alberto Cavalcanti who had previously directed her in his films Le Truc du Brésilien and Plaisirs défendus. The other two tunes in the film were Marly’s Paris est á Nous (Paris is ours), also performed by Sablon, and La Marseillaise performed by renowned operatic tenor Georges Thill. This would be the new song’s first ever performance. For a while, the song was released anonymously as Bernard wanted it to feel as though it had emerged naturally from the maquis. It very quickly became ubiquitous. Part of the reason for the song’s rapid ubiquity was that many people were already familiar with the tune, long before it gained its French lyrics: André Gillois, a resistance fighter who hosted a radio show, Honneur et Patrie, on the BBC’s Radio Londres realised that gently whistled songs went undetected by German radio jammers. He asked his friend Anna Marly if she had anything he might use as theme music. Thenceforth, he used a recording of the first few bars of the song to signal coded messages for the resistance fighters over the Channel. On a fun note, the whistlers he recorded were apparently Marly, Druon, Bernard, himself, and another resistance operative called Claude Dauphin.

After the war and the liberation of France, Le chant des partisans became an unofficial national anthem. It was even briefly put forward to replace La Marseillaise, albeit unsuccessfully. I grew up in the southern foothills of the Vercors, a mountain range in the French Prealps. As a resistance stronghold, indeed a thriving maquis habitat (the mountainous shrubland that gave its name to the Maquisards, the resistance fighter on the ground in France), we were brought up to be exceedingly proud of our region. The French education system’s general proclivity for glossing over Vichy and our intense regional pride meant we were taught Le chant des partisans from a very young age. Whilst the context of the song’s origins flew over my head at the time, its lyrics and energy hit straight to the core of whichever rebellious cause I was undertaking at the time. The marching cadence latches onto some subconscious visceral rhythm innate to us all. The melodic intensity of each crescendoing phrase ramping up the energy. After just four lines, the “Ohé” bellowed around the classroom made me feel excited for the possibilities. I could well imagine fighters standing in the mist on the Vercors rocks and ravines I knew so well, signalling their allegiances across the valleys. Warning of the black crow of Fascism. Calling comrades from the mines and the hills. Retrieving smuggled weapons from their hiding places. Tonight, our enemies will know the price of tears and blood. Killers, kill fast. Saboteurs be careful with your dynamite. Together, we resist!

So what of our four heroes after the war?

Druon went on to become one of the world’s most well-regarded historical fiction writers with his series The Accursed Kings. George R.R. Martin has credited him with being the main inspiration behind the A Song of Ice and Fire series, and once famously called him “France's best historical novelist since Alexandre Dumas”. Druon was eventually elected as chair of the Académie Française where he exacted his increasingly conservative cultural values. He also served as Minister for Cultural Affairs in Pierre Messmer’s right-wing Gaullist government. He eventually passed aged 90 in 2009.

Kessel continued his high-energy lifestyle getting into scrapes all over Europe. As a journalist, he gave one of the best accounts of Marshal Pétain’s treason trial. It was his adventures beyond Europe however, that pushed him into questionable legacy territory. The day after the state of Israel was founded, he chartered a flight to Palestine to report on the historic event. This gave him the dubious distinction of holding the first ever visa issued by Israel. There are quibbles over whether it was an official visa or not, but they’re not that interesting. The point is that this journey pushed an already simmering Zionism to boil over in Kessel. From that point onwards, he became one of France’s most prominent proponents of the Israeli cause. His further travels to Kenya and Afghanistan yielded two of his most famous novels, respectively Le Lion, and Les Cavaliers. The characters in both these books are overblown exoticised caricatures of Massai and Afghan people respectively. Both are taught in schools still today. Kessel passed in 1979, aged 81.

Marly continued writing and performing. Along with Bernard, she wrote another more mournful partisan song called La complainte du Partisan. This tune would be picked up by Hy Zaret, the famous Tin Pan Alley lyricist who gave us Unchained Melody. He wrote the English lyrics and renamed the song The partisan. The most famous interpretation of this song would be Leonard Cohen’s 1969 take on it, from his album Songs From a Room. My favourites however, are Electrelane’s from their 2005 album Axes, and Buffy Sainte-Marie’s from her 1971 record She Used To Wanna Be a Ballerina. Marly also wrote Une chanson a trois temps for Edith Piaf. She eventually moved to Pennsylvania and then Alaska so as to reconnect with nature and be closer to the motherland. She passed in 2006, aged 88.

In another pleasingly serendipitous twist of history, Joan Baez covered The partisan in her 1972 album Come From the Shadows. She had become a close friend of Bernard’s family, in particular his wife Luba Krassine (daughter of the Bolshevik revolutionary leader Leonid Krasin). Baez wrote her tune Luba the Baroness in her honour.

Finally, Sablon returned to the limelight, performing and recording another 30-odd tunes before her passing in 1985, aged 85. Before the end of the war however, she deployed to North Africa as a military nurse. Partly as she was keen to continue serving, partly to be reunited with her two sons, one of whom had recently been injured. Here she made an especially nice recording of Je n’en connais pas la fin. Upon her return to Paris, she found a bitter and sulking Kessel who never forgave her for choosing her sons over him. Their relationship wouldn’t survive. She spent her final years touring Europe as well as both North and South America with her brother. Her efforts as a nurse during the war earned her a Croix de guerre and the Médaille de la Résistance, as well as being made a Chevalier de la Legion d’Honneur making her one of the most decorated singers in French history. Who is the most decorated you ask? We’ll get to that…

Hundreds of artists have covered, sampled, and adapted Le chant des partisans over the years. I’ll spare you an in-depth list as they all end up blurring into each other a little. I will however highlight a few which stand out either for their significance or just because I like them. I’ll also add a few more to the playlist for you.

The definitive version of the song was recorded by French-Italian actor Yves Montand for his 1955 album Chansons Populaires de France (the 1959 reissue is a strong contender for one of the all-time great album sleeves, I’ll let you google it.) The recording you’ll want however, is from his live album Olympia 1974, the pin-drop silence in the room as he commands the material with staggering gravitas is extraordinary. You may know Montand as the first person (along with Irène Joachim) to ever perform the Jacques Prévert poem Les feuilles mortes which eventually became the globally famous jazz standard Autumn Leaves. Funnily enough, he is also often credited as the first to have recorded it, but he was actually pipped to the post by Jean Sablon!

One of the most common political march chants in France (across the whole ideological spectrum) is the simple “Motivés ! Motivés !” echoed back and forth and around processions, I remember also shouting it as a kid on sports day and during long bus journeys. The chant’s origins lie in Le chant des partisans however. In 2001, Toulousain pop band Zebda (who we discussed back in August) founded a political movement called Motivé-e-s. They campaigned around a leftist message, predominantly championing participatory democracy. They brought home 12,49% of the vote at the 2001 municipal elections in Toulouse, ultimately losing to the center-right UDF. Like any movement worth its salt, they created an anthem for themselves. This was essentially a cover of Le chant des partisans with the “Motivés ! Motivés !” chant laced into it. The chant has since become a ubiquitous part of French protests.

If you’re reading a Noise Melt article about French music, you’re never too far away from the film La Haine. Indeed, a 2024 musical stage adaptation of the film made excellent use of a sinister hip-hop remix of the tune by Proof.

Finally, a shout-out to Johnny Hallyday’s surprisingly good take on the tune. He made it into a wonderfully eerie spoken word piece, and it works superbly well!

You’d almost think I did this on purpose, but the song with which I’m releasing you into the world is the perfect culmination of the past few months on Noise Melt. You’ll no doubt recall the importance of the punk band Bérurier Noir in the struggle against the French far-right. Back in 1985, they gave the movement one of its most enduring slogans “La jeunesse emmerde le Front national!” lifted from their song Porcherie. In 2006, Loran, one of the band’s founding members headed off to form Les Ramoneurs de Menhirs, a Breton Celtic punk band. In 2017, they released one of their finest albums, Breizh Anok which features a splendid cover of Porcherie. This version differs from the original however as it leads into an instrumental take on Le chant des partisans. And if that wasn’t enough, the melody is played by Bagad Bro Kemperle a Breton pipe band!

Next time, on Noise Melt: we’re spending one last week in 1940s France to hear the story of the nation’s greatest hero. The most decorated entertainer in French history. An entertainer who sang Le chant des partisans throughout their career.

It’s November 30th 2021, the French Army Choir is lined up outside the Panthéon in Paris. They’re singing Le chant des partisans. A symbolic coffin is making its solemn way towards the monument’s hallowed necropolis, the single most prestigious burial site in the whole country. Amongst the 70-odd national heroes interred there can be found such household names as Victor Hugo, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire, Émile Zola, Simone Veil, and Marie Curie. Today, they will be joined by the first black woman to ever be honoured at the Panthéon. The war hero we’ll be discussing next week is of course Josephine Baker.

Further Resources!

Books

• L’armée des ombres (1943), Joseph Kessel

• Un amour de Kessel (2020), Dominique Missika

• Les Partisans: Kessel et Druon, une histoire de famille (2023), Dominique Bona

Films

• Three Songs of Resistance (1944), Alberto Cavalcanti

Podcasts

• Les Grandes Traversées - series: Joseph Kessel, sans frontières

• Tour de chant - series: La voix d’or de Germaine Sablon

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It was the most humiliating moment of Léon Noël’s life. Beyond that he realised, it might be the most humiliating moment in French history. He was the only civilian in the static train carriage, there in his capacity as a veteran diplomat and former ambassador to Poland, representing the Minister of Foreign Affairs. Noël was fuming. The Germans had brought them here out of petty spite. Adolf Hitler had personally selected this carriage in the Compiègne Forest as it was the very place in which the First World War armistice had been signed, 24 years earlier. Or perhaps more importantly, it was where German surrender had been officially accepted.

Sat in the carriage, Noël reflected on the whirlwind events of the past nine days. Last Friday, the advancing German forces had finally outflanked the defensive ‘Maginot Line’ and marched Paris unopposed. Seeing the writing on the wall, Prime Minister Paul Reynaud had resigned on Sunday, recommending that President Albert Lebrun appoint Marshal Philippe Pétain to lead the country. Pétain had proven himself as an unflappable leader in WWI, in particular during the Battle of Verdun. Monday saw Pétain, in his first move as leader, announce his intention to surrender and cease fighting. After hearing this radio broadcast, a relatively unknown former brigadier general and tank commander by the name Charles de Gaulle fled to London in an attempt to seek support from the British against the Germans and his new national leader. On Tuesday, as French and German commanders met to negotiate an end to hostilities, De Gaulle addressed the nation via a radio broadcast of his own, warning of the dangers of collaboration and calling for resistance to the Nazis. In the subsequent couple of days, reports of small resistance groups started springing up. On Friday, Noël and his colleagues had gathered in Compiègne to start negotiations. They were welcomed in person by a very smug Hitler who had found the time to say a few words before leaving, making it very clear to everyone present that this was all beneath him.

Now, Noël looked over the proposed armistice. He voiced his objections to the terms laid out in front of him. He pointed to clause XIX which he interpreted as a violation of international law. He expressed his concerns that the Germans would illegally annex the Alsace and Lorraine regions. He even decried the manner in which the armistice was forced on France without any actual diplomatic negotiation. But he knew as well as everyone else in the carriage that none of this mattered. He had no leverage. France had no leverage. And so, at 18:36 on 22nd June 1940, the armistice was signed and the Nazis took control of the north and entire Atlantic coast of France, roughly two thirds of the country. The small remaining southern section, would be run by an independent, albeit collaborationist government led by Pétain from the small central spa-town of Vichy, thus the ‘Vichy Regime’. Noël pointedly refused to initial the document, but his boycott made little difference.

Three days later, the Nazis destroyed the Compiègne Forest site and took the train carriage back to Berlin as a trophy of war. In gratitude for his work, Pétain appointed Noël as one of the seven officials designated to take over governance if he were to die. Noël had other ideas however. Disgusted by the direction the country was taking, he resigned on 19th July, before penning an incendiary warning to French business owners reminding them that the armistice was a cease-fire, not peace. Showing his commitment to overturning recent events, he wrote that any businesses found to have collaborated with the Third Reich would, after the war, be duly punished by anti-treason laws.

De Gaulle’s now famous Appeal of June 18 actually wasn’t heard by many people at all. In addition to this, the BBC, who broadcast the speech, failed to record it, meaning that very few people actually have any idea what was said on one of the most famous speeches in French history. Due to this, De Gaulle was forced to return on the 22nd to repeat the speech. This time, it was widely promoted, and recorded so we know what he said as did the vast swathes of the population that heard it. This marked the beginnings of what would eventually coalesce into a coherent resistance effort. On 28th June, the British officially recognised De Gaulle as the leader of a third French entity dubbed ‘Free France’. Initially only conceptual, and based in London, Free France eventually gained a territorial base as French colonies started aligning themselves with the movement. First Cameroon, Chad, and Congo, then in 1943, Algeria, at which point the operation moved its headquarters from London to Algiers.

Shortly after the armistice, back in Vichy France, the French parliament voted to grant Pétain emergency absolute powers. He used this newfound latitude to dismantle the Third Republic and build an autocratic regime around his own warped values. I’ve touched on Pétain’s regime in previous articles, but to bring you back up to speed: He was a virulent antisemite who’s state-sponsored persecution of Jews went above and beyond the Nazis’ mandate. In the four years he was in power, Pétain oversaw the deportation of an estimated 75,000 Jews to Nazi death camps. In addition to this, he restructured French society in his image, quite literally, launching a cult of personality around himself. He changed the country’s beloved motto of ‘Liberté, égalité, fraternité’ to ‘Travail, famille, patrie’ (Work, family, fatherland). He also outlawed free speech, unions, Communism and suppressed the national anthem La Marseillaise. I bet you were wondering when I’d finally bring some music into this, weren’t you! Well here we are, at last.

During these four years, the increasing despondence felt throughout the nation began seeping into the music still being produced. This is evidenced by the somber tone found in many of the more famous tracks written during this time. In a more explicit example, Édith Piaf wrote and recorded Où sont-ils mes petits copains? Chanting along to a martial rhythm, she decries the human loss of war as she asks where all her young male friends have gone. Smiling and singing, they all went off to fight, but now they’re nowhere to be seen. During a particularly famous show in 1942, German soldiers ordered her to stop singing the song after she draped herself in a French flag. Orders she defiantly ignored. As a treasured national hero, Piaf’s involvement in the war has been overstated in every direction. It would seem she did quietly help out a few Jewish friends by funding their escapes into the unoccupied zone; but generally, she just carried on singing and performing as normal. Her career was helped by the fact she was incredibly popular in Nazi circles which also allowed her more freedom in her lyrics and movements than many of her peers. The furthest she ever took this was with the excellent 1936 song Il n’est pas distingué. Originally recorded in 1934 by Fréhel, this is a hilarious heavily slang-laden caricature of an unrefined Parisian urchin called Zidor who finds himself being quizzed for his opinion by a number of aristocrats. In the final verse, Zidor gives his assessment of Hitler, reminding his interlocutors he was on the losing side in WWI: “Hitler gets up my noses // I really can’t stand him. // The Nazis seem to have forgotten // That it’s us, who in the last fight, destroyed them.” Written before the war started, it seems this tune was phased out of Piaf’s live repertoire, although there is one story of her friend Pierre Hiegel accidentally playing it on his German-controlled Radio Paris show. Much to the consternation of the station’s German owners.

In 1940, Django Reinhardt, then based in Paris, wrote the very first version of Nuages, a song which would become both one of his most re-worked, and most popular. In contrast to a vast majority of his compositions, Nuages adopts a markedly sombre tone, reflecting the general sentiment of life under occupation. Reinhardt was another musician who’s popularity amongst Nazi troops afforded him some freedom, this was especially surprising as he was both Romani and a jazz musician (famously declared “degenerate music” by Hitler. One of his biggest fans was Dietrich Schulz-Köhn, a Nazi luftwaffe commander who’s proclivity for music earned him the nickname ‘Doktor Jazz’. Dr. Jazz became a patron of Reinhardt’s helping him play shows in Paris and once signing the release papers after he and his family had been captured by Nazi officers. The first two recordings of Nuages, both made in 1940, reflect Reinhardt’s shifting mood. The first take’s frenetic energy and pleasingly disjointed structure belie the much richer depth and a beautifully haunting atmosphere he had landed on by December for the second recording.

Arguably the most accomplished piece of music to come from France in this period is Olivier Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du temps (quartet for the end of time). Messiaen joined the army as a medical auxiliary in 1940, he was promptly captured and sent to the German prisoner-of-war camp, Stalag VIII-A. Here he met clarinettist Henri Akoka, violinist Jean le Boulaire, and cellist Étienne Pasquier. After convincing a sympathetic guard to give him some paper and a small pencil, he set about writing a trio for his new friends. The piece would become Intermède in the broader composition Quatuor pour la fin du temps to which he added a piano for himself. The four musicians premiered the quartet in the stalag in 1941 in front of what Messiaen claimed to be 5,000 enthralled fans, but was more likely 400-odd fellow prisoners with nothing else to do. Later in life, Akoka was quoted as saying the quartet was “the only memory of the war that I wish to keep”. For your best listening experience, I recommend the 1990 recording, overseen by Messiaen himself. The ensemble for this one was made up of world-leading Messiaen expert (and also his wife) Yvonne Loriod on piano, Wolfgang Meyer on clarinet, Christoph Poppen on violin, and Manuel Fischer-Dieskau on cello. It beautifully captures the deep spirituality Messiaen brought to his writing.

In spite of his respected status as a popular composer, Messiaen found himself snubbed by the Vichy régime after his release. His music was a little too modernist for the newly minted ‘Fine Arts Committee’ who had started commissioning new music which aligned with Pétain’s conservative values. One such tune was Maréchal, nous voilà !, a tune which was promoted as a new national anthem for Vichy-led France.

Maréchal, nous voilà ! was credited to André Montagard and Charles Courtioux, written in 1941. Montagard saw a competition in the paper calling for lyrics to a new anthem glorifying Pétain. According to the landlord at his local bar, Montagard, who was rather partial to quickly spending any money he had on pastis, was especially motivated by the financial reward. The lyrics he came up with are nauseating to say the least “Marshal, here we are // before you, the saviour of France…” and so on and so forth. I’d point you to Montagard’s other hits for a more palatable flavour of French patriotism, in particular Un pastis bien frais (a nice cold pastis), and his ode to France’s national sport, Une partie de pétanque which was later made famous by renowned Anarchist Georges Brassens.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, it later transpired that Maréchal, nous voilà ! had been plagiarised. The great irony however, is that it was stolen from Margoton du bataillon by Casimir Oberfeld, a French-Polish Jew. The theft was fairly quickly identified by la SACEM (the French artist royalties people) but to no avail as Oberfeld’s membership had been suspended due to his heritage. He would die during a death march in Auschwitz in 1945.

In spite of having been more or less banned, La Marseillaise quickly became a symbol of resistance. underground fighters would hum, whistle, or even sing it to each other as a sign of solidarity. Lines like “Grab your weapons, citizens! // Form your battalions! // Let us march! Let us march!” took on fresh meaning as they were muttered by organising troops. The newfound political weight of La Marseillaise is perhaps best exemplified in Michael Curtiz’s 1943 film Casablanca. You’ll no doubt remember the iconic scene in which Czech resistance leader Victor Laszlo leads the café’s house band in a rendition of La Marseillaise in order to drown out a group of German officers singing Die Wacht am Rhein. Gripped by patriotic fervour, the crowd erupts in cheers and cries of “Vive la France!” This scene is especially poignant as many of the extras seen crying are in fact actual refugees who had been forced to flee their homes under Nazi occupation. To them, La Marseillaise represented resistance and the hope of freedom from oppressive forces, both on screen and in reality.

It was another tune however that would truly unify the French resistance and serve as their anthem, soundtracking their fight, and leading them to eventual liberation. And that’s where we’ll pick back up next week with the story of Le chant des partisans!

I know I promised you spies and sinners etc. but in classic Noise Melt fashion, I realised there’s loads of context to lay out before I get to the music. See this perhaps as a prologue more than a part one. An appetite whetter if you will. Next week, we’ll look at one of the most effective protest songs in European history. From there, we’ll take a series of journeys into the lives of a handful of musicians who participated more actively in the war effort. Throughout this series, I’ll be turning my pen to what happens when artists and their art collide with the unstoppable forces of war. And of course, we’ll be listening to some fabulous music along the way!

Further Resources!

Films

• Casablanca (1943), Michael Curtiz

• 1940, les secrets de l’armistice (2019), Emmanuel Amara

Books

• To Lose a Battle: France 1940 (1969), Alistair Horne

• For the End of Time: The Story of the Messiaen Quartet (2003), Rebecca Rischin

• The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (2007), Alex Ross

• Édith Piaf: A Cultural History (2015), David Looseley

• France on Trial: The Case of Marshal Pétain (2024), Julian Jackson

• Quartet for the End of Time: On Music, Grief & Birdsong (2025), Michael Symmons Roberts

Please support my work!

If you enjoy my writing, please subscribe for free.

If you can spare a few quid, please subscribe for a small monthly donation.

If you think anyone else would like it, please share it far and wide.

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I fully intend on keeping the Sunday long-reads entirely free as I want the knowledge, history, stories, and excellent music to travel as far as possible. The research behind each article however requires a lot of time and resources (books, research trips, film rentals, gig tickets, exhibition tickets… etc.), not to mention the countless hours of dyslexically writing and editing myself.

Paid subscriptions help cover those costs and allow me to dedicate more time to producing richer, better-researched articles week after week.

My ambition is to deliver 52 substantial pieces a year as well as the odd bonus. If you reckon this is worth supporting, please sign up for one of the suggested amounts, or enter a custom number.

If on the other hand, you can’t stretch to financial support right now, no worries, Noise Melt will remain free. This isn’t a transaction so much as collective support. Those who can afford it, help keep it accessible for everyone else.

Subscribe now

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Well now I am actually going to take that stroll! I’ve been working on a massive five-part (maybe even six-part) series on the music of the Second World War. I know, thrilling! But it’s not quite ready yet, so while we wait, here are a few of my favourite things that John Coltrane released. You’ll no doubt be aware that we celebrated his centenary this week, so I’ve been revisiting a load of his music, and I’m happy to report he’s still brilliant! These are in no particular order and there’s no grand narrative. This is just a personal collection of the records of his with which I have the deepest relationships. Share your favourites and any thoughts in the comments if you fancy. Enjoy!

John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman – John Coltrane & Johnny Hartman

Despite both having been in Dizzy Gillespie’s band, John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman had never formally met as their time there never overlapped.

It’s rumoured Coltrane saw Hartman singing with Gillespie and requested they record together. Hartman was initially unsure but after seeing Coltrane play at New York’s Birdland, the two met and bonded. He was convinced, and they put together this soaring masterclass of sheer effortless class and smoky soul.

With help from McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison, and Elvin Jones, the album was released in 1963.

This record is both one of the first jazz albums I enjoyed, and one of my all-time favourite records in any genre. Over the years, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what makes this album so compelling. And in all honesty, I’m still not sure, but I think its beauty perhaps lies in the seemingly aloof ease of the music which belies the tension at the heart of the performance. On the one hand Johnny Hartman, like most singers, is a natural frontman, taking up space with his natural charisma, charm and peerless vocal performance. On the other hand, John Coltrane is one of the greatest saxophonists of all time, and he knows it, typically taking centre-stage on his records (and often others’ records too). Yet both uncharacteristically make space for the other here, each stepping in and out of the spotlight as the music requires, creating an otherworldly sense of unity in their performance. This unique cohesion is truly spellbinding.

Ballads - John Coltrane Quartet

If a great chef can be judged by their French omelette, so, a great jazz musician can be judged by their ballads.

Often seen (rightly or not) as the basic end of the jazz canon, ballads have long been maligned as uninteresting and overly simple tunes. It was therefore surprising that in 1963, John Coltrane decided to release not just an album with a ballad featured, but an entire album of just ballads; he even called it ‘Ballads’ to avoid any confusion. Bearing in mind that by this point, he was already six years and 20ish records into his career. He’d already released some of his defining music such as Blue Train, Africa/Brass, and Giant Steps… so, what was he playing at?

Coltrane had correctly identified that the purest demonstration of skill is in restraint and the ability to nail simplicity. He had already reinvented bebop, pioneered free jazz, cut his teeth in swing, and displayed beyond any doubt that he could imbue even the most complex of sax lines with deep emotion. So what next? Ballads is what’s next!

It’s also worth noting his label of the time Impulse! would likely have welcomed some more approachable and crowd-pleasing music to bring in a few more sales…

In 1961, Coltrane nipped to a local music store and bought a bunch of commercially available sheet music, and invited his band (McCoy Tyner, Elvin Jones, and Jimmy Garrison) to the studio. Together, they spent a short while going through the music, annotating, tweaking, re-arranging, and generally improving on what was written down. They then gave over about half an hour to rehearsing and promptly smashed every single tune in a single take! Reggie Workman also played bass on one track.

Unsurprisingly, this is an extraordinary album. Swerving the easy cheese available to ballad interpretations, Coltrane and co. offer an effortlessly cool, laid-back, and absolutely masterful take on a bunch of tunes you’ve heard a million times before. But I promise, you’ve never heard them sounding this serious.

Ballads often finds itself at the bottom end of the myriad “Coltrane Albums Ranked” lists I’ve been seeing this week. An instant red flag for me. To underestimate Ballads, is to underestimate John Coltrane. And nobody wants to be caught doing that!

Ascension – John Coltrane

The title Ascension may well be referring to Coltrane’s elevation from versatile classic jazz sax stalwart, to supreme being of free jazz experimentation. Indeed, this record marks the significant shift in Coltrane’s style. It can be considered the ascension from his early career to latter sound.

Ascension was Coltrane’s 11th record for Impulse! And something like his 36th album altogether. It features a dazzling roster of jazz mavericks: Freddie Hubbard and Dewey Johnson on trumpet; Marion Brown, Pharoah Sanders, Archie Shepp, and John Tchicai accompanied Coltrane on various saxophones; McCoy Tyner on piano; Art Davis and Jimmy Garrison shared bass duties, whilst Elvin Jones held it down on drums.

There are actually two versions of this record, both released in 1966. On the day, Coltrane handed out a few notes to the musicians and played the main line for them, adding a few thoughts about loose structure, then they just played. They recorded two high-energy extremely arduous 40-minute takes. These would be the two versions. Solo orders altered slightly between takes.

Confusingly, the second take was released as Edition I, but a few months after its release, Coltrane decided he preferred the first take, so it was released as Edition II. The latter is the more widely available version.

The tune is an extraordinary otherworldly masterpiece showing off some of jazz’s most skilled improvisers bouncing off each other, creating sounds and energies no single human could conceive of alone. Marion Brown said it “had that kind of thing in them that makes people scream.” Joe Tchicai described it as “very African! Our Ancestors were definitely among us more than usual!” and that, during the session “ecstasy and excitement were the prime movers.” Elvin Jones marked the end of the session by thowing his snare drum at the wall.

In my personal Coltrane journey, Ascension came at a perfect time. Over the years, I’ve fluctuated wildly from just smashing copious quantities of route-one pop garbage into my face, to seeking out the most abrasive noises a greasy-haired basement-dweller has had the audacity to call music. Ascension landed on my decks during one of the latter periods and it really did focus the mind. Amidst the extreme blasts of Merzbow’s Venerology and the self-flagellating distress of Throbbing Gristle’s Journey Through a Body (gosh, I must have been a laugh back then), my frazzled brain somehow made space for what then appeared, in comparison, to be a record of airy dinner jazz. One can never tell with these things, but I suspect that if it had been any other jazz-adjacent album, I would have swiftly moved on, but not with Ascension. Ascension dragged me in. I distinctly remember Jones’ chaotic drums rising up from their place relatively low in the mix to grab me by the collar and refusing to let go. Tyner’s piano, possibly the tamest aspect of the recording, liberally splashes jabs and splotches of colour around the canvas as the fiery solos I now know to be Hubbard’s and Sanders’ hit me with the violence of noise music but with the addition of an underlying tenderness. Finally, before the grand finale blowout (with the snare drum still just about on its stand), everybody steps back leaving the floor to Jones and the double-bass double of Davis and Garrison bowing and plucking an exquisite tapestry of rhythm, the growing tension of which ushers in the last four minutes of improvisation from everyone together. Ascension has been a favourite ever since.

A Love Supreme - John Coltrane

I never saw John Coltrane live. In fairness, he passed 27 years before I was born so the chances were pretty slim. The closest I’ve come therefore, was an exceptional tribute to his album A Love Supreme staged by Shabaka at Hackney’s St. John Church in December 2023. The gig was billed as Shabaka’s last performance on the tenor saxophone before an indefinite hiatus. He’s since been experimenting with a variety of flutes and other woodwinds.

On the day, Shabaka had replaced Coltrane’s Quartet (Jones, Tyner, Garrison) with an extraordinary octet of his own. Dave Okumu on guitar, Tom Herbert and Neil Charles on bass, and four drummers: Moses Boyd, Jas Kayser, and his Sons of Kemet bandmates Tom Skinner and Edward Wakili-Hick.

The show was an extraordinary re-interpretation of a foundational masterpiece. Shabaka lifted A Love Supreme’s core theme and ran with it. Sprinted, galavanted, and frolicked with it. Having a six-person rhythm section gave the performance an unprecedented earthy energy, grounding it with deep plunging roots, and allowing Shabaka to soar, untethered, alternating his saxophone with a piccolo. Amongst the earnest tribute and sad reality we may never see Shabaka playing sax again, there was a real playfulness to be found. The giddy excitement of everyone on stage was laced through the music, giving it irresistible momentum and charm.

Released in 1965, Coltrane’s A Love Supreme is a single composition in four movements, marking a move to more ambitious compositional suites, rather than individual tunes. Here, Coltrane is taking his first substantial steps into the transcendental spiritual sound that would mark his later career. This is often cited as Coltrane’s best work, and has been the subject of thousands of words of analysis by far smarter people than me, so I’ll leave it there. I included it on this list partly because it’s superb, but also to show how incredibly malleable Coltrane’s music can be.

Africa/Brass – The John Coltrane Quartet

Africa/Brass, recorded and released in 1961 was John Coltrane’s first of an eventual 14 albums released on Impulse! Records (that’s without counting a further 13 posthumous releases!) It was only Impulse!’s sixth full length release, as Coltrane’s incredibly lucrative contract was the very first one they signed. When ABC set up Impulse! In 1960, they already saw huge things for the new imprint, and Coltrane’s magic touch was a key part of their vision. Label boss Creed Taylor actually bought out Coltrane’s old Atlantic contract so as to get him on Impulse! as fast as possible.

To celebrate this new chapter in his career, Coltrane decided to assemble a massive band for his next release. His usual quartet (Tyner, Jones, and the newly joined Reggie Workman) formed the basis for the sessions while Coltrane recruited a further 14 musicians to collaborate across two sessions.

This was Coltrane’s first time leading such a large band. Predominantly made up of extra brass instruments, including French horn and euphonium amongst others, the result is the closest John Coltrane ever came to big band jazz, whilst keeping his signature controlled chaos running throughout. Africa/Brass sits at the approachable end of Coltrane’s more experimental work. It brings an innovative approach to the big band sound, marching along, making full boisterous use of the brass section whilst the Quartet sit alongside, ducking and weaving, improving and colouring in the gaps as they go; and of course, Coltrane soars over the lot, as enchanting and blissful as ever.

For me, this is also a superb example of Elvin Jones’ drumming. Jones served as the backbone to some of Coltrane’s finest work, but Africa/Brass perhaps shows him off with the best clarity. Jones’ supreme artistry can be broken down into three exceptional skills, all on display here. Firstly, he had an iron grip on tempo. If you listen to Dear John C., his 1965 tribute to Coltrane, you’ll find a restrained Jones laying the time foundation for the musicians to work with. On records like Ascension, his rock-solid time keeping serves as fuel to the improvisational chaos around him. Secondly, his tight grip on tempo allowed him to play around with it. Jones was forever purposefully lagging or speeding, a secret weapon which gave incredible depth and character to the rhythm section his recordings. Check out the Coltrane tune India for a superb example of this skill (the version from the 1961 Live at the Village Vanguard show. I think it was included on his 1963 album Impressions). Finally, Jones’ defining ability was in his signature cascading drumming technique. He was able to conjure huge nuanced textural tapestries, mixing cymbal washes with rolls and snare reverberations, creating a lush, ever-evolving bed in which the saxophone can revel. For an example of this, I bring you my favourite Jones tune, and one of the best displays of jazz drumming anywhere: Afro-Blue from Coltrane’s 1963 Live at Birdland.

At Carnegie Hall - Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane

Between 1955 and 1957, Coltrane enjoyed his first taste of national prominence as a member of Miles Davis’ so-called First Great Quintet (alongside Red Garland, Paul Chambers, and Philly Joe Jones). During this period, he played on four records (including the exceptional ‘Round About Midnight and Relaxin’). In 1957, he was fired from the band for excessive heroin and alcohol abuse. He successfully cleaned up his act, released Blue Train (no less!), and was invited back into Davis’ band in 1959, just in time to take part in the Kind of Blue sessions. Kind of Blue was released in 1959, the same year as Giant Steps.

It was very tempting to include a Davis record in this article, I likely would have gone with Milestones. The interplay between Coltrane on tenor and Cannonball Adderley on alto, the perfect blend of last week’s bebop and next month’s modal experiments, that awesome version of Thelonious Monk’s Straight, No Chaser… But in the end, I wanted to shout about this unsung albeit crucial period in Coltrane’s career instead.

After being fired from Davis’ band and successfully weaning himself off the rock, Coltrane found himself free and ready to collaborate. The timing was fortuitous as it coincided with another jazz legend returning from down time too.

In 1951, Thelonious Monk was arrested on a narcotics charge, and, after refusing to testify against a friend, lost his cabaret card. This meant he was banned from performing in any New York clubs for six years. By 1957, he had just had his card restored and was looking to do something big, and indeed he did two big things! The first was to release the era-defining Brilliant Corners. The second was to accept a six-month residency at Five Spot Café. He invited Coltrane to join him on the residency alongside Wilbur Ware and Shadow Wilson. Over the next six months, the two players developed a telekinetic musical bond. Monk spent hours every day patiently guiding Coltrane through complex harmonic navigation, explaining dissonant chord changes, and generally improving both their practice until they reached a genuinely astonishing mind-meld level of complicity. Both Coltrane and Monk later credited this short period of their careers as turning points in their respective sounds.

A handful of albums bear witness to the pair’s exceptional skill together, but for me, the pinnacle came with the live recording they made at Carnegie Hall in 1957. The two sets they played that night were part of a larger event. Wait until you see this lineup: Zoot Sims, Dizzy Gillespie, Billie Holiday, Sonny Rollins, Chet Baker, and Ray Charles, all in one evening! The two are joined by Shadow Wilson on drums as well as a delightfully tame showing from Ahmed Abdul-Malik on bass who always sounds right on the edge of veering off course, but keeps it tight throughout. Here, our two heroes are performing the perfect duo, almost extensions of each other. A tall call I realise, but I reckon this might be the finest collaboration in the Coltrane canon.

Pursuance: The Coltranes - Lakecia Benjamin

As a little bonus to round off this list, I thought I’d include a more recent favourite inspired by Coltrane’s music (as well as that of his wife Alice)

Taking on the music of a transcendental elder is a risky endeavour. I’ve heard countless covers, adaptations, and reworkings of classic tunes which simply don’t do justice to the music, or indeed the player. Two such transcendental elders are of course Alice and John Coltrane, without a doubt two of the greatest musicians in jazz history, so seeing both their names on a tribute album sure made me nervous… But I needn’t have worried! Lakecia Benjamin’s 2020 Pursuance: The Coltranes is an exceptional record for three simple reasons:

1. Both the Coltranes wrote music of such purity that their compositions are able to mould themselves to meet an interpreter’s style whilst never losing their spiritual shape. As long as they are worked with respect and understanding, these tunes will live on as standards through history.

2. Lakecia Benjamin is one of our best living saxophonists. Not only is she an exceptional musician, she is also a student of jazz and has a deep and respectful understanding for its immense and rich history. Thus, she inherently understands the Coltranes’ approach. “They were writing songs to Indian gods, to Christian gods, to Muslim gods - their whole ideology was that every religion is one and we’re all one with god.” Benjamin is also aware that both Coltranes were consummate collaborators who knew to surround themselves with the very best players available in order to bring their art to life.

3. Benjamin has therefore surrounded herself with a roster of the very finest musicians she could for this album. These include veterans such as Ron Carter, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Gary Bartz, and long-term Coltrane collaborator Reggie Workman who helped produce the record. Benjamin has also reached out to many leading current jazz players such as Marcus Gilmore, Brandee Younger, Keyon Harrold, Jazzmeia Horn, and Marcus Strickland, as well as the legendary Meshell Ndegeocello and Georgia Anne Muldrow for a superb take on Om Shanti. Together, these musicians all bring their own character to the work whilst supporting Benjamin in her role as leader, and spiritual steward of the treasures that are the tunes of Alice and John Coltrane.

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I fully intend on keeping the Sunday long-reads entirely free as I want the knowledge, history, stories, and excellent music to travel as far as possible. The research behind each article however requires a lot of time and resources (books, research trips, film rentals, gig tickets, exhibition tickets… etc.), not to mention the countless hours of dyslexically writing and editing myself.

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Before we start, let’s make sure we’re all on the same page regarding the sport in question. This isn’t football as understood in the UK, or indeed the US, this is Gaelic football, a team sport involving a ball kicked, bounced, or punched into the opponent’s goal. Or over it, that also counts. You can slap the ball to a team-mate, but you can’t throw it. You can run with it but only for three steps… you get the gist, it’s a sport and it’s hugely popular in Ireland. Here, we’ll be discussing the All-Ireland Senior Football Championship (SFC), the premier inter-county tournament in Ireland (and therefore the world I guess).

I’ll share a quick fact which will give you an idea of quite how popular Gaelic football is in Ireland: If you read my recent Diljit Dosanjh live report, you’ll have witnessed my weird obsession with sports stadia and their size. Croke Park in Dublin, where the All-Ireland final takes place every year, holds 82,300 people, making it the fourth largest stadium in Europe. The list goes: Camp Nou (Spain national football team), Wembley (England national football team), and Bernabéu (Real Madrid), followed by Croke Park, a place that exclusively hosts Gaelic football, an amateur sport.

Our story begins on 15th July 1951. Dublin’s Croke Park stadium is saturated with the yellow and green of Meath and the green and red of Mayo. The cacophony of the crowd is deafening as Mayo, the defending champions, are once again dominating this year’s final. They eventually won comfortably, securing their second title in a row, and third overall. The final score of 2-8 0-9 (nope, no idea either) leaves Ireland in no doubt, Mayo are the best Gaelic football team in the country.

Celebrations started early that day. Beers and perhaps even the odd drop of poitín flowed liberally onto the homebound open-top truck as the players clambered aboard chanting and laughing. Spirits both high and in hand, they set off. As the truck slowly made its way out of Dublin, fans lined the streets, shouting their appreciation, sharing in the elation of their team’s historic victory. The players looked on with excitement, if this was the vibe in Dublin, imagine the hero’s welcome back home on Mayo!

A few hours later, our heroes were indeed welcome back home with open arms and riotous celebrations, the likes of which the county hadn’t seen in years, decades even. Pub landlords still speak of the onslaught today. Now in Mayo, the team embarked on a procession down country lanes to the local small towns and villages, many of them home to various players and their families. As celebrations were joined by locals, the party grew louder and more rowdy. Soon enough however, as they approached the especially scenic market town of Foxford, the Mayo football team would take it too far, making a blunder of biblical proportions, and in the process, changing their luck irreparably, forever.

The priest peered down the road from his position at the head of the funeral cortege. He couldn’t see yet, but he could hear. Were those… football chants? This was the last thing he needed. He remained hopeful however. The people of Mayo were good god-fearing Catholics, even the football fans. As soon as they turned that corner, these hooligans would surely pull over, turn off their engine, and, honouring the crosses on their team crest, bow their heads in respect until his solemn cortege had passed. Perhaps they’d even walk a short distance with them as was customary. Sure enough, the truck appeared around the corner, the chants were now louder than ever. The whole funeral had noticed them by now. But they kept going. The priest jumped as the truck playfully honked its horn. This was no way to behave in the presence of mourners! As the Mayo team chugged passed ignoring the funeral, laughing, drinking, and chugging diesel fumes over his congregation, the priest did the only thing he knew how in the circumstances. He uttered a curse: Mayo would never win another All-Ireland tournament for as long as a single player on this team was still alive.

The Mayo players felt the wind change as a chill blew through their celebrations. They continued the party long into the night, but something had shifted on that small road outside Foxford. These gods amongst men somehow felt… human? Nevertheless, they wouldn’t think much about it until a year later when they lost miserably to Roscommon in the qualifying Connacht Championships, failing to even reach the All-Ireland Championship for the first time since 1947. They told themselves that winning streaks can’t last forever. They’d just train harder and return to form next year. To no avail. By this point, most of the players had forgotten the curse, but as their poor form persisted, they couldn’t help but think back to that fateful afternoon. Surely not. Of course curses are real, but they only happen in ancient folk tales, not to modern day sports teams. For the next four decades, Mayo failed to reach the All-Ireland final completely. By now, the original 1951 team had entirely retired, but the legacy of the curse was manifest. There was no doubt in anybody’s mind that it was real. In 1989, Mayo finally played their way to the All-Ireland final for the first time since that eerie encounter on the road outside Foxford. In what has come to be known as one of the greatest matches in Gaelic football history, Mayo battled it out with the formidable Cork team (who had their own pride to save, not wanting this to be their third consecutive final loss). As a goal in the 38th minute gave Mayo the lead, the crowd went wild. Green and red banners floated with abandon all around the stands. Was this it? Was the curse finally lifted? They knew it, it was all superstitious nonsense after all. Then Cork scored. And then they scored again. And again. Mayo would make the final another ten times after this, never once winning. For many still, the curse couldn’t be real, this was all bad luck, but then the 2016 final happened and there could no longer be any doubt. In this match against Dublin, Mayo scored not one, but two own-goals, a feat almost unheard of in any sport, let alone Gaelic football where even a single own-goal is exceedingly rare. It could only be down to supernatural intervention, the curse then became common lore. Their final loss came on 11 September 2021. 15 days later, Paddy Pendergast, the last surviving player of the 1951 starting-15 passed away aged 95. Nobody said it aloud, but many thought it. This had to signal the end of Mayo’s woes. In 2022, they failed to qualify, and again in 2023. How could this be? Then, a small local obituary started making the rounds. Dr. Mick Loftus had just passed, a beloved local doctor, Gaelic football referee and administrator, and crucially, a former player whose short career saw him occupying the bench in that 1951 final. Of course! He hadn’t played on the day, but he was on the truck home. Pendergast wasn’t the last player alive after all, it was Loftus. The path to victory was now truly clear.

Sure enough, Mayo romped to an easy win in the 2026 All-Ireland, marking only their fourth ever win, and their first since 1951, bringing a 75-year drought to an end. The entire country fell behind them as the collective relief of a lifted curse brought football fans of all stripes together in the excitement of a well-deserved win.

Front and centre of the celebrations were Irish folk rockers The Saw Doctors whose 1992 song The Green and Red of Mayo had since become an unofficial anthem for the team. As I sauntered into their set at Electric Picnic, I was engulfed in a sea of green and yellow flags, jackets, shirts, hats, scarves, wigs, face-paint… It had more the feel of a football match than a gig. As the opening chords of the iconic tune rang over the field, the crowd went feral, but this was nothing compared to the reaction when the band brought the entire Mayo football team on stage to sing along. I had yet to learn the significance of the song, but this was one of the single most exciting live moments I’d ever experienced. I turned to the man beside me and asked what was happening. He grinned and said “Wait until you hear this…”

You may be shocked to hear that I did fact-check the story as soon as I got home. Those dates and stats didn’t come from my plastered chum at the gig. The truth is unsurprisingly a little more prosaic. There almost definitely wasn’t a curse. Investigators and journalists have waded through parish records and failed to find any sign of a funeral happening on the day of the victory parade. The least plausible part however, is that a collection of Irish men in the 1950s wouldn’t have stopped for a funeral cortege, no matter how many All-Ireland finals they’d won. The idea of the curse didn’t start appearing until much later, after the team started making a habit of losing, and there are many strong arguments to be made that the existence of the myth did in fact affect play for all those years, but a sports psychologist I most definitely am not. I’ll tell you instead about a sweet albeit very short interview I found, in which a 90-something Dr. Loftus fondly remembers the team going for ice cream after winning in 1951.

Watching The Saw Doctors on stage, I fairly assumed they were born-and-bred Mayo boys. They are in fact from Tuam in the neighbouring county of Galway, crucially still in the province of Connacht though, meaning the teams are natural rivals. The Galway-Mayo football rivalry is one of the fiercest in the entire country. It even has its own Wikipedia page! It’s worth noting at this point that Gaelic football is an amateur sport, meaning no player salaries, and importantly, no player transfers. If you’re born in Mayo, you’re playing for Mayo. So what are these guys doing aligning themselves with the rival side?

The song was originally inspired by a boat trip the band took to Clare Island off the coast of Mayo. Looking back at the mainland, they were struck by the stunning beauty of the Irish landscape. In particular the green and red of the heather dotted across the coast. In that moment, they understood where the team’s jersey had come from. When you listen to the song’s lyrics, you’ll hear that it’s actually an ode to a beautiful land and has nothing to do with football. “Where the ocean kisses Ireland // And the waves caress its shore // Oh the feelin' it came over me // To stay forever more.”

Nobody actually knows where the team’s stripes originated for certain, but there’s a persistent alternative to the Saw Doctors’ interpretation. It’s thought that they were found in the 19th-century Thomas Davis poem The Green Above the Red, a nationalist seditious call to arms in which the green symbolises Ireland, and the red, England. The closing lines of the poem are especially pleasing:

We'll trust ourselves, for God is good, and blesses those who lean
On their brave hearts, and not upon an earthly king or queen;
And, freely as we lift our hands, we vow our blood to shed
Once and for evermore to raise the Green above the Red.

I don’t need to tell you where the green is positioned on the jersey in relation to the red. There’s another theory that the green comes from the Irish name for Mayo, Maigh Eo, which translates roughly as ‘the plain of yew trees’.

As is often the case, English colonialism looms ominously in the background. Which brings me neatly onto a point made by Saw Doctors founder (and Galway super-fan) Leo Moran when asked about the association with Mayo: “The border is only a line the English made up.” Indeed the province of Connacht was partitioned into four counties (Mayo, Galway, Roscommon, and Sligo, following the English shire model) around the late-1570s. The partition was made by Sir Henry Sidney, an English statesman who was serving as Lord Deputy of Ireland at the time. Sidney was one of the key figures in the expansion of English administrative rule in Ireland.

Moran’s conciliatory sentiment helped crystallise something for me. I’m not a Gaelic football expert (I know, you’d never have guessed), but something that has struck me whilst researching this piece, is quite how friendly the national scene is. When Mayo finally won the All-Ireland title, most of the nation got behind them. And when Mayo adopted The Saw Doctors’ song as an anthem, the band leaned into it, as evidenced by their actions at Electric Picnic this summer, and the reaction of the 40,000-odd people from all over Ireland in the crowd.

Further Resources!

Podcasts

• Amazing Sport Stories - series: The Curse of County Mayo

• An Irishman Abroad - episode: The Saw Doctors Episode

Books

• The Poems of Thomas Davis (2018), Thomas Davis

Please support my work!

If you enjoy my writing, please subscribe for free.

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If you think anyone else would like it, please share it far and wide.

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I fully intend on keeping the Sunday long-reads entirely free as I want the knowledge, history, stories, and excellent music to travel as far as possible. The research behind each article however requires a lot of time and resources (books, research trips, film rentals, gig tickets, exhibition tickets… etc.), not to mention the countless hours of dyslexically writing and editing myself.

Paid subscriptions help cover those costs and allow me to dedicate more time to producing richer, better-researched articles week after week.

My ambition is to deliver 52 substantial pieces a year as well as the odd bonus. If you reckon this is worth supporting, please sign up for one of the suggested amounts, or enter a custom number.

If on the other hand, you can’t stretch to financial support right now, no worries, Noise Melt will remain free. This isn’t a transaction so much as collective support. Those who can afford it, help keep it accessible for everyone else.

Subscribe now

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Diljit Dosanjh has been on a calculated meteoric rise to absolute global dominance for the past five to six years, but he’s been working on it for a lot longer than that. Born in Dosanjh Kalan, a large village in the Punjab region of India, he began his musical journey singing and playing tabla in his local Gurdwaras as a teenager in the early 1990s. He eventually released his solo debut Ishq Da Uda Ada in 2003. The next decade or so was spent gradually amassing an increasingly engaged cult following, and dipping his toes into acting. By the time 2020 rolled around, he had become a national megastar in India and an icon to the global South Asian diaspora. He had released a string of huge hits and starred in such box-office hits as Jatt & Juliet and Punjab 1984, as well as crossing over into Hindi cinema with the likes of Udta Punjab and Good Newwz. The only next logical step: Take on the West!

In 2022, Dosanjh signed with Warner music who immediately got him a slot as the first Punjabi-language performer to play Coachella. From there, he made the first of two memorable appearances on The Tonight Show, the second of which saw him teaching Jimmy Fallon some rudimentary Bhangra moves. In 2024, he made history again with Dil-Luminati, the highest grossing tour in Indian history. This, incidentally, was the first time I saw him perform. The show at Birmingham’s Utilita Arena was an ecstatic affair (and he wheeled out Ed Sheeran for one song!) This tour was also the first time he smashed the ‘biggest Punjabi concert outside India’ record (at Vancouver’s 50,000-capacity BC Place), a record he has since broken repeatedly. A year later, he attended the Met Gala, making him the first turbaned Sikh to walk the red carpet. The list of milestones and historic firsts goes on, but to date, it culminates with selling out the 92,000 seats at Wembley Stadium, making this his biggest show to date, anywhere in the world.

A little after 8pm, Dosanjh appeared on a platform high above the stage, dressed in a pristine white chola and turla wali pagg, paired with Dunk High Pandas, bedazzled gold bullet bandoliers, and a North Face x Supreme cargo vest. As the platform lowered, the tumbi and dhol of Morni’s intro blasted through the stadium to which 92,000 (mostly) South Asians jumped to their feet, screaming, cheering, and chanting. By the time Dosanjh ripped off his face covering as the beat dropped, there was absolutely no doubting that “Punjabi Aa Gaye Wembley Oye!”

With a twist on his usual catchphrase of “the Punjabis are here”, Dosanjh launched head first into a scintillating set of bangers from across his back catalogue. Hit upon hit lined up to remind us of the reasons he is a stadium artist. Indeed, one of the most beloved stadium artists in the world. Rarely have I seen such fan adulation at a live show, and what’s more, it’s entirely deserved. Deeply rooted in Punjabi folk and bhangra, Dosanjh’s home-spun blend of pop, hip-hop, and soaring vocals lands especially well in a live context. The cavernous head-bopping drops of Case; the limpid meandering vocal soul running through Water; God Bless, an incendiary hip hop anthem which subtly pays tribute to the late Punjabi rap icon Sidhu Moosewala; Mitran Da Junction, a floor-filling ode to nightlife; the exceptional flighty use of a harmonium in the playful Patiala Peg… As the countless timeless tunes come and pass, I find myself falling once again for Dosanjh’s irresistible charm. His charisma is undeniable and his casual ease on such a huge stage gives the impression he was always there.

A lovely moment came with a couple of unexpected songs reaching over the border to the Pakistani side of Punjab. The first was a short interpretation of Mera Laung Gawacha leading straight into one of his best-loved tunes Do You Know. Mera Laung Gawacha is an old Punjabi folk song whose origins pre-date partition. Its most famous recorded version was performed by Pakistani singer Musarrat Nazir. This version of the song was used in the popular 1987 film Dulari which helped cement it as the definitive recording. It was also later sampled by Bally Sagoo in his popular dubby rework of the tune under the same name.

The second took the form of a powerful tribute to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan with a cover of his song Sanson Ki Mala Pey. A vocal highlight of the evening. Behind the seemingly innocuous beauty of the song hides a very political message of regional unity. Khan, a Pakistani Punjabi, famously performed the song during his first trip to India. Since then, many artists have used the tune as a subtle symbol of cross-border unity. This stance from Dosanjh was a refreshing pivot from his more recent political outings. Beyond a recent appearance alongside far-right Hindu nationalist PM Narendra Modi (in which he gives the leader a bouquet of frankly ridiculous proportions!), Dosanjh recently came under fire for failing to support or even comment on the historic student protests currently taking place in India. He responded with infuriating nonchalance “I’m an artist bro.”, a phrase he subsequently used as the name for a surprise EP, dropped earlier this month.

The first half of the show was brought to a close with his Sia collaboration Hass Hass an incredibly catchy ear-worm to be hummed long into the intermission. Throughout the show, the crowd was incredibly engaged. Every lyric to every song was chanted back, echoing around the stadium. The atmosphere was superb but, and it’s a big one, it should have been so much better. Now that we’re safely in the interval, let’s talk about the stink of the sound quality.

Simply put, Wembley is not designed for concerts. Neither is Twickenham, where I saw Metallica. And crucially, neither is almost any other sports stadium anywhere. I won’t bore you with the intricacies of architectural acoustics, but sports stadia are purposefully designed to specifically amplify the noise of the crowd, helping to create a wall of sound effect which will encourage the home team and intimidate the visitors, all the while creating a buzzing atmosphere for the fans. The focus is on amplification and reverberation, not desired effects for live music. This means that, unless the act brings in a custom designed sound system to mitigate these effects, the result will be an echoey, boxy, dampened sound experience for a majority (if not all) of the audience. Secondly, in spite of the vast number of people present, fire regulations and security concerns will always mean the space feels sparsely occupied as walkways and certain tactically placed seats are kept clear. All the intimate charm of a smaller venue is gone as vast swathes of concrete and plastic pitch-protection are visible. So why put on gigs in stadia? I honestly don’t know. It’s bad for the audience, as explained above. And it’s bad for the artist as their music is being presented in terrible conditions. The cynic in me, on a bad day, may think that the ego of a given artist likes the idea of the headline: “X in historic show at massive venue” obviously sounds great. I’m sure I’d be tempted if I were an international pop legend… I imagine promoters would argue that the communal experience is more powerful the larger it is, but as explained, I’ve been in far smaller shows where the density of the crowd has made it feel much bigger. In reality, I fear the only good reason for these gigs is making more money.

When I saw Dosanjh in 2024, it was in the 15,800-capacity Utilita Arena in Birmingham. As this is a dedicated concert venue, the sound was lush: gut-punching bass, crystal-clear vocals, and a superbly crisp top end. In addition, he played in the round, meaning everyone had a better view of the stage. It ended up being one of my best gigs of the entire year. I therefore had very high hopes for Wembley. Whilst the gig was superb by most metrics I couldn’t help but feel that more attention should have been given to production. Creating a historic moment such as this doesn’t only lie in the news headlines, it also needs to deliver on the experience. A niggling thought sat in the back of my mind that Dosanjh (or if I’m being charitable, his team) was only interested in the milestone and that the show itself was secondary… With that thought in mind, I made the most of the break to take a little seat and remind myself of the monumental nature of the event I was lucky enough to be experiencing.

After the short intermission, Dosanjh reappeared with Born to Shine, a massive anthemic banger which announced a high-energy second half. During the break, he’d changed into equally pristine long white shorts, a tight tee, and a cardigan which, for some reason, just reminded me of Dolly Parton (we miss you Dolly!) He rattled through a few more hits with lightly tweaked arrangements, now featuring more prominent rock instrumentation and twiddly guitars. We’re treated to the dreamy Lemonade; Choli Ke Peeche (from the film Crew in which he featured), a rapid clubby belter which blends in a sample of original singer Ila Arun to superb effect; Ranjha, a surprisingly good collaboration with David Guetta; the relaxed bouncing production of Kinni Kinni. Throughout the show, a string of fans were brought on stage to dance with Dosanjh and receive gifts, most often a T-shirt in a box, but also on one occasion a ring, and on another the Dolly Parton cardi. Bringing fans on stage can be a risky business (I’ll never forget seeing a person insisting on rapping an entire song they’d written to an increasingly bemused and restless Shenseea mid-gig) but Dosanjh handled everyone with kindness and aplomb. Guiding them around the stage by the hand, taking selfies for them, and gently ushering them off at the right time, never once missing a beat of the song in the process.

Around this point, Dosanjh donned one of the more incongruous items of the night, a meticulously decorated leather jacket adorned with the names and logos of relatively obscure oi! and hardcore bands (Circle Jerks, The Virus, G.B.H., Subhumans, Dirty Rotten Imbeciles) and Motörhead on its back. I have no idea if Dosanjh is a secret street-punk, but I like to imagine him sat in the back of his tour bus, Tippex pen in hand, Crass blasting on his headphones, a look of intense concentration on his face, jacket on his lap, studiously spelling out “punk not dead”. The jacket eventually ended up being thrown into the crowd and I must admit to an unreasonable pang of jealousy when thinking of the lucky fan who caught it.

In the intro to his 2020 album G.O.A.T., a short skit sees BBC Asian Network’s Haroon Rashid interviewing Dosanjh rather presciently asking him how it feels to have sold out Wembley three times. Stood in a sold-out Wembley in 2026, it’s tempting to say ‘one down, two to go’ but it would seem he has already moved on from the idea. Towards the end of the gig, Dosanjh announced his next milestone, a headline concert this November at Ahmedabad’s 132,000-capacity Narendra Modi Stadium, the single largest sports stadium in the entire world!

With this bombshell, he brought over two hours of music to a close singing Ishq Mitaye, a huge tune lifted from the soundtrack to Amar Singh Chamkila (in which Dosanjh played the titular role). The chorus repeated ad infinitum, resounded around Wembley, out of the stadium, down Olympic Way, onto the tube, and home with each and every one of the 92,000 audience members “Main hoon Panjab!” (I am Punjab).

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If asked, as I occasionally am, to name my favourite musical artists, I’ll often start floundering. Torn between wanting to look cool, naming someone my interlocutor will have heard of, and invoking acts whose entire output I genuinely like and frequently revisit. There is only really one artist in the history of music who comfortably fits all three of the above categories. She is, of course, Dolly Parton.

Throughout her seven-decade career, Parton masterfully and repeatedly asserted herself as one of the all-time greats. From singing and playing to writing, recording, and keeping it tight on the business and marketing side of things too, there was very little she couldn’t do. For me, however, the defining facet of her output, the thing that cements her in the books as one of our very finest artists, is her incredible skill as a lyricist, specifically as a storyteller. Country music has always been brimming over with vivid yarns spun by a colourful collection of passionate raconteurs. Indeed countless books have been written about her male counterparts’ outputs, but I would hazard the assertion that Dolly did it best!

She was peerless in her ability to create emotional narratives with snappy precision and an astounding economy of words, infusing them with her characteristic tongue-in-cheek humour, empowered pathos, and of course, tying it all together with her incredible vocal delivery.

Since her passing a few weeks ago, much has been made of Parton’s superb wit, her business acumen, her broad appeal, her philanthropy… And rightly so, these are all huge part of her legacy. But none of these things would be making headlines had they not been preceded and accompanied by the superb music she gifted us over the years. Penning somewhere between 3,000 and 5,000 songs, Parton’s output can perhaps seem daunting, but fear not! I’ve made you a playlist.

In no particular order, here are my nine favourite Dolly Parton records to get you started. Enjoy!

Coat of Many Colors – Dolly Parton

Imagine if you will, a world in which most people haven’t heard of Dolly Parton. A tall ask, I know, but this drab colourless existence was a tragic reality for the good folk knocking about before 1971. Parton already had a small following on country radio of course. The general population however, would need to wait until September 1971 for a 25-year-old Parton to sing about her childhood jacket and infuse their world with its many colours.

Coat of Many Colors was the lead single from the album of the same name, released a month later. The song is a tragic tale of Parton’s youth growing up in poverty. The titular coat of many colours was patched together by her mum from a box of rejected rags. The coat brought young Dolly so much joy and pride, she simply couldn’t believe it when she showed up to school only to be mocked by her classmates. “Oh, I couldn’t understand it // ‘Cause I felt I was rich // And I told ‘em of the love // Mama sewed in every stitch.”

The song and subsequent album would mark Parton’s first massive hit, introducing her to a mainstream audience beyond country radio. And beyond The Porter Wagoner Show. An audience that would grow exponentially over the years, and stay behind her to this day.

Throughout the album, we find many of the signature moves Parton would hone and refine throughout her career. The second tune on the record for example, Traveling Man, is an early outing for Parton’s exceptional sense of humour. It’s one of what I like to call her ‘punchline tunes’, songs where the rug is pulled in the last few lines to hilarious effect. Traveling Man sees a young woman sneaking around behind her mother’s back to step out with the titular older no-good traveling man only to find her mother had other ideas: “Oh, that traveling man was a two-time lover // He took my love, then he took my mother.”

In spite of the tone I’ve been striking so far, Coat of Many Colors is far from being Parton’s first release. Indeed, it was her eighth solo album, and her third of 1971 alone! But its success may well have been down to its timing. Released as Parton started emerging from the shadow of one Porter Wagoner. Although it still features three of his songs (If I Lose My Mind, The Mystery of the Mystery, and The Way I See You), and they wouldn’t officially part ways until 1975. Parton here, has found her feet as a solo writer and performer. In my humble opinion, Coat of Many Colors is the album in which Parton first shows she will be a bigger star than anybody around her, most of all Porter Wagoner.

According to Parton, the title track of the album was written on the spur of the moment when she was sent to collect some of Wagoner’s suits from the dry cleaners whilst the two were on tour. She was struck with inspiration and started writing it on the dry-cleaning tag. So who is this Wagoner character I hear you asking…

Once More - Porter Wagoner & Dolly Parton

Porter Wagoner was one of country music’s earliest superstars. Kicking off his career in the early 1950s, he landed his own syndicated TV show in 1960. It would run until 1981. Whilst not the first of its kind, The Porter Wagoner Show was one of the most successful country variety shows of the 20th century. Over the course of 700+ 30-minute episodes, Wagoner introduced the nation to myriad country and gospel singers as well as several broad comedy acts. In its early years, Wagoner was accompanied by Norma Jean, who he introduced as ‘the girl singer’, a role later adopted in 1967, by a relatively unknown vocalist called Dolly Parton. Initially, the Wagoner crowd were reluctant to accept Parton, often heard chanting for Jean to return. But Parton eventually won them over with her easy charm and excellent performances.

Whilst Parton still today magnanimously credits Wagoner with her success, there’s no doubting he was very controlling and kept her in his shadow. Old episodes of his show can make for quite uncomfortable watching now, as he embodies a semi-paternal, semi-flirtatious role with a Parton whose half his age. His constant patronising language and attitude may well have been more commonplace at the time, but the dynamic is obvious, she was his sidekick.

Wagoner was absolutely instrumental in launching Parton’s career, producing her not just on his TV show, but on his equally popular live roadshow. He was however a highly toxic force in her life. When she eventually expressed an interest in pursuing a solo career, he kicked off, unable to accept that his protégée could be seen without him. Parton persisted though, and of course she was right, she had outgrown the show. In 1979, Wagoner filed a spiteful $3 million lawsuit citing breach of contract. They eventually settled out of court for about $1 million. Parton famously said “It took me a while to pay it off, but he got the first million dollars I ever made."

Wagoner remained bitter as Parton’s career soared. He often criticised her in interviews, calling her character into question. Later in life, after Wagoner had fallen on tough times, Parton anonymously bought the rights to a portion of Wagoner’s catalogue and gifted them back to him shortly before his passing in 2007. The song I Will Always Love You was famously written about their professional breakup.

The pair released a huge number of duets, filling out an eventual 13 albums, but for me (and many others) the pinnacle of their collaboration is the 1970 record Once More, their fifth release together. It features one of the duo’s most famous tracks Daddy Was an Old Time Preacher Man, originally penned by Parton with help from her aunt Dorothy Jo Hope. Another highlight is the humorous Fight and Scratch, although its themes of domestic unrest land a little ominously given the ending of their story.

Hello, I’m Dolly - Dolly Parton

“Just because I’m blonde, don’t think I’m dumb // ‘Cause this dumb blonde ain’t nobody’s fool.” So goes the chorus of Dumb Blonde, the opening song on Parton’s 1967 debut. Something of a mission statement as she announces herself to the world and warns the poor souls who would be foolish enough to under-estimate her.

Parton was born in 1946 to Robert Lee Parton, a sharecropper, and Avie Lee Caroline, a homemaker. She was the fourth of 12 kids. They lived in a one-room cabin in rural Tennessee, some 70-odd kilometres from Knoxville. Throughout her career, Parton has spoken of growing up “dirt poor” but in familial happiness, “We were rich in things that money don't buy.” Avie Lee used to entertain her kids with old ballads rooted in folk songs from the British Isles, brought over to Appalachia by their ancestors. These ballads and their influence would crop up repeatedly throughout Parton’s life, not least in the so-called Bluegrass Trilogy of albums, two of which we’ll be discussing shortly.

By the age of six, Parton was singing in church and mucking about with a guitar. By the age of ten, she was appearing on local radio. At 13, she released her debut single, Puppy Love (not to be confused with the excellent Paul Anka song of the same name!) which she had penned with help from her uncle Bill Owens (although the record sleeve only credits him).

Owens and Parton would form quite the team, initially writing tunes for other artists to sing. Her two biggest successes in this period would come with Bill Phillips’ biggest hit Put It Off Until Tomorrow, and Skeeter Davis’ Fuel to the Flame. A personal favourite of mine however is I’m In No Condition, a superb tune she wrote for Hank Williams Jr. Parton recorded her own versions of all three of these, all of which appeared on Hello, I’m Dolly.

Parton had signed to Monument Records in 1965 but they pigeonholed her into singing bubblegum pop. Only after the success of the tunes she wrote for Phillips did they let her record country songs. And with that she was off!

A quick detour, if I may, to mention Parton’s one charting single of the pre-country pop period: a cover of The Tune Weavers’ Happy, Happy Birthday Baby. It’s nothing to write home about, but it did rear its head again on the 1982 mutant-cash-grab record The Winning Hand, a compilation of mostly archival recordings billed as a collaboration between Parton, Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, and Brenda Lee. This version of Happy, Happy Birthday Baby features Parton’s original 1965 vocals edited together with a fresh 1982 recording of Nelson ‘duetting’ with her. It’s quite eerie. For the definitive version of the song, I’d point you to Wanda Jackson’s charming take on it.

Hello, I’m Dolly is an exceptional debut album, perhaps unsurprisingly considering the work Parton had already been doing for the past decade. Ironically for such a massive songwriter, its lead single Dumb Blonde was written by somebody else. Curly Putman is most famous for his country standard Green, Green Grass of Home (made famous by Porter Wagoner and later, Tom Jones. The version you want though, is Johnny Cash’s one on the Live At Folsom Prison record), but for me, his greatest contribution to the canon is Tammy Wynette’s superb D.I.V.O.R.C.E.

Just Because I’m a Woman - Dolly Parton

Parton’s second album, released in 1968 contains two songs which, for very different reasons, sit amongst the most significant in her back catalogue. Firstly, let’s discuss The Bridge.

The Bridge is made up of seven short verses. The first five lull the listener into thinking it’s a classic love song, depicting the story of a young couple finding love and lust on a bridge and consummating in a nearby meadow. The four lines of the sixth verse dissipate the rose-tint with astonishing efficiency, give us more background and harrowing emotion than I’ve possibly ever heard in such a small number of words: “Tonight, while standing on the bridge // My heart is beating wild // To think that you could leave me here // With our unborn child” I’ll leave you to discover the final verse for yourself.

The reason this tune is so important, beyond its superbly written lyrics, is that Parton reversed the then incredibly popular trope of the murder ballad. For the uninitiated, these are, for the most part, ancient folk songs depicting the darkest instincts of humans. Often, the stories revolve around love-struck men murdering their partners. The imagery can be incredibly graphic in its violence, so do proceed with caution. Parton has spoken of growing up listening to people singing the Appalachian murder ballad Knoxville Girl (made famous in 1956 by the Louvin Brothers) and its various British ancestors (check out Shirley Collins’ version of The Oxford Girl for some real chills). If you’d like to explore murder ballads further, you could do a lot worse than Nick Cave’s 1996 record, simply called Murder Ballads. His version of Henry Lee (traditionally called Young Hunting) with PJ Harvey is something else… Anyway, I’m getting distracted!

With The Bridge, Parton subverts the genre by shifting the listener’s perspective. Several murder ballads have told the story of women murdering men (see Henry Lee, the blues classic Frankie & Johnnie, and Parton’s own take on Banks of the Ohio for excellent examples) but very rarely do we hear the woman’s perspective from the traditional dynamic. Rather than hearing about how terrible the man feels about his violence, we are now experiencing how the woman feels about the story. And all this without a murder even taking place! A feminist anthem I hear you shouting… well it’s never that straightforward with Dolly.

Parton has often balked at the term ‘feminist’. Asked about her stance at various points throughout her life, she has usually evaded and talked about loving men, flirting with ‘not all men’ type statements. Pinning her down on any political stance in fact has forever been a fool’s game. In the first episode of the excellent Dolly Parton’s America podcast however, host Jad Abumrad posits that whilst the label may be unhelpful, she has nonetheless embodied feminism her whole life. In the closing scene of the episode, Parton seems tacitly satisfied with the statement.

When watching Parton deftly swerving politically charged questions, I’m often reminded of Michael Jordan’s refusal to endorse Democratic candidate Harvey Gantt, stating that “Republicans buy sneakers, too”. The uncomfortable truth is that Parton was a capitalist first and foremost. She knew she could be all things to all people, and indeed she was! There are however a handful of overt political songs in her repertoire for those who care to look, which brings me neatly to the title track of Just Because I’m a Woman. Here, Parton is calling for gender equality, reminding us that “My mistakes are no worse than yours // Just because I'm a woman”

Joshua – Dolly Parton

Joshua, released in 1971, is one of my favourite Parton records, and it’s the one about which I have the least to say. It is however the finest example of the exquisite storytelling to which we alluded in our intro. Each song paints a tableau more vivid than the last.

The title track sees an adventurous young girl going against the best advice of her loved ones to visit a mean mountain recluse, only to find he was lovely. They of course fall in love and build a beautiful life together. She also displays a lovely bit of yodelling at the end.

Daddy’s Moonshine Still conjures a dark picture of Parton’s dad’s destructive obsession with home-distilling. Walls of My Mind gives us wonderfully descriptive visions from memories of young love through the seasons, it of course ends in heartbreak, this is country after all! Chicken Every Sunday is a lovely ode to working class resilience in the face of poverty.

I reckon I come back to Joshua more than any other Parton record for the simple delights of her songwriting. Her punchy lyrics are clear, clever, and show a superb economy of words from which many far better-regarded lyricists could learn a great deal.

The Grass Is Blue -Dolly Parton

Parton once famously said “both [bluegrass and country] have a lot of fiddling in them, but with bluegrass you make half the money and have twice the fun.” The quote is actually a longstanding joke in bluegrass circles, but her use of it speaks to her passion for a genre she had been performing since she was a tiny child. In spite of this long lasting relationship, she didn’t make a full bluegrass album until 1999. And then she made three! The Grass Is Blue is the first outing in what has loosely come to be known as Parton’s ‘Bluegrass Trilogy’ alongside Little Sparrow and Halos & Horns.

Bluegrass is arguably the quintessential musical genre of the Appalachian mountains. Almost exclusively played on acoustic instruments, such as banjo, fiddle, mandolin, guitar, and upright bass, it finds its roots in folk ballads imported from the British Isles and Northern Europe, or at least that’s the common history associated with the genre. In reality, the European roots only make up a portion of the story. Bluegrass more widely emerged from music played by enslaved Africans who had adapted instruments from back home. This is how the banjo came about. Invented and spread by enslaved people, appropriated by white enslavers, and eventually handed down to the white working classes, which is how the banjo and more broadly, bluegrass came to epitomise the sound of Appalachia as an implicitly white-coded music.

In their fabulous monograph on Parton’s album White Limozeen, Stacy Easton writes about the difficulty of telling the Parton story without making it a hagiography. Parton’s image has always been exceptionally well curated and any nuance is typically brushed aside in favour of a story of charitable actions, quick wit, or exceptional music (I refer you to the whole of this very article for example!) Nevertheless, there are some uncomfortable aspects to Parton’s career, and in this instance, her artistry. I recommend Easton’s book for a very well presented case around Parton’s conditional support of LGBTQ+ causes, her tricky relationship with the South’s history, and her unabashed capitalist callousness. It also touches on the lack of discourse around her appropriation of predominantly Black genres, such as soul, disco, and of course, bluegrass.

In the case of bluegrass, it’s a lot more nuanced however, as the genre is now almost wholly coded as white (in as much as these labels are useful at all) but as we’ve demonstrated, it is rooted in African-American music. In addition this, many of its lyrical themes revolve around a longing for home, the mountains, and the beautiful landscapes of the singer’s youth. Lest we forget though, these mountains were once stewarded by the Cherokee, Shawnee, and Muscogee tribes before being occupied by the mournful bluegrass singer’s ancestors. This never comes up in the songs.

As a born-and-bred Appalachian, Parton is of course well within her rights to make bluegrass music (and even if she wasn’t, she still would be), but the question of appropriation arises for me when there is no effort to contextualise or credit the music to its originators. Whilst Parton has made a small number of moves in the right direction (for example, appearing on Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter, thus tacitly endorsing an album overtly exploring Black contributions to country music; or more substantially, using some of the royalties from Whitney Houston’s cover of I Will Always Love You to help develop various Black neighbourhoods in Nashville) the bluegrass question remains largely untouched.

Nevertheless, musically, the Bluegrass Trilogy is arguably the strongest run of albums in Parton’s entire career!

Little Sparrow – Dolly Parton

After announcing her bluegrass intentions with The Grass Is Blue, Parton released Little Sparrow, her 38^th effort, in 2001. Little Sparrow is a record which often sits in the top five, or even top three of those ‘Dolly’s albums ranked’ type lists. And rightly so, it is a truly exceptional piece of work!

Whilst Little Sparrow is predominantly a bluegrass album, what makes it so great is Parton’s ability to fold in influences from throughout her career. We can hear hints of folk, country, gospel, and honky tonk, all thriving together in the endless vibrant barn dance of Parton’s artistry.

Little Sparrow features a couple of revisited tunes from Parton’s back catalogue. Down from Dover and My Blue Tears, respectively from 1970’s The Fairest of Them All, and 1971’s Coat of Many Colors. Here, they’ve been given the bluegrass treatment to excellent effect

It also features the superb tune Marry Me which has inadvertently gone some way to repositioning bluegrass in its correct historical context. As the tune fades out, after a cheeky yodel, it briefly opens up into an old-timey string jam. It was this section of the song that caught the attention of a then 20-something Rhiannon Giddens. Giddens has credited these few seconds of music with sparking her lifelong passion for exploring American music history through her mastery of the banjo. Giddens has since done more work than anyone to re-contextualise much American folk in terms of its African American roots. She went on to include a lovely cover of Parton’s Don’t Let It Trouble Your Mind on her 2015 solo debut Tomorrow Is My Turn.

Honky Tonk Angels – Dolly Parton, Tammy Wynette, & Loretta Lynn

As demonstrated through a handful of Parton’s tunes, we have seen that some of the most important lyrical innovations in the history of country music have come from women. By necessity, they have entered from the outside, thus imposing their views and experiences on an otherwise painfully male story. Updating and improving the songbook in the process. The Honky Tonk Angels are three examples of this:

Tammy Wynette has often been mischaracterised by her biggest hit, the unfortunate (albeit great-sounding) Stand By Your Man, but dig a little deeper in her repertoire, and you’ll find classic country tales of love and heartbreak but always told, rather refreshingly for the time, from a woman’s perspective.

Loretta Lynn broke boundaries from the very start of her career, like Parton, singing authentically about her experience as a working-class woman. She also pioneered a now widespread trend for modern-day lyrics inspired by the day-to-day struggles of women in America, as most vividly epitomised by her smash hit The Pill.

Of course, we already know what Parton was bringing to the table.

Something I’ve skated over a little in the interest of brevity, is Parton’s keen collaborative skills. She has always been able to identify other incredible talents and bring them into the fold (there has been the odd misfire, although I kind of like the Powerful Women!) Back in the 1980s, she identified Loretta Lynn and Tammy Wynette as two kindred spirits bringing their modern-day evergreen experiences to a genre perennially stuck in the past. All three women had made names for themselves introducing day-to-day life to their lyrics and therefore the genre as a whole.

Parton approached the other two and after some light persuasion, they agreed to record an album together. Thus, Honky Tonk Angels were born! The album would be released in 1993. The three agreed on a collection of standards as well as a soloed original each (with the other two singing harmony on each solo track of course), the result is a fantastic record of country class, full of wit, joy, pathos, and cheek.

Backwoods Barbie - Dolly Parton

With toes dipped in such far-flung industries as clothing, fragrances, wine, cookbooks, theme parks, Christmas tat, and pet apparel, it seems obvious that Parton should have run her own record label, and indeed she did, the imaginatively named Dolly Records. But it may come as a surprise that she didn’t start releasing her own music until 2008 with Backwoods Barbie, her 42nd album!

For many, Parton’s last great album before this was Little Sparrow from 2001. This was followed by a few middling efforts and let’s be honest, one truly horrific record called For God and Country for which she recorded a number of patriotic songs in a misguided attempt to lift the national spirit after 9/11. A nice sentiment, but its unabashed jingoism and barely concealed American supremacy makes my skin crawl. Gee Ma, I Wanna Go Home is a particular low… anyway, it seemed that, in the early to mid-2000s Parton had maybe lost her way. She had already given us everything. Indeed, most casual fans still today will likely only know music from before this period. She started with classic country, moved through folk, bluegrass, rock, pop, gospel, soul… what more was there to do? The answer, it transpired, was to head all the way back to her roots and give us an album of pure country bangers adapted for the modern age.

Three years in the making, Backwoods Barbie travels all the way back to the original Nashville sound and it’s produced with the quality of an artist at the peak of her powers. If you like early Parton, this is a surprisingly refreshing return to form from one of the greatest country stars we ever had.

Further Resources!

Books

• Dolly Parton, Songteller (2020), Dolly Parton & Robert K. Oermann

• She Come by It Natural (2020), Sarah Smarsh

• White Limozeen (2024), Stacy Easton

Podcasts

• Dolly Parton’s America - all episodes

Films

• Dolly Parton: Here I Am (2019), Francis Whately

• 9 to 5 (1980), Colin Higgins

• Steele Magnolias (1989), Herbert Ross

Academic Papers

• Region and Identity in Dolly Parton’s Songwriting (2016), Jada Watson

• Dolly Parton, Gender, and Country Music (2018), Leigh H. Edwards

• Complexities of White Feminism in the Music Industry: From Dolly Parton to Taylor Swift (2024), Emma Kopplin

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If you haven’t already, please do have a read of the last two week’s articles in which I explain how the Rassemblement National (RN), a party currently leading the polls in France, was founded by SS officers as the Front National. We also ran through some of the great music inspired by the movement since its inception in 1972. This week, we will bring the story up to the present day. Let’s start by meeting Marine Le Pen, the party’s founder’s daughter and current parliamentary leader. And of course, let’s listen to some superb music along the way!

Marine - Diam’s

In 2006, my little sister brought home a copy of the then hugely popular album Dans ma bulle by Diam’s. Like most people my age, my favourite tunes on the CD were its lead singles La Boulette and Jeune Demoiselle, (still two massive bangers of angsty 2000s hip-hop) but one of the album tracks always intrigued me. Marine was actually originally written in 2004 a few months after the French cantonal elections in which the FN received the third most votes of any party in both the first and second rounds. One of the FN’s many victorious councillors was a young Marine Le Pen, Jean-Marie’s daughter, who took on a seat in Diam’s’ home constituency of Île-de-France (the greater Paris region). Marine, originally included only on a live DVD Ma Vie/Mon Live, finally received a proper release on Dans ma bulle in 2006.

Marine takes the form of a letter or monologue given to Marine Le Pen by Diam’s who highlights their similarities as French women of roughly the same generation but questions her path, beliefs, and direction, before inviting her to see the light and experience a life of acceptance over exclusion and division. Marine is by a long way the most lucid track I’ve discussed in this series. Diam’s’ masterfully crafted lyrics reached out to me as a 12-13 year-old. I had no idea who this Marine was, or even if she was real but I did know that she seemed so misguided, trapped in a prison of hatred passed through the generations. It was also the first time I’d heard somebody put cogent words to the troubling traits I’d started noticing in some of my schoolmates. Kids whose grandparents had fought on the French side in Algeria and thus gave North African kids a wide berth in the playground. Kids who tagged swastikas on the toilet wall to be provocative. Kids who traded horrifically racist jokes without fully understanding their content. Misguided kids trapped in a prison of hatred passed through the generations.

Diam’s helped to crystallise the insidious evils of fascism in the minds of a whole generation of French rap fans. So much so, that by 2011, when Marine Le Pen was eventually properly introduced to the general public after winning the presidency of the FN, there were thousands of 15-20 year-olds all over the country waiting in the wings, ready to mobilise. Once again, the youth stepped up. The chorus of Marine simply goes “J’emmerde. J’emmerde qui?” but in the 2004 live version, we find a familiar end to the sentence: “J’emmerde le Front National.”

In 2007, Marine Le Pen would manage her father’s fifth and final presidential campaign. By this point however, Nicolas Sarkozy had fully integrated an anti-migrant message into his campaign, temporarily neutralising the far-right. The Le Pen team only received 10% of the vote, finishing fourth overall. Sarkozy won, becoming the most right-wing president in French history.

Le front de la haine - Keny Arkana

In 2007, a video circulated on far-right platforms depicting a re-edited version of a couple of Keny Arkana videos soundtracked by her song La Rage. The video was labeled ‘nationalist rap clip by Keny Arkana’. If you’ve read my article on the music of Marseille, you’ll know that Arkana is one of the country’s most eloquent opposers not just of right wing politics, but of the capitalist system as a whole. In the piece, I introduced Arkana’s most famous record, 2006’s Entre ciment et belle étoile. The lead-single La Rage lays out her alter-globalist and anti-capitalist worldview. A rallying cry for all the oppressed of the world to stand up and realise that change will never be institutional. Change will only ever come from the bottom. In the FN video, La Rage is spliced onto edited clips from her video for Nettoyage au Kärcher, also originally from Entre ciment et belle étoile.

The Kärcher jet-washer became a visceral image in the French psyche in 2005 when then minister of the interior Nicolas Sarkozy suggested using one to clean out the crime from Parisian banlieus. The image endures in right-wing discourse today. Arkana used it as a way into an incredibly dense, structured, and damning take-down of 2000s French politics. I’d love to go into it in detail (and may well some day) but you lot have lives to get on with! The final line of Nettoyage au Kärcher, seemingly missed by our anonymous FN videographer, is “don’t forget that it’s through the ballot boxes that Hitler came.” or perhaps that was the point?

As soon as the video surfaced, Arkana responded immediately and in no uncertain terms writing and releasing the single Le front de la haine (the hatred front) making it absolutely clear she does not endorse any political party, least of all the FN.

Voilà Voilà - Rachid Taha

We finished the first part of this series with Carte de Séjour’s brilliant cover of Douce France, a tune they first performed in 1985 in front of half a million young activists who had taken to the streets to fight the rise of the far-right they were seeing all over France at the time. We now find the band’s frontman Rachid Taha, nearly three decades later, on the eve of releasing Zoom his ninth and final solo album in 2013. Surely, racism has been fixed now, and he’s singing about enjoying life as a rockstar in his 50s, right?

To answer that question, let’s take another leap, back in time now, to 1993, just seven years after Douce France, when Taha released his second solo album, simply named Rachid Taha, in 1993. This is an extraordinary record that already contained all the building blocks that would eventually make his career a success, including the very first version of the eventual global hit Ya Rayah. Another tune first heard on Rachid Taha was Voilà Voilà, a song Taha would rework repeatedly throughout his career. He would release another six versions between 1993 and 2013 (including various dance remixes, one in Spanish, and the superb live take during his historic 1, 2, 3 Soleils gig with Khaled and Faudel). The reason Taha revisited the song so much (besides its qualities as a genuine floor-filler) is the tragically evergreen relevance held by its message.

The chorus of the song is simple: “Voilà voilà, que ça recommence. // Partout, partout, sur la douce France. // Voilà voilà que ça recommence. // Partout, partout, ils avancent.” (There, there, it’s starting again. Everywhere in sweet France. There, there, It’s starting again. Everywhere, they’re moving forwards.)

He’s of course referring to the rise of the far-right in his beloved homeland. A rise that seemed terrifying already in 1993 but grew to become existential in 2013. The final version appeared on his heaviest, most rock-inclined record Zoom, but the album was actually announced with another version released with a video a few months before the album. For the video, Taha is making his stance clear by surrounding himself with activist royalty, thus also cementing his own position in their lineage. We have Femi Kuti whose father Fela spent most of his life fighting political corruption and oppression in Nigeria (read more about him here). We have The Clash’s Mick Jones who first appeared at Rock Against Racism in 1976 and and has been a vocal supporter of similar causes ever since, much like fellow feature Eric Cantona who’s long and well-documented history of despising discrimination stretches from his two-footed assault on a racist fan in 1995 all the way up to his appearance at Brian Eno’s Together for Palestine fundraising concert at Wembley in 2025. Brian Eno isn’t in the video, but he does feature extensively on Zoom as a producer. We also have Christian Olivier whose band Les Têtes Raides have long supported undocumented migrants in France. Other French do-gooders in the video include Camélia Jordana, Oxmo Puccino, Rachida Brakni, Agnès b., Sonia Rolland, Rodolphe Burger… this version was never officially released but you can find the video on YouTube, in which everyone has been corralled into a recording booth to deliver two or three fresh lines to the now timeless tune.

After officially taking over the party in 2011, Marine Le Pen began her dédiabolisation project. She started by expelling the last remaining pro-Vichy party members, and worked on a more smiley and friendly presentation, sidelining some of the more extreme views of the party. Now, a highly trained team of representatives were wheeled out for interviews, coached in the correct vocabulary and subject matter to use in public. Old logos were removed or minimised, and in some local elections, the words “Front National” were removed entirely from campaign materials. By 2015, just one toxic element remained. Thankfully for Marine Le Pen, this toxic element took it upon himself to appear on TV and re-iterate his long-held view that the holocaust was simply a detail of history. He then compounded this by saying he could tell a prominent French journalist was Jewish by looking at his nose. This made what came next a little easier for her. Jean-Marie Le Pen was officially expelled from the party he founded in August 2015. In 2018, the final move of dédiabolisation came in the form of a full rebrand. The Front National would now be known as the far more inclusive-sounding Rassemblement National.

Amazingly, this all fooled many French people. In the 2012 presidential election, Marine Le Pen’s first, she took home 17% of the vote, the highest share for the party, ever. So for Taha, re-re-re-releasing Voilà Voilà in 2013 was a crucial message to his fans. When he sang “it’s coming back”, it was understood that the wolf had simply put on its sheep’s clothing. And yet, in 2017 and 2022, Le Pen made it to the second round both times, each time growing her vote-share (both times ultimately losing out to Emmanuel Macron), her next election will be in 2027.

Marianne - Kery James

In 2024, a young woman named Marianne was heading home after her 100m training. After she boarded the bus, it stopped moving. She looked up to see the driver staring her down in his rear-view mirror. “Either you take off your hijab or you get off. I’m not driving this bus as long as you’re on it.” As Marianne was identified as the reason the bus wasn’t moving, other passengers began turning on her, grumbling and asking her to comply. Gradually the situation degenerated with people insulting her and even spitting in her face until she was hounded off the bus. As she ran away, a man ripped the hijab off her head. The whole scene was filmed and for a short while Marianne became a viral example of non-assimilation for the right-wing blogosphere.

Thankfully, the story in the last paragraph was made up by veteran rapper Kery James for his 2022 tune Marianne. In this eight-minute epic he describes a nightmare he had in which he saw a dystopian vision of France two years in the future after the election of a far-right candidate he calls “the little Napoleon”. Marianne, who was forced to change her name from Maryam by law, is the first of two characters he puts in disturbingly plausible situations. In this world, Islamophobia is state-mandated under the spurious guise of laïcité (secularism). All face and head coverings have been banned.

Dating back to the enlightenment and originally designed to keep the Catholic church in check, the laïcité laws state that the government does not recognise, pay, or subsidise any religion. In its ideal form, laïcité prevents discrimination or preferential treatment at work or at school, ostensibly keeping everyone on an even playing field, at least as far as religion is concerned. Le Pen however, has successfully redefined the word ‘laïcité’ as a stand-in for her virulent islamophobia. In 2010 she compared Muslims praying in the street in Lyon to the Nazi invasion of France, calling it an “occupation of territory” (astounding comments given her party’s history with both nazism and occupation in Algeria). She has also proposed the ban on head-coverings in public, calling them “an Islamist uniform”.

In the opening lines of Marianne, James also says Skyrock (France’s leading hip-hop radio station) has been shut down because “the little Napoleon can’t stand this scum music”. This is a clear nod to another song James released in 2016.

Musique n**** was written in response to a horrific story (a real one this time) in which 2017 presidential candidate and radio executive Henry de Lesquen had stated he no longer wanted “n**** music” to be played on his stations, claiming it was “aimed at the reptilian brain” and “has an ‘ensavaging’ effect on listeners.”

Kery James has been rapping professionally since the age of 14, as a member of seminal band Ideal J. Since then, he has carved out a niche as the elder statesman of furious albeit incredibly lucid rap texts. Throughout the eight minutes of Marianne, there is no chorus or even a break. He is rapping non-stop over an increasingly oppressive instrumental track. His virtuosity only serves to make the message more visceral.

No Pasarán - Various Artists

In 2025, DJ Kore, formerly one half of Kore & Skalp (who gave the world the Raï’n’B Fever compilations I discussed in my history of raï) and Ramdane Touhami (the serial entrepreneur and pioneer of Parisian concept retail) assembled a who’s-who’s of old and new rappers to come together on a song specifically calling for the French public not to vote RN. For the song’s title, they borrowed the famous slogan used during the Spanish civil war by the Republicans fighting General Franco’s fascists. Interestingly, the Republicans borrowed the slogan from French fighters in WWI, most notably using it during the battle of Verdun. All money raised from the song went to the FLD (formerly Fondation Abbé Pierre), a charity which helps out people experiencing homelessness. People who are often used by the RN as rhetorical tools to condemn immigration. Although in practice, RN-run councils have been noted for dealing with homelessness by punishing mendicancy instead of offering any actual solutions.

The 20 verses in No Pasarán vary wildly in style, quality, message, and delivery. It seems none of the rappers spoke to each other prior to recording and definitely didn’t run their words past a sensible adult. Nonetheless, there are many highlights scattered throughout.

Relo, a veteran of the Marseille scene, trashes the idea that “we’ve never given them a chance”, a very common argument amongst far-right voters, by reminding us of the party’s roots in the Waffen-SS. ISK proudly proclaims his triple-nationality (French, Tunisian, and Canadian) revelling in the fact this annoys the RN who have proposed banning such split citizenships. He also draws parallels between the RN campaign to ban Muslim face coverings and their own hiding behind laïcité laws.

Old hand Akhenaton, now closing in on his fourth decade of rapping about the FN/RN, delivers a solid verse (albeit verging on conspiracy) claiming Jordan Bardella and Marcon are essentially the same person. If nothing else, he gives us the delightfully chimeric nightmare vision of “Jordanuel Macronardella”.

Seth Gueko, a rapper whose controversial lyrics have long been misappropriated by right-wing followers lays out his anti-RN views in very clear terms (or at least as clear as his intense use of verlan allows). He also invokes Sarkozy’s famous Kärcher.

Another veteran, Sofiane gives us “Jordan t’es mort” a slogan aimed at Jordan Bardella, reappropriating the heavily memed chant by MMA legend Cédric Doumbé in the lead up to his pairing against Jordan Zébo (Doumbé went on to win the match by KO in nine seconds!) Many of the rappers here enjoy plays on Bardella’s name, although the pun is best explained with a different song, Bardella, released in 2024 by stand-up/rapper Walid Jabbari, in which he sings “Macron m’a dit ‘Bardella’”: “Macron told me ‘Bardella’” a play on the French ‘barre (toi) de là’ meaning roughly ‘get out of here’.

After a verse explaining he doesn’t understand politics, Zed, a stalwart of Parisian drill, accidentally delivers the most insightful line of the whole tune:“I know the far-right is using my disconnection, so: anti-RN!” Indeed, since its inception, the RN has preyed on voters only partially interested in politics, if at all. By offering them easy solutions, the RN is mining the disconnection of French voters who won’t fact-check their claims as long as they offer a glimmer of hope. In the 2022 presidential election, polls showed that a whopping 70% of 18-24 year-olds abstained, the proportion of the population statistically most likely to vote against the RN.

The tune is however let down by a handful of rappers who flirt with crossing the line into silly conspiracy theory. Plenty hint at old school Free-Mason and Illuminati tropes which undermine the far more numerous sensible points. A couple of others indulge in more violent imagery, even calling for death. Much has been made of these words in the press since the song’s release, although as I see it, they’re simply upholding the long-standing French tradition of condemning one’s opponents in song. A tradition that can be traced back to before records began via such staples as the national anthem La Marseillaise (yes, Mbappé is singing “May the impure blood [of our enemies] water our furrows!” before every football match) and such national treasures as the famously apolitical Edith Piaf who once sang about hanging aristocrats from street lamps. Only Alkpote takes it too far though, replacing cogent political argument with horrific misogyny. Sadly, his weak lyrics allowed the French commentariat to jump on the entirety of the song as an incitement to violence and widely discredit it in the eyes of many, effectively doing the RN’s job for them.

My favourite line, if you’re asking, comes from Kerchak’s political awakening: “We need to vote to the left, and not just to legalise weed.” Oddly, of all the incendiary verses, Kerchak’s is the one that was singled out by Bardella in a recent defamation lawsuit. His second taken out against a rapper. The other came after Soli’s 2026 tune Un Facho K.O.

Un Facho K.O. - Soli

I imagine the bit Bardella is relying on in court is the opening line and leitmotif throughout in which Soli suggests kicking in a fascist’s head leaves a delicious taste. Admittedly not the most imaginative lyrics, but the rest of the song essentially sums up in very pithy and melodic terms everything I’ve far less eloquently written out in this article so far. He begins calling out working class RN voters who are shocked when they find out their idols are in fact millionaires. He then takes a pot shot at the people who believe the age-old trick of masking the complexity of a capitalist job market with easy racism, by scapegoating hard-working immigrants as job-thieves. In the second verse, he turns his sights on the RN itself, correctly pointing out that they were collaborationists back in 1939. As well as alluding to the RN’s anti-abortion policies and the series of scandals that have dogged the party in recent times, not least high-profile RN MEP Hervé Juvin who was convicted for domestic abuse the same week Bardella became president of the party. Thus achieving the impressive double-whammy of stealing the spotlight and undermining one of the party’s core messages that they are there to protect women.

In his final verse, Soli brings it neatly home with the line “La jeunesse vous emmerde” before concluding “You don’t cry for Palestine or the Congo. // I’ll never cry for the death of a Facho.” In a tale as old as racism, Bardella’s lawsuit has highlighted Soli, his career, and his message bringing the young artist to a far wider audience than he may have enjoyed otherwise. Some of the imagery in the track is of course a little close to the bone, although it’s alleviated by the hilariously tongue-in-cheek video in which Soli, draped in a French flag, leads a couple of mates in a panto version of beating up three other youths wearing comedy masks depicting Marine Le Pen, Bardella, and Éric Zemmour (another flash-in-the-pan French fascist who runs a party all of his own, the terrifyingly named Reconquête). In spite of all this, Soli’s antics pale in comparison to the rhetoric punted out by the ostensibly detoxified RN in recent years.

Le Chant des Partisans - Marine Le Pen

On July 4th this year, Marine Le Pen made the most peculiar of choices during an RN meeting in Liévin. She ended her short speech with rather an incongruous line: “Ami, si tu tombes, un ami sort de l'ombre à ta place” (Friend, if you fall, a friend will emerge from the shadows in your place). Given the timing of the speech, the sentiment of the quote was apposite. Its provenance, less so.

In March 2025, Le Pen, along with eight of her MEPs and 12 RN assistants, were found guilty of embezzling European Union funds. Le Pen received a €100,000 fine and a four-year prison sentence (two years suspended, the other two served as house arrest). But the most crucial ruling was an immediate ban from standing for political office for five years, making her ineligible to run in the 2027 presidential election. She appealed, with the court’s ruling coming on July 7th, just three days after her speech. By using this quote, she appeared to suggest Jordan Bardella would take her place in the event her appeal should be rejected. In any case, the appeals court shortened the ban and she announced her intention to run in 2027 the same day.

So why was this such an odd choice of words? Well, as any French school-kid since 1945 will tell you, it’s from the chorus of the Partisan Song, le Chant des partisans, also called Chant de la libération. Written in 1941 by Anna Marly, it was the anthem of the French resistance during WWII. The French resistance who took on the Nazis and French collaborationists during the German occupation of France.

Further Resources!

Books

• Cette chanson qui emmerde le Front national (2007), Baptiste Vignol

Podcasts

• Jean-Marie Le Pen, l’obsession nationale - all episodes

• Mémoire d’un monde - episodes:

  • Interroger Jean-Marie Le Pen était toujours une épreuve

  • Le jour où Jean-Marie Le Pen est passé au second tour

• Anatomie d’une décision - series: Le RN, un paria gagnant

Please support my work!

If you enjoy my writing, please subscribe for free.

If you can spare a few quid, please subscribe for a small monthly donation.

If you think anyone else would like it, please share it far and wide.

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I fully intend on keeping the Sunday long-reads entirely free as I want the knowledge, history, stories, and excellent music to travel as far as possible. The research behind each article however requires a lot of time and resources (books, research trips, film rentals, gig tickets, exhibition tickets… etc.), not to mention the countless hours of dyslexically writing and editing myself.

Paid subscriptions help cover those costs and allow me to dedicate more time to producing richer, better-researched articles week after week.

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If on the other hand, you can’t stretch to financial support right now, no worries, Noise Melt will remain free. This isn’t a transaction so much as collective support. Those who can afford it, help keep it accessible for everyone else.

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Last week, I laid out how the rise of the French far-right in the second half of the 20th century began defining a generation of anti-right-wing music. Where part one was heavy on the politics and machinations of Front National leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, this week, we’ll take a little step back from that and focus more on the music itself.

La bête est revenue - Pierre Perret

Most of the music I have discussed or will discuss in this series comes from fringe left-wing activists, underground youth movements, and obscure agitators, but we’ve yet to hear from a truly mainstream artist, someone who cuts through the generations to every part of French society. That is until 1995 when a certified national treasure lent their voice to the anti-FN struggle. Pierre Perret had been singing bawdy comedy songs since the mid-1950s, his most famous probably being Le Zizi, a clever little ditty about all the different types of willy in the world. His childish tone paired with a superb control of the French language (he famously re-wrote Jean De La Fontaine’s Fables) had gained him a huge following throughout the country. In 1995, he surprised his fans by introducing an unflinchingly dark note with his album La bête est revenue (the beast has returned), a large portion of which was dedicated to an excoriation of rising far-right rhetoric and support in France. Bear in mind his previous album was called Chansons éroticoquines (roughly: ‘eroti-naughty songs’).

On the title track of the album, Perret has replaced his usual clown noises and irreverent guitar with a dark cello winding its sinister way around a relentless marching snare. The musical textures are stark as he describes the beast in terrifying terms and warns of the evils of fascism. The chorus line “Be careful my friends, I’ve seen it. Beware, the beast is returning!” lands with particular authority as Perret was born in 1934, meaning he lived through WWII and experienced its immediate aftermath in his most formative years.

Another stand-out tune on the album is Vert de colère (‘green with anger’, or to translate the idiom, perhaps ‘seeing green’), an environmental anthem expressing Perret’s dismay at the destruction of the environment in the name of profit. At the time, environmental issues were fairly far removed from the FN’s discourse. In more recent times though, the RN have started rhetorically positioning themselves as champions of nature. In practice of course, they systematically oppose green policies in parliament and continue to promote fossil fuel industries.

In the song Ferdinand, Perret turns his wit to another national treasure Louis-Ferdinand Céline, still considered today one of the greatest French writers. I remember studying excerpts from his incredibly influential 1932 book Voyage au bout de la nuit (Voyage to the End of the Night) in literature classes as a youth. Céline was however a virulent antisemite who advocated collaboration with the Nazis during the war, to the extent he was forced to flee the country in 1944. In Ferdinand, Perret rather deftly displays his knowledge of literature by almost exclusively reformatting Céline quotes to highlight the hatred and racism in his work.

Amongst the many horrific views that made up Le Pen’s global outlook, antisemitism was the core value around which much of his other opinions gravitated. Examples of this stretch all the way through his career, but the most famous came in a radio interview in 1987 when he downplayed the holocaust calling it a “detail of the history of the Second World War”. He would repeat this take throughout his career, eventually receiving a €30,000 fine for saying it on TV in 2015. We’ll come back to his antisemitism later as it sat at the root of his eventual rift with his daughter… but we’re getting ahead of ourselves! In the meantime, I’m delighted to say that, at time of writing, Pierre Perret is still regularly performing, aged 92.

Le bruit et l’odeur - Zebda

After his success at the European election in 1984, it suddenly became apparent that Le Pen was a threat to the mainstream parties, in particular those also on the right whose votes he had been pilfering. Attempts were made by various politicians to reposition their message to include the then more fringe issue of immigration. Le Pen’s well oiled communications machine however quickly coughed out the slogan “The French people prefer the original to the copy.”

In 1991, Jacques Chirac, who was then mayor of Paris, had started gently positioning himself to run for president with his neo-gaullist RPR party. During this time, he made one of his most controversial speeches:

“How do you want a French worker who works with his wife, who earn together about 15,000 FF and who sees next to his council housing, a piled-up family with a father, three or four spouses and twenty kids earning 50,000 FF in benefits, naturally without working... If you add to that the noise and the smell, well the French worker, he goes crazy. And it is not being racist to say this.”

Aside from such an amazing lack of self-awareness from a man famed for being a vociferous bore (and looking like he’s not had a bath since the war), Chirac is here displaying the general shift in public rhetoric to match Le Pen’s. A shift later completely integrated by Nicolas Sarkozy who gained power in 2007.

Chirac was elected in 1995, bringing the Socialist’s 14 years in government to an end. At the same election, Le Pen garnered 15% of the vote, finishing fourth overall. Toulousain partiers Zebda decided the election would be an opportune time to remind us of both Chirac’s and Le Pen’s racism with their album Le bruit et l’odeur (the noise and the smell), released a few months after the election. The album, and its titular single, beautifully lampoon Chirac’s nonsense from 1991.

The members of Zebda met playing members of a fictional band called Zebda Bird in the 1985 short film Salah, Malik : Beurs. They decided to start a real band and called it Zebda, the Algerian Arabic word for ‘butter’ (زبدة). This is a play on the French word ‘beurre’ (also butter) which means ‘Arab’ in verlan (a form of slang I don’t really have the energy to explain.) Active from 1985 to 2015, Zebda broke into the mainstream with their light-hearted 1998 track Tomber la chemise. Before then however, they’d cemented their position as an activist band with Le bruit et l’odeur, their second album, in which they blended their signature riffy pop-reggae with far more politically engaged lyrics. Another standout track on the album is La Bête J M L P, A hilarious painting of a monstrous stinking creature with sharp teeth and hateful opinions.

Zebda were amongst the first bands to understand that lyrics alone wouldn’t suffice to spread their message, they needed to be smuggled into the clubs, parties, and raves hidden in dance-floor-filling bangers. Le bruit et l’odeur, like all of Zebda’s output, is dancing music first, motivated by political activism.

Throughout the 1990s, Le Pen repeatedly approached other right-wing parties to propose alliances. Chirac rejected him and spoke of erecting a “cordon sanitaire” around him. After the Le bruit et l’odeur speech, Le Pen responded, correctly suggesting that the centrists may not like him but they’re sure beginning to sound a lot like him. Throughout France, the left-leaning public saw Chirac’s election as another step towards Le Pen’s far-right politics, which is why (along with the mayoral elections we’ll cover shortly) so many tunes in this article were released in or after 1995.

Plus Jamais Ça - Suprême NTM

One of my favourite French albums of all time, of any genre, is Suprême NTM’s third effort Paris sous les bombes, released in 1995. The record opens with Plus Jamais Ça (never again), the band’s most overtly political song (in a career of fairly overtly political songs)

Where IAM’s intellectual lyrics occasionally obscure themselves in style, NTM’s Kool Shen and Joey Starr keep it simple with smartly crafted visceral slogans. Plus Jamais Ça is one of the finest examples of their on-message eloquence, delivered with the passion and verve of angry youths who nevertheless, still know their music is for dancing. Like Zebda, NTM are angling their music to the youth. Indeed, if you don’t listen to the lyrics, this is still a thrilling hop-hop track. As Starr barks wildly over the driving rhythm and sampled sax wails, and Kool Shen alternates settled flow with manic laughter, one can’t help but be dragged into the general loose atmosphere of the tune.

As for the lyrics, Kool Shen opens up proceedings decrying the apparent national amnesia around WWII, referencing iron crosses and roman salutes before delivering a line I’m delighted to give you in English! (In the course of writing this piece I’ve discovered the frustration of robbing lyrics of their rhythm and flow by translating them into understandable English. I’m therefore very grateful to Kool Shen for writing this bar that works perfectly in both languages. Drumroll…)

“National is this front, international the affront.”

The third verse, shared by the two rappers, serves as an excellent recap of the reasons for their fans not to vote FN. Trading bars, they start “Honours, nation, conquering and colonies. // We’ve already seen the results of this bullshit.” before listing the FN’s promotion of racial segregation, Le Pen’s propensity for violence (he once physically assaulted the socialist candidate in a local election campaign), and his inability to deal with Algerian independence.

Plus Jamais Ça, still an oft heard anthem today, set off a slew of similarly themed tunes from the world of French hip-hop and reggae. Let’s listen to a few more…

Bleu Blanc Rouge - Raggasonic

Sinsemilia, mostly made up of white dudes with dreadlocks left a lasting scar on my soul when they released the horrifically saccharin tune Tout le bonheur du monde, an anthem for the rural wooden jumper-clad crusty to kick off their grass sandals and sing earnestly round a camp fire. They did however, in 1998, release the far more engaged and angry anti-FN call to arms La flamme (the flame), earning themselves a brief mention in this article. La flamme is a reference to the FN’s logo, a flame in the colours of the French flag. The logo was directly copied from Italy’s neo-Fascist party, the MSI. A far greater reggae tune though was Raggasonic’s exceptional 1995 outing Bleu blanc rouge.

Formed by Big Red and Daddy Mory in the outskirts of Paris in 1990, Raggasonic were one of the first dancehall acts in France. An early break came when they featured on MC Solaar’s Ragga Jam alongside a 14-year-old Kery James. Their tune Sors ton gun brought them to national fame after it was included on an album of music inspired by the seminal 1995 film La Haine. The same year, they released their eponymous debut, a superb collection of conscious ragga which arguably remains today one of the very best French reggae records. The track Bleu blanc rouge plays around with the colours of the French flag to criticise the rising far-right ideology in the country. Le Pen gets a name-check when Daddy Mory says he uses a microphone the same way he would an uzi to eliminate the FN, Le Pen and all the Parisian fascists.

A few months before the release of Raggasonic, the FN won their first ever municipal mayoralties in the three southern towns of Toulon, Marignane, and Orange, with a fourth, Vitrolles following in 1997. All four towns are spitting distance from Marseille where yet another reggae act, Massilia Sound System responded with their 1997 tune Ma ville est malade (my town is ill). Opening with a dedication to volunteers campaigning against the FN in the four towns above, the lyrics go on to outline how Marseille has been built by immigrants since the antiquities, before summing up the things that bring Marseillais from different backgrounds together, namely the accent, the footie team, community, and Provençal hospitality. The song closes with the repeated line “If we love our town, then together we say no to the Front!”

In spite of Massilia’s best efforts, the FN took home 15% of the popular vote in the 1997 legislative elections. In Marseille however, they gained a staggering 30% of the vote. Two residents of France’s second city were so dismayed by this result that they stayed up all night, just writing. Come dawn, they had a song ready to record…

Manifeste - Shurik’n

Shurik’n and Akhenaton are the two main rappers in conscious rap group IAM, who I introduced back in the Marseille Geo-Disco. After seeing the news in 1997, they wrote the lyrics to what would become Manifeste, eventually released on Shurik’n’s 1998 solo record Où je vis.

The tune is built around a sample of the Love Theme from Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus, here sounding surprisingly eerie as it’s paired with a sputtering beat and the two rappers’ anxious tone. Akhenaton starts strong, establishing his credentials as the son of immigrants from a poor part of Naples who came to France as a generation seeking a better life. Instead, they were met with exclusion, taxation, and addiction. Following a theme of percentages, he takes a variety of pot-shots at the upper echelons of French society before landing on his point half way through the verse: “Here, the flame did 30%. // let me count, that means one in three blokes we’ll need to slap.” as humorously as he introduces the subject, it’s immediately made serious: “the day after the election, I fear for my own.” Suddenly the abstract statistics and percentages are brought rapidly down to earth as the two rappers translate them deftly into their day-to-day experience. Shurik’n picks up the sentiment in his verse giving more space to the idea one in three people he’s seeing on a daily basis are targeting him as the child of Malagasy and Réunionnais parents. He can’t look at anybody the same way anymore, a feeling shared by several million people around the country every time the FN took another step up in the polls. He closes with a powerful ode to multiculturalism: “The pride of hip-hop will not be the shame of the nation.”

21/04 - IAM

I have a very vivid ten-minute snippet of memory from my childhood. It sees me, aged seven, in our kitchen, the telly is on in the corner but it’s the news so I’m ignoring it. My parents however, are staring into it, faces lined with deep concern, oblivious to whatever nonsense I’m spouting. I can now pinpoint the time and date of this memory: It’s 8pm on Sunday 21st April 2002. The presidential election polls had just closed. Everyone expected the incumbent Jacques Chirac to be joined in the second round by Socialist prime minister Lionel Jospin. Instead, the news-reader pronounced four words that would send shock-waves through the country, still felt today: Jean. Marie. Le. Pen.

Like in 1997, IAM wasted no time in releasing 21/04, named for the historic date. The production here is a little more involved than the urgently released Manifeste, in fact, 21/04 samples Manifeste in amongst jack boots, sirens and a superb use of both Al Green and Big Daddy Kane. In the first two verses of the song, Akhenaton and Shurik’n wield their typically high-brow penmanship calling out fellow descendants of immigrants who voted for Le Pen. In a short third verse, Freeman is rather less poetic, drawing direct comparisons between Le Pen and Hitler, most notably the tried and tested “Hitler also made it through with votes” line. He does however land one of the most damning lines of the tune: “It’s not a protest vote when you know about Dachau” Using the memory of the first Nazi concentration camp to call out one of the most common excuses used for voting far-right. Looking back at the events of April 21st, Freeman’s route one comparisons with Hitler may not have actually been so heavy-handed as they initially seemed.

Shortly after the first round results, Le Pen delivered one of his best remembered speeches. Uncharacteristically, he pivoted his usual exclusionary tone to one of inclusion and unity: “I call all French women and men, whatever their race, religion, or social class, to rally for this historic chance of national recovery!” Perhaps a new direction, had the weight of the moment given him a fresh sense of responsibility? Of course not. Anybody as well versed in French history as Le Pen will have balked at those last two words, last heard in the mouth of maréchal Philippe Pétain. The man who headed up the collaborationist Vichy régime in Nazi-occupied northern France between 1940 and 1944. Pétain called his ideology ‘Révolution nationale’. The full breakdown of this vision is beyond the scope of this piece but its main policies revolved around a rejection of democracy and the introduction of state-endorsed antisemitism. When discussing his grand plan, Pétain often used the terms ‘national recovery’ (my best translation of ‘redressement national’ parroted by Le Pen in his 21/04 address.) He also wanted to change France’s motto “Liberté, Égalité, Franternité” to “Travail, Famille, Patrie” (work, family, fatherland). In his 2018 memoirs, Le Pen vehemently defended Pétain and his regime.

Jacques Chirac took home a resounding 82% of the second round vote as French liberals pinched their noses and cast their ballots for him. Nonetheless, the FN had now moved in from the fringes and established itself firmly as a legitimate party at the heart of French politics.

That’s all for today folks! Sign up now to get next week’s conclusion straight to your inbox! We’ll be meeting Le Pen’s daughter Marine, and listening to plenty more superb music.

Further Resources!

Books

• Cette chanson qui emmerde le Front national (2007), Baptiste Vignol

Podcasts

• Jean-Marie Le Pen, l’obsession nationale - all episodes

• Mémoire d’un monde - episodes:

  • Interroger Jean-Marie Le Pen était toujours une épreuve

  • Le jour où Jean-Marie Le Pen est passé au second tour

• Anatomie d’une décision - series: Le RN, un paria gagnant

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An emaciated Algerian man sits in his underwear, trembling, eyes dead, as a French paratrooper rubs him down with a cloth and two more clear up in the background. They’re in a dark room, the walls are covered with tools and chains, two surgical tables are pushed up against the wall. A closer look reveals raw burn marks on the man’s chest. The vacant look on his face flits between trauma and shame as a single tear runs down his cheek. Three more paratroopers enter the room as the one with the cloth greets them “he’s finally spat it out.” It’s clear that we’re witnessing the aftermath of a horrific torture scene.

So begins Gillo Pontecorvo’s seminal 1966 film The Battle of Algiers. Whilst lightly fictionalised, the scene was written based on myriad first-hand accounts of torture carried out by French troupes during the Algerian war of independence from 1954 to 1962. These torture techniques were long denied by the French government until president Emmanuel Macron formally acknowledged them (albeit without stretching to an apology) as late as 2018. When I was attending school in France, the Algerian chapter of the country’s history was barely touched in class and when it was, the discourse was centred on early ‘civilising missions’, barbarity from the Algerian side, and France eventually benevolently granting their independence. These scenes of torture however, whilst ignored in my education, are crucial to understanding the state of French politics today. They are crucial because it was whilst he was personally taking part in these war crimes, behind closed doors in Algiers, that a young paratrooper named Jean-Marie Le Pen started forming the beginnings of an ideology that would, in time, coalesce into a political party, Le Front National, later inherited and renamed Rassemblement National by his daughter Marine, who, at time of writing, looks like she may well be leading the party to power in the 2027 presidential election.

In recent years, RN leader Marine Le Pen and party president, the hugely popular Jordan Bardella have gone to great lengths to sanitise the image of their party leading a project of “dédiabolisation” (best translated as ‘detoxification’ or more literally ‘de-demonisation’). The fact remains however, that behind the acceptable veneer the outfit now presents, their belief-system is built around a core deeply rooted in, and inextricably linked to a history of war crimes, colonialism, collaborationism, homophobia, racism, and holocaust-denial.

Of course, this has been the subject of much music over the years. Join me for a journey through the terrifying story of France’s far-right (or as they pleasingly call it, the extreme-right) as told through the songs railing against it. I’ve split the tale into three parts: Today will lay a lot of groundwork as I explain the political machinations and context for the FN’s early years. Next week, I’ll bring a lot more of the music to the fore, discussing some of the tunes and artists that have come to define French music for several generations. I’ll then bring everything to a close with the Marine Le Pen years, dédiabolisation, and a little peek into the future.

I will keep one playlist going for all three articles. So as to avoid any spoilers, I’ll simply add the relevant tunes each week as the email is sent out. Sign up now to avoid missing out!

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Oh! De Gaulle - Djaafer Beck

In 1962, Folkways Records released Freedom Fighters of Algeria, an album of field recorded protest music performed by a variety of soloists, an unidentified orchestra, and a choir of combatants from the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN). Released in the same year Algeria gained its independence from France, this is a superb artefact of the revolutionary spirit rife in the country at the time. Two of the album’s eight songs, General De Gaulle and Oh! De Gaulle are aimed at Charles De Gaulle, French national hero, wartime leader, and famously tall chap (Indeed, the opening line of the song General De Gaulle goes “A tree walks in the streets”) who at the time was despised in equal measure by both the FLN and the nascent French far-right movement. Let’s rewind a second, because to understand the RN today, it is crucial to understand France’s relationship with Algeria during the first half of the 20th century. In the UK, where I’m writing this, we tend to see former colonies as countries we invaded, occupied, then left. The Algerian case is very different: France invaded the country in 1830, but in 1848 they did something unusual for European powers at the time, they integrated Algeria into metropolitan France. Algeria was under French rule for 132 years, but for 115 of those years, it was, on paper at least, just France. For French people back home, Algeria had been sold as an unoccupied idyll, an extension of the sunny south. And the few people who did exist there were simply seen as uncivilised natives, barely more than curiosities.

I’ve gone into more detail on the Algerian war of independence in my previous articles on the music of Oran and the history of raï, but I’ll reiterate the broader headlines in case you’re new here: In 1954, the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) started coordinating a series of guerilla attacks and bombing campaigns on majority French neighbourhoods. The French army retaliated with blanket bombing of civilians and the widespread torture described in our introduction. The rising tension boiled over in the bloody Battle of Algiers of 1956-1957. Back in France, the entire political spectrum was incensed. As far as the French were concerned, the FLN were effectively invading France. Anti-colonial voices, in as much as they existed at all, were then the reserve of fringe and anarchist groups. In an act of desperation, president René Coty brought back Charles de Gaulle as prime minister, hoping he could address the crisis. Having retired from public life in 1946, De Gaulle returned, and promised the French Algerians he would protect them, he then pivoted and eventually granted Algeria their independence in 1962, an act still seen today by the far-right as one of great treachery. (It was during this time that French right-wing extremists conspired to assassinate De Gaulle thus inspiring the 1971 book (and subsequent film and series) The Day of the Jackal.) The immediate aftermath of these events saw De Gaulle commission a new constitution approved by voters in a referendum, and establish the fifth republic (the one we’re currently enjoying); he was then elected president and remained in the position until 1969. This paragraph may be a little dense, but the perceived betrayal of the relinquishing of Algeria was the single most important event in the radicalisation of one Jean-Marie Le Pen.

Jean-Marie Le Pen was a life-long ideological demagogue, but in his early years, prior to the Algerian war, he was also a shameless opportunist. As a young man, he had decided he wanted to pursue a career in right-wing politics and, seeing the Poujadist (right-wing anti-taxation and antisemitic) party gaining steam, he jumped on board. He was promptly elected to the National Assembly in 1956 aged 27. At the time, he was the youngest member ever elected to the assembly, a record much later held by his granddaughter Marion Maréchal, elected in 2012, aged 22. Amusingly, in spite of Le Pen repeating this fact his whole life, he was actually beaten to the title by André Chène a communist seven months his junior, elected the same year.

The Poujadist movement proved to be a flash in the pan however, and Le Pen turned his attention to the situation unfolding in Algeria. He saw the opportunity to marry his pro-colonial instincts to a then hugely popular cause in the public eye. Initially standing on the sidelines as a commentator, he eventually signed up as a volunteer paratrooper in 1957.

Parachutiste - Maxime le Forestier

Maxime Le Forestier started his military service in 1969 with the parachute regiment, the same unit in which Jean-Marie Le Pen cut his teeth in both Indochina and Algeria. By the time Le Forestier joined, Le Pen had left the army, but it gave him the same first-hand experience, although he wouldn’t see action as he was dismissed for lack of discipline. In contrast to Le Pen, Le Forestier found himself leaning even further to the left, with his army experience helping him develop a staunch anti-militaristic outlook. One of his more famous songs is Parachutiste (paratrooper) inspired by his time in the army. It featured on his debut album Mon Frère, released in October 1972, the very same month that Le Pen founded his political party Le Front National.

The song’s lyrics depict the experience of a young paratrooper being conditioned by war to see only two types of people: the good and the terrorists. Rewarded for his violence, the young lad is drawn into the specialised field of torture for which he is honoured and decorated. As the war draws to a close, the paratrooper finds himself at a loose end as his lust for blood remains unquenched. The final line of the song suggests a solution: “I think the police are recruiting.”

The song was originally written in 1971. Whilst Le Pen was already in the public eye by then, he had yet to ascend to national notoriety. Le Forestier never mentioned Le Pen and it’s likely the song isn’t specifically about him. The fact that it could be however, speaks to prevalence of Le Pen’s experience and the potential for radicalisation within the French army. The song also illustrates the widespread nature of French torture and extremism in Algeria, still rife in the late 60s. Le Pen’s radicalisation was an all too common issue.

Les Fachos Reviendront - René Fourré

Today, Marine Le Pen, Jordan Bardella, and their coterie of aides spend a huge amount of time dismissing the labels ‘Nazi’ and ‘Fascist’ often thrown their way by the press and public alike. They insist they are inappropriate, and in fairness, these are terms which tend to be chucked around a little lightly in the current media landscape. In this instance however, they are in fact wholly appropriate as the RN was founded by Nazis. I don’t mean this in the exaggeratory way lefties sometimes use to speak about centrists, I mean it in a semantically accurate way that the party was co-founded by former members of the Waffen-SS.

In the 1960s, after his return from Algeria, Le Pen set about attempting to consolidate the fractured far-right vote. The peak of his achievements in that period came as Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour’s campaign manager during his bid for president in 1965. Le Pen successfully rallied 5.2% of the vote, the highest ever share for a French far-right candidate at the time (unless we count Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte who picked up 74.3% on his Bonapartist ticket back in 1848). This election would be the last won by Charles De Gaulle, although Le Pen and his cronies were still so furious with him over Algeria, that in the second round, they officially endorsed Socialist candidate François Mitterrand! Tixier-Vignancour is the first of a few colourful characters I’m sadly going to have to skate over in the interest of brevity, but I will tell you he is now most famous for stealing maréchal Pétain’s coffin in 1973! Perhaps a story for another time…

During this period, Le Pen also founded and ran SERP, a recording company which specialised in political speeches and songs. Following the communist model of self-publishing political messages to circumvent censorship, he began releasing vinyl records of songs and speeches he deemed of historical importance. Whilst SERP did release songs from across the revolutionary political spectrum, one of his more famous albums was Le IIIe Reich: Voix et chants de la révolution allemande (the IIIrd Reich, voices and songs of the German revolution), a compilation of recordings from the Third Reich. It features the voices of such stars as Herman Göring, Joseph Goebbels, and one Adolf Hitler. The latter also appeared on the cover of the record, the back of which featured a blurb reminding the listener that Hitler had come to power thanks to popular support, a detail of history often ignored in its retelling, and one that this record seeks to redress. The SERP label would be handed to Le Pen’s daughter Marie-Caroline (mother of Marion Maréchal) who would run it until its dissolution in 2000.

By the time the 1970s rolled round, Le Pen had proved himself as a canny operator and the terrain was set. He co-founded the FN in 1972 with leading members of the French neo-fascist movement Ordre Nouveau, in particular Pierre Bousquet and Léon Gaultier, both of whom had spent WWII respectively as a section leader and officer in the Waffen-SS. The former became the FN’s first treasurer; the later played a leading role in SERP. Initially, they bided their time, organising, and forming policies. In 1974, Le Pen made his first of five eventual bids for president. He secured less than 1% of the vote, barely registering in the national psyche. After his defeat he made his final opportunist pivot, turning away from his now slightly dated pro-colonial messaging, instead moving his racism to the centre of his rhetoric. Another co-founder, François Duprat played a hugely important role as the FN’s communications director. Having studied amongst others, our very own Enoch Powell, he leaned heavily on the populist crutch of anti-immigration with such pearls as “One million unemployed is one million too many immigrants!” Duprat was also one of the very first holocaust negationists in France, a conspiracy in which Le Pen would later prove especially adept.

With a new scapegoat, a keenly honed populist presentation, and pitch-perfect messaging to boot, Le Pen began campaigning in earnest.

When Belgian pianist René Fourré sang in 1977 “The Fascists are waking up // They’re getting angry // They’re getting ready”, he likely didn’t know quite how correct he was. Released as a B-side to his single La Chanson de Sisteron, Les Fachos Reviendront (the fashes will return) is a jaunty albeit eerie prophecy of Le Pen’s breakthrough result in 1984…

Porcherie - Bérurier Noir

If you’ve ever spent time in France in the lead up to an election, there’s a good chance you’ll have witnessed our friends over the Chanel taking part in their favourite national sport: Demonstrating. If so, there’s an equally strong chance you’ll have heard or seen daubed on a wall the anti-right wing rallying cry “La jeunesse emmerde le Front National!” There’s no elegant translations, but it’s roughly “the youth says ‘fuck you’ to the Front National!” Still in broad use today, this slogan has its origins in a relatively obscure Punk song from the 1980s.

Bérurier Noir have existed in some form or another since 1978, but the final formation and the name were landed on in 1983 with just singer Fanfan and guitarist Loran who would play together accompanied only by a drum machine. The drum machine, still anathema to rock music at the time, gave the music a frenetic edge which ramps up the tension and adds to the overall unease of their deeply political lyrics. It also offered a genuinely original sound, thus refreshing an increasingly tired Parisian punk scene beginning to lose its way a little at the time. Les Béru came in with their rejuvenating energy and set the tone for the decade to come. (This cold electronic punk sound was pioneered by an equally virulent anti-fascist band Métal Urbain whose 1981 album Les hommes morts sont dangereux I cannot recommend enough!)

In 1984 Le Pen would enjoy his first significant electoral result, claiming nearly 11% of the vote at the European parliamentary elections, meaning 11 of France’s 81 MEPs were now from the FN. This set a fire under Fanfan and Loran who decided to focus their message. A year later, Bérurier Noir released the song that would arguably define their entire legacy. Originally, Porcherie was a classic angsty punk reaction to the general status quo, a chaotic call to arms decrying the state of the world, nothing much more precise than that. It wouldn’t be until a little later that the song would take on the political significance that it still has today. Although the seeds were planted: The intro to the song is a sample of a Le Pen speech which the band cut off with pig noises.

When playing the song live, they would always end it with repeated chants of “La jeunesse emmerde le Front National!” This version of the song would be immortalised on their 1990 live album Viva Bertaga where the final verse is also preceded by a translated line from the Crisis tune White Youth “We are black, we are white, together we are dynamite”.

Concerto pour détraqués, more than any record, embodies the Bérurier sound. Where their previous effort, the also excellent Macadam Massacre indulged in the darkness of their lyrics, here the band have found a balance with some more light hearted tunes offering a counterpoint to the themes of societal failure. This is a record which remains vital today as one of the finest examples of tongue-in-cheek French punk rock.

Douce France - Carte de Séjour

In the wake of the FN’s success at the European elections, a group of left-leaning students and activists rallied together and formed SOS Racism, an organisation that has since become one of the largest NGOs of its kind in Europe. Their tagline “Touche pas a mon pote” (don’t touch my mate) started appearing all over France, as marches and protests became a part of daily life. The biggest of these marches took place in 1985, culminating in Paris’ Place de la Concorde for a huge free concert, attended by an estimated 500,000 people. The show included performances from huge French stars such as Téléphone, Indochine, Francis Cabrel, and Les Rita Mitsouko alongside international bands Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, Fine Young Cannibals, Steel Pulse, and Gilberto Gil who wrote an original song in French for the occasion (I’m so glad I’ve started doing playlists so I can share this delight with you!). One of the highlights of the day came from Carte de Séjour, an Algerian rock band from Lyon who that day debuted one of the songs that would come to define their career: a cover of Charles Trenet’s Douce France.

The next little bit of writing (not withstanding a few minor edits) originally appeared in my article exploring the life of Rachid Taha, Carte de Séjour’s frontman, but it is such a crucial part of the French anti-right-wing movement, that this article would have been incomplete without it.

Trenet wrote Douce France in 1943 when the country was in the midst of Nazi occupation and ravaged from the general destruction of WWII. The song’s patriotic lyrics wistfully evoke the pastoral idyll of Trenet’s youth as he yearns for the good old days. It was originally a fairly innocuous song aimed at raising French morale in wartime. After the war however, it was misinterpreted as a pro-Vichy anthem. To this day, the French remain confused as to the true meaning of the tune with the full political spectrum claiming it as anything from a dewy-eyed ode to a France free of foreigners to a radical and anti-Nazi protest anthem. Carte de Séjour however, saw it for what it was: one of the nation’s most beloved snippets of heritage, and thus a perfect opportunity to assert their right to being French.

You can see their first ever performance of the song as the SOS Racism gig was filmed. From the stage on Place de la Concorde, Taha affects an exaggerated Algerian accent as he sings the opening lines of the song a cappella. Revelling in the discomfort, he gleefully interrupts his singing: “Some of you are cringing aren’t you? We’re toying with [French] heritage now. Well it’s ours too!” before launching into a brand new Chaâbi-infused arrangement of the song which crucially, leaves the lyrics untouched as Taha snarls them with almost aggressive irony.

Taha was born in Oran in 1958, when Algeria was still an integral part of France and was divided into French regions. In spite of this, Algerians born during this time weren’t afforded French, or even equal citizenship rights. So when he sings “Douce France, cher pays de mon enfance” (sweet France, dear country of my childhood), he’s emphatically asserting his claim to France, French culture, and the French identity he was always denied.

As we close in on the end of the 1980s, Le Pen and his FN party are polling better than ever and the cultural backlash to his progress is picking up speed. Join me next week as I run through the 1990s and early 2000s taking a closer look at some of the era-defining tunes that were released in response to the rise of the far-right. Where today has been heavy on the politics, next week will be much heavier on the music as we listen to some timeless hip-hop, reggae, chanson, and metal.

Further Resources!

Books

• Cette chanson qui emmerde le Front national (2007), Baptiste Vignol

• Carte de de Séjour (2025), Philippe Hanus

Podcasts

• Jean-Marie Le Pen, l'obsession nationale - all episodes

• Mémoire d’un monde - episodes:

  • Interroger Jean-Marie Le Pen était toujours une épreuve

  • Le jour où Jean-Marie Le Pen est passé au second tour

• Anatomie d’une décision - series: Le RN, un paria gagnant

Films

• The Battle of Algiers (1966), Gillo Pontecorvo

Please support my work!

If you enjoy my writing, please subscribe for free.

If you can spare a few quid, please subscribe for a small monthly donation.

If you think anyone else would like it, please share it far and wide.

Subscribe now

I fully intend on keeping the Sunday long-reads entirely free as I want the knowledge, history, stories, and excellent music to travel as far as possible. The research behind each article however requires a lot of time and resources (books, research trips, film rentals, gig tickets, exhibition tickets… etc.), not to mention the countless hours of dyslexically writing and editing myself.

Paid subscriptions help cover those costs and allow me to dedicate more time to producing richer, better-researched articles week after week.

My ambition is to deliver 52 substantial pieces a year as well as the odd bonus. If you reckon this is worth supporting, please sign up for one of the suggested amounts, or enter a custom number.

If on the other hand, you can’t stretch to financial support right now, no worries, Noise Melt will remain free. This isn’t a transaction so much as collective support. Those who can afford it, help keep it accessible for everyone else.

Subscribe now

If you’re already subscribed, I greatly appreciate you. Thank you.

A few months back, I put together a list of my favourite albums inspired by birds to help spread a little bit of lightness into the world. As it transpired, this has been one of my most popular articles. So let’s make it a regular feature! This week, as a reward for making it through the heavy America and Northern Territory series, here are ten records and compositions about, inspired by, and featuring bees. Enjoy!

Songhive: Beelore & Folksong in the British Isles - Various Artists

Now, I know I said this is a good mental health article designed to uplift your day, but I’d be doing myself a disservice if I didn’t include a short paragraph on the plight of the bee un the UK. Thankfully, folk musician Rowan Piggott has given me the perfect opportunity to do so with his 2020 compilation Songhive, and album designed to raise both awareness and funds for the bees and featuring a whole host of folk musicians interpreting a beautifully selected collection of traditional songs from throughout history which deal with different aspects of bees.

Bees are a crucial part of our ecosystem: As pollinators, they are either directly or indirectly responsible for vast amounts of our global food crop networks, either through directs fruit and vegetable pollination or through livestock food pollination. This means they affect our vegetable, meat, and dairy networks. Natural pollination by bees saves the agricultural industry estimated billions of dollars globally every year. They are also crucial propagators of wildflowers, trees and shrubs, all of which provide food and habitat for other insects, birds, and mammals. Oh, and they make delicious honey! We nonetheless use highly toxic, and in many cases illegal pesticides which kill both their sources of food and the bees themselves… Alright, I said just one paragraph! Rant over, on to the loveliness now.

Scherzo Fantastique - Igor Stravinsky

Recommended recording: Pierre Boulez with the Cleveland Orchestra (1994)

In 1901, Maurice Maeterlinck published his short book La Vie des Abeilles, an approachable philosophical text exploring the lives and intricate societies of bees. The book caught the attention of a young Igor Stravinsky who found himself so inspired, he decided to write a piece of music in response to it. In 1907, he wrote to his teacher and mentor Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (yes, the guy who wrote Flight of the Bumblebee!) about his desire to compose a “fantastic scherzo” entitled Bees. Once the piece was completed in 1908, he was able to send a copy to Rimsky-Korsakov who gave it his seal of approval just before his death the same year. He sadly never got to see it performed. As for Stravinsky, this would prove the catalysing composition for one of the most exciting careers in 20th century music. This was only the third piece of music he ever wrote.

In 1909, a performance of Scherzo Fantastique (as it was now called) and his short composition Feu D’Artifice in Saint Petersburg was enjoyed by ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev. He was so impressed by the two pieces that he invited the young composer to orchestrate some scores for his Ballets Russes company. This would eventually lead to Diaghilev commissioning The Firebird in 1910, thus putting Stravinsky on the global stage. In total, Diaghilev commissioned three ballets from him: The Firebird, Petrushka, and The Rite of Spring, the latter of which would fundamentally shift the course of Western culture… all because bees are so fascinating!

Wið ymbe -Muco

Coming to prominence under the Book of Voices handle on Instagram, Muco has made a name for himself interpreting old and middle English Folk songs, verse, and poems in beautiful rural settings, usually accompanying himself on inānga, a type of Burundian zither. Muco’s repertoire ranges roughly from the 5th century, before the Kingdom of England existed, to around the 14th. He sings all the songs in the original Old English and Middle English in which they were written, infusing them with his own Burundian heritage via his original inānga melodies.

His debut Soþlice, released in 2025 draws from myriad sources across Britain and sub-Roman Britain. Particular highlights included the haunting Bede’s Death Song, a five-line poem, ostensibly the Venerable Bede’s final words before his death in the year 735; and the superb Wið ymbe, the subject of this entry. Wið ymbe is an Anglo-Saxon metrical charm designed to help beekeepers sooth aggravated swarms. Dating from either the 10th or 11th century, it give detailed instructions for the ritual a beekeeper must perform before pronouncing the charm. I especially like the lyric that refers to bees as ‘sīgewīf’ which translates as ‘victory women’. And in the unlikely event the charm doesn’t work, Muco’s gentle voice would no doubt suffice to calm the angriest of bees.

One - BE

In 2015, multi-sensory artist Wolfgang Buttress conceptualised The Hive, a huge 17m tall structure inspired by the inside of a beehive. Initially created for the Milan Expo, it can now be found in the middle of the wildflower meadow at London’s Kew Gardens. If you’re lucky enough to visit The Hive, you’ll hear a gentle beautiful soundtrack playing inside shimmering along to the hundreds of LED lights installed throughout the space. The soundscape was composed by Buttress with help from Kevin Bales and Tony Foster, inspired by the thousands of bees found on site. Every sound in the piece is in the key of C, the frequency at which bees buzz. They released the composition as and album, One, credited to BE, in 2016.

To Be - Karman Line Collective

Some eight years later, the three artists from the previous record came together again, with the addition of Justin Goodyer, to create a soundtrack to Buttress’ new immersive exhibition, BEES: A Survival Story at the World Museum in Liverpool. To make this album, they were no longer simply inspired by the bees, they actually used the bees!

Over the next three years, they used high grade field recording equipment to record hundreds of hours of bee sounds, from flight to waggle dance, to noises referred to in technical language as purring, tooting, and quacking. These recordings would form the basis for the soundtrack and subsequent album To Be, released in 2025.

Raw recording as well as heavily manipulated ones sit side by side in this mesmerising ambient artwork. Additional production includes cello, voice, guitar, trumpet, and saw, all blended into a stunning 37 minute tune which rather novelly follows a Pop song structure (verse, chorus, middle eight… etc.) Despite being the soundtrack for a multi-sensory live experience, this is an exceptional album in its own right.

Bee-Sharp HoneyBee - Rae Howell

Rae Howell, the Aussie composer who writes music inspired by bees, is absolutely not to be confused with Rae Howells, the Welsh poet who writes poems inspired by bees. I know, what are the odds? Anyway, Howell (without the ‘s’) began recording bees in 2023, amassing hours of recordings. She dedicated her time to analysing the spectrograms thrown up by her recordings, in particular the intricate rhythms, and pitches of the bees’ waggle dances.

To me, the waggle dance is one of the most fascinating things in the natural world. For those of you new to bee communication, it is a particular movement, or dance, used by honey bees to communicate to the hive where good food, water, or even shelter might be found. The angle, shape, duration, and frequency of the dance each indicate the direction, distance, and quantity and quality of the food.

Howell’s recording formed the basis for her composition Bee-Sharp HoneyBee, which in turn formed the basis for a live multi-media performance in which the piece was played alongside animations and a live audiovisual feed from inside a beehive. Eventually, the piece was recorded by Howell and her Sunwrae String Orchestra, and released in 2023.

Season of the Dark Hive - Tabernis

Hailing from Belgium, Tabernis are one of those bands locked in their own lore. Presenting as a pair of Medieval beekeepers, they play in the full garb (multi-layered white tunics and protective head baskets). All the blurb around them is about how mystical they are and how they’re carrying forth ancient traditions “The hum crossed the veil. From age to age, carried by breath and memory, the Dark Hive endured”… you get the drift. Thankfully though, they have the music to back up the pantomime!

They’ve only released the one record to date, Season of the Dark Hive, from April 2026, and it is superb! The duo is made up of Noxifer on Medieval bagpipes and Umbrae on davul (a massive double-headed drum). They are also sporadically joined by string players, credited as Dark Monks. The record is a blend of originals and revitalised 12th and 13th century folk tunes. Their sound is seemingly informed by a genuine interest in the historical context of their music as well as incredible skill on their respective instruments. Add to this an omnipresent drone shifting from electronics to bee recordings, and you have a fabulously compelling Medieval doom folk record!

Tome I: Apidae - Vígljós

Now that we’re familiar with Medieval beekeeper aesthetic, let’s jump into the world of black metal. The campest of all the metal genres. There are actually several black metal bands that dress as Medieval beekeepers, and rightly so, they do look really cool! But only one (as far as I know) has extended the vibe into their music.

Vígljós formed in Basel around 2023 and produce music based around bees. Their debut Tome I: Apidae, released in 2024 follows the life cycle of apidae (the scientific name for the broader bee family). This is a sensational album of lo-fi grinding black metal. Singer L howls at a frequency which often blends into the general crackle of the mix as his bandmates J on drums, Xenos Iskalon on guitar swarm angrily around him. The buzzing heart of the sound however, comes from Aorrta whose filthy mellotron polyphonies give Vígljós their flooring original identity. They followed this up in 2025 with Tome II: Ignis Sacer, an album inspired by ergot. Who knows, maybe we’ll do an article on fungi-inspired music at some point…

Bee Frequency Electronics - Bioni Samp

I’m realising as I write, that this article features substantially more costumes than the bird one… Bioni Samp is a mysterious artist, electronic musician, and beekeeper who also wears the outfit on stage, albeit not a Medieval one.

In 2006, he began work on a home-made modular synth which, in 2020 would be finished and named the Hive Synthesiser. Made from recycled electrical components enclosed in Tupperware boxes, it uses honey as an organic electrical resistor. The point of the synth is to emulate the vast array of bee sounds he heard when tending his hives. Over the years, he has performed with and recorded the Hive Synth creating hours of bee-inspired experimental techno and ambient.

Released in 2019 on cassette, Bee Frequency Electronics is a collection of recordings of live improvisations on the Hive Synthesiser.

Eric the Half a Bee - Monty Python & Neil Innes

When Eric Praline is called crazy for requesting a licences for his pet halibut and pet half-bee (it had an accident), both called Eric, he demands that the licensing officer listen to this, a short song exploring the complex ontological question of wether a half-bee can be said to be, or not to be an entire bee.

Possibly my favourite Monty Python song, Eric the Half a Bee, released in 1972, pushes philosophical discourse to breaking point with the delightfully absurd notion of a half bee. Using increasingly ridiculous language, it asks what defines the nature of being, gently pulling apart years of ontological and metaphysical studies that have led up to it. I’ll leave you today with the great existential question: “Half a bee, philosophically, must, ipso facto, half not be. But half the bee has got to be Vis a vis, its entity. D'you see?”

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I fully intend on keeping the Sunday long-reads entirely free as I want the knowledge, history, stories, and excellent music to travel as far as possible. The research behind each article however requires a lot of time and resources (books, research trips, film rentals, gig tickets, exhibition tickets… etc.), not to mention the countless hours of dyslexically writing and editing myself.

Paid subscriptions help cover those costs and allow me to dedicate more time to producing richer, better-researched articles week after week.

My ambition is to deliver 52 substantial pieces a year as well as the odd bonus. If you reckon this is worth supporting, please sign up for one of the suggested amounts, or enter a custom number.

If on the other hand, you can’t stretch to financial support right now, no worries, Noise Melt will remain free. This isn’t a transaction so much as collective support. Those who can afford it, help keep it accessible for everyone else.

Subscribe now

If you’re already subscribed, I greatly appreciate you. Thank you.

And on the off chance you have found this obscure corner of the internet, welcome!

Accompanying Playlist

The first of Gurrumul’s songs I heard was Wiyathul. I distinctly remember the beginnings of emotion being stirred up by the intro’s hummed lines before being sucker-punched by the clarity of his vocals, I wasn’t prepared for the sheer beauty of his singing voice. I didn’t know what he was singing about, or indeed anything else about him. All I had was this extraordinary piece of music bringing me close to tears, and I didn’t really know why.

Over the past two weeks, we’ve been enjoying a plethora of excellent albums from Australia’s Northern Territory starting with seminal rockers Warumpi Band, then looking through the myriad styles and cultures scattered around the vastness of the Outback. Today, we will be working through the life of arguably Northern Territory’s finest artist, and seeing what happens when Aboriginal art is processed through the Western music industrial machine.

Djarridjarri - Saltwater Band

Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu was born on Galiwin’ku in 1971. Blind from birth, he was drawn to sound from a very young age, mucking about with anything that made noise. At the age of four, he taught himself to play a toy keyboard. Throughout his childhood, the community encouraged his seemingly natural musicality, acquiring and building all sorts of instruments for him. Before long, he was proficient on accordion, a variety of percussion instruments, yiḏaki, and guitar. Like many lefties before and after him, he only had access to a right-handed instrument so was forced to develop a unique playing style, holding the guitar upside down, a technique that would endure throughout his career. What defines Gurrumul more than anything however, is his extraordinary vocal ability. Raised on the songs and cries of ceremonial life, he soon joined the local mission choir. By the time he hit 18, in 1989, Gurrumul was already an incredible musician. This is when he joined a then unnamed Yolŋu folk band who were touring Northern Territory as the support act for Swamp Jockeys.

Six years later, in 1995, having sampled the delights of national superstardom, Gurrumul left the folk band (don’t worry, we’ll get to them in a second!) and returned home to Galiwin’ku. Here he formed his own outfit called Saltwater Band.

In the late-1990s, two lads by the names of Mark Grose and Michael Hohnen had noticed in their travels the incredible richness of the music scattered around the disparate communities of Northern Territory, much of which was remaining in said communities. They decided it was a crying shame that such tunes weren’t being shared far and wide across Australia and even further. After encountering Saltwater Band, they decided to take action and founded Skinnyfish Music, a business and label aimed at promoting the work of Indigenous musicians. In Grose’s words, “we had a simple plan: Get Aboriginal music to Aboriginal people. And the simplest way to do that was get the band in a bus and head for the bush.” and so Saltwater Band started touring and released their debut Gapu Damurrun on Skinnyfish in 1999.

Their followup, the excellent Djarridjarri came in 2004. Here their sound is at its most natural, deftly weaving reggae and American R&B influences into a traditional Yolŋu sound. By this point, Grose and Hohnen had started whispering suggestions of a solo career into Gurrumul’s ear. Initially reluctant, he would eventually give it a go in 2008, although a year later, Saltwater Band released a third and final record, Malk.

Tribal Voice – Yothu Yindi

On 15^th October 2023, Yuin rapper Nooky opened his regular Triple J radio show Blak Out with the above statement before playing the 1991 hit Treaty by Yothu Yindi on repeat for the entirety of his one-hour slot.

The previous day had seen Australians head to the polls and cast their vote on the Indigenous Voice Referendum in which they were asked whether or not to alter the Australian constitution to give Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders a formal voice in governmental decision-making processes. The proposed voice was simply an advisory body to help include First Nation perspectives when lawmaking. The proposal was however declined by the population following an incendiary hate-fuelled campaign from Australia’s right wing. The incredibly effective slogan “If you don’t know, vote no.” allowed disinterested people to remain disinterested. As Baker Boy put it when promoting his single Thick Skin: “[…] mottos like 'if you don't know vote no' [are] encouraging ignorance. It highlighted the everyday experience of being Yolŋu, being Indigenous in this country, and that hit me hard.”

In spite of its released in 1991, over three decades earlier, Nooky’s choice of song was incredibly relevant that day in 2023. Treaty was originally written in direct response to an unfulfilled promise made in 1988 by prime minister at the time Bob Hawke to conclude a treaty with Aboriginal Australians, in his words “by 1990”. The treaty in question would have formally recognised the history, culture, and rights of First Nation people. To this day, no such treaty exists. The lyrics keep it simple: “This land was never given up // This land was never bought and sold // The planting of the Union Jack // Never changed our law at all.”

Still active today, Yothu Yindi was formed in 1986 in Northern Territory when a white rock band, the Swamp Jockeys merged with the unnamed Yolŋu folk act of our opening segment. Thus, Gurrumul found himself in one of the very first Aboriginal rock bands on the planet. Indeed, Treaty was the first Indigenous song to ever hit the Australian charts. ‘Yothu Yindi’ is a Yolŋu matha kinship term meaning ‘child and mother’.

In 1989, they released their debut Homeland Movement, followed by the seminal record Tribal Voice in 1991. Somewhat overshadowed by the later success of its lead single (Treaty), Tribal Voice is an exceptional record from beginning to end. Tunes like Djäpana and the eponymous Tribal Voice showcase a band whose fresh sound, blending of cultural backgrounds, roots in folk, and infectious energy would come to define generations of Australian music to come.

In 2018, Yothu Yindi teamed up with Baker Boy to release Treaty ‘18, a hip-hop remix of the tune highlighting the enduring relevance of its message.

Gurrumul – Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu

Gurrumul released his first solo effort in 2008, it was simply called Gurrumul. Where Yothu Yindi showed us his skill as a rock songwriter, and Saltwater Band as a fusional performer, this album gives us the first true taste of his beautifully ethereal voice. Sung predominantly in Yolŋu matha, Gurrumul explores Gurrumul’s spiritual connection with Country and the environment. As a Maralitja (Crocodile Man) and Djarimirri (Son of the Rainbow Serpent) - both names of songs Gurrumul would perform at different points - Gurrumul identifies especially with the baru (saltwater crocodile) and wititj (olive python), aspects of the natural world which form leitmotifs woven through and connecting each phase of his career.

The album also features the song Gurrumul History, a tune unusually written in English which philosophically ponders the experience of having been born blind and its effects on his life and his family’s. Another standout track is the truly breathtaking Wiyathul which was mine and many others’ introduction to Gurrumul. This album is of a beauty difficult to express. Gurrumul’s voice is simply transcendent, creating a connection for the listener to both his heritage and homeland. For the duration of its 90-odd minutes, one finds oneself transported to, and promptly lost in the Australian Northern Territory, floored by the sheer vastness and beauty of the natural world around.

His Life and Music – Gurrumul & The Sydney Symphony Orchestra

Gurrumul would go on to release another two records, Rakala in 2011, and The Gospel Album in 2015, before tragically passing in 2017, aged just 46.

Only a few weeks before his death, Gurrumul had put the finishing touches to his fourth record Djarimirri. The album was released posthumously in 2018 and would mark a significant departure from the gentler songwriting of his earlier solo work. This was in no small part down to Michael Hohnen of Skinnyfish.

After signing Saltwater Band, releasing their albums, and convincing Gurrumul to go solo, Hohnen found himself playing a huge role in the singer’s life. The two had become fast friends and Hohnen took on a spokesperson role for Gurrumul. You see, one of the many great aspects of Gurrumul is that he spent almost the entirety of his career largely disengaged with the industry, the press, or even the public. He made the music and that was it. In the excellent 2017 documentary about his life, the opening scene sees Gurrumul’s first major interview in which an ABC journalist is patronisingly grilling him about his newfound fame. Gurrumul literally says nothing as Hohnen sits beside him awkwardly smiling along. This may be shyness, it may be lack of confidence (Hohnen points out in the film that English is Gurrumul’s fourth or fifth language), it might be disinterest in the plasticity of the world surrounding the purity of his music, it may be something completely different, or a combination of the above. Either way, Gurrumul developed a reputation for his quiet public persona. Throughout the film, Hohnen is seen taking on interview responsibilities, appearing on Gurrumul’s behalf on radio and TV, as well as speaking for him from the stage where he played double bass in Gurrumul’s band. He also acts as a guide, helping him navigate the obscurity of the world he occupies as a blind man. There’s an especially touching scene in which Hohnen is shaving Gurrumul whilst Gurrumul’s aunt Susan Dhängal Gurruwiwi who narrates the film, can be heard describing their relationship as one of brotherly love.

In 2012, Gurrumul played a one-off special gig at the Sydney Opera House for which he was accompanied by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. This would be released as the excellent 2013 live album His Life and Music. The concert planted a seed in Gurrumul’s mind, and he started incorporating classical arrangements into his composing process, a process aided by Hohnen whose passion for minimalist music would inform the remainder of Gurrumul’s career.

Djarimirri - Gurrumul

For Djarimirri, subtitled Child of the Rainbow, Gurrumul and Hohnen drafted in experimental composer and arranger Erkki Veltheim. Veltheim quickly took to the project wheeling out such neat tricks as transcribing yiḏaki improvisations and adapting the score for cellos. Together the trio created a minimalist classical record deeply rooted in traditional Yolŋu music. The result is far more challenging than anything Gurrumul had done before, the lightness of his early career is given over to stronger, more powerful vocals, while the backing music is more experimental, forcing the listener to engage. It does however maintain the beautiful heart that had come to be so loved throughout Australia and the world beyond.

In the film, directed by Paul Damian Williams, we’re shown a man who is blessed with what might well be genius, being pushed into a life with which he seems reluctant to engage. I couldn’t help but feel a sense of unease as an increasing number of non-Aboriginal people insert themselves into his life. In Hohnen’s case, the relationship seems genuine and reciprocal, in others, it appears rapacious. One of the more striking examples of this comes from Britain’s very own Sting who invites Gurrumul on French TV to sing Every Breath You Take. Gurrumul has no idea who Sting is and Sting, dressed in a very silly hat, gets upset that Gurrumul doesn’t know the song. Once on set however, Gurrumul very quickly slots in and delivers a perfect performance of the song he’d only first heard that afternoon, possibly the best performance the song has ever received. I found myself wondering how Sting would fare if given a couple of hours to learn Wiyathul… The scene however, is illustrative of the discomfort to which Gurrumul is seemingly subjected in order for his career to be a success. Crucially however, it is only a success in capitalist Western terms: he sold loads of records and gig tickets. In oposition to this, film repeatedly shows Gurrumul most at ease when he’s at home, mucking about with his friends and their kids, or on the phone to his family. The culminating scene (this might be a spoiler if such a thing exists for a documentary) comes when Gurrumul is a no-show as Hohnen and his entourage are waiting for him at the airport before heading off on his first American tour. The following scene sees Gurrumul with his family celebrating his young nephew’s initiation ceremony. A very neat juxtaposition which leaves the viewer contemplating the true nature of success.

Skinnyfish launched Gurrumul’s career with an aim to connect Northern Territory artists with one another, but gradually, as his profile grew, priorities shifted and the Western success model began imposing itself on his career. Gurrumul’s legacy however remains as a crucial Aboriginal voice in Australian culture and a peerless musician, recognised globally for his talent and artistry.

I’ll leave with my favourite quirk of Gurrumul’s legacy: In 2021, a new species of Uperoleia was described. These are tiny frogs, commonly known as ‘toadlets’. Only three individuals of this new species have ever been recorded, all in the uninhabited Wessel Islands near Gurrumul’s home island of Galiwin’ku. The new species is named Uperoleia Gurrumuli, Gurrumul’s Toadlet.

Further resources!

Films

• Tribal Voice (1993), Stephen Maxwell Johnson

• Gurrumul (2017), Paul Damien Williams

Books

• Writing in the Sand (2023), Matt Garrick

Please support my work!

If you enjoy my writing, please subscribe for free.

If you can spare a few quid, please subscribe for a small monthly donation.

If you think anyone else would like it, please share it far and wide.

Subscribe now

I fully intend on keeping the Sunday long-reads entirely free as I want the knowledge, history, stories, and excellent music to travel as far as possible. The research behind each article however requires a lot of time and resources (books, research trips, film rentals, gig tickets, exhibition tickets… etc.), not to mention the countless hours of dyslexically writing and editing myself.

Paid subscriptions help cover those costs and allow me to dedicate more time to producing richer, better-researched articles week after week.

My ambition is to deliver 52 substantial pieces a year as well as the odd bonus. If you reckon this is worth supporting, please sign up for one of the suggested amounts, or enter a custom number.

If on the other hand, you can’t stretch to financial support right now, no worries, Noise Melt will remain free. This isn’t a transaction so much as collective support. Those who can afford it, help keep it accessible for everyone else.

Subscribe now

If you’re already subscribed, I greatly appreciate you. Thank you.

What’s this then, a mid-week post? Don’t worry, it’s just a short one to let you know I’ve gone through every one of the 71 articles published on Noise Melt so far, and added an accompanying playlist to each of them. Well, only the ones where a playlist would be beneficial, so about 20-odd.

Where shall I start then?

If you’ve ever read a piece and thought “this needs a soundtrack”, then now’s your time to give it a revisit! Or if you need some inspiration, here are a few of my more popular articles, now fully playlist-accompanied:

Lankum and their vast array of side-projects

An introduction to Kieran Hebden/Four Tet’s back catalogue

My favourite albums about birds

Dead Kennedys’ various take downs of American oppression

A history of raï

An introduction to the music of KMRU

The music of Marseille

A history of the song Which Side Are You On?

So crank those volume dials up to 11 and get reading! I’ll see you on Sunday with a brand new long-read (and a playlist attached).

Why Qobuz?

I’ve made the playlists on Qobuz because I deleted my Spotify account. I deleted my Spotify account for a variety of reason. In no particular order:

• Former CEO Daniel Ek’s €600 million investment in Helsing, a firm that builds AI weaponry. (He made the investment before stepping down from Spotify.)

• The free version of the app running ICE recruitment adverts in 2025 offering a $50,000 signing fee to any new recruit, and encouraged listeners to “fulfil your mission to protect America”.

• The paltry artist pay-outs, estimated around six times less than Qobuz.

• Poor compressed sound quality.

• Increased platforming and prioritising of AI-generated music.

• Increasingly, artists I listen to a lot were also removing their catalogues from the app for a variety of reasons, no more Massive Attack, King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Deerhoof, Prince…

The catalysing event however, was reading Liz Pelly’s excellent book Mood Machine, The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist in which she breaks down the history of the company, its treating of art as a tech asset, and its homogenising effect on an otherwise diverse global culture. For me, the biggest revelation from the book is that Spotify was started as a targeted digital advertising platform. The type of content attached (music in this case) was only decided on much later.

Whilst Qobuz is still a streamer attached to large investment capitalists, it does appear to be the far preferable option. Firstly, it pays the most of any streaming platform. It also prioritises sound quality above all using a lossless sound format. Finally, they have a strong human-first stance on AI, all playlist curation and editorial content is human-generated. Although I have found plenty of AI slop on there, so that bit’s to be taken with a pinch of salt. I have however been thoroughly enjoying Qobuz since swapping over and the increased sound quality makes all the difference, especially when I’m listening on the big speakers!

I should probably say I’m not gaining anything from Qobuz for this!

Whilst I’m here…

I might as well flag the new-ish Live Reports section of my Substack page. This is where I post shorter rougher pieces about the gigs I’ve attended. They’re not reviews so much as me exercising my writing skills and trying out new things. A sort of writing sketchbook if you will. Have a look if you’d like to see me learning to write in real time, or if you’re interested in excellent concerts. There are still plenty of great facts and stories in there too!

So far, I’ve written about the likes of Lankum, Patti Smith, Vanessa Paradis, Sunn O))), Courtney Pine, Christy Moore, Behemoth… etc. I don’t send these out by email, so you’ll need to check back on the web-page or the app every so often for new ones.

Read Live Reports

Now, as a very special treat and a reward for making it this far, past the Spotify rant and shameless plug, here is a special bonus playlist I made featuring only songs with pink album artwork. You’re welcome!

I installed myself in the third row beside a man of an especially ripe vintage peering at the stage through a pair of binoculars. Yes, much more my speed. Pine, no spring chicken himself was just limbering up. “My name’s Courtney Pine and I love jazz!” he bellowed before launching into an extraordinary demonstration of his substantial soprano sax prowess. Watching him running around the stage in his glittery red tunic, I reflected on the extraordinary privilege witnessing him live.

Pine isn’t necessarily one of the headline names in the current UK jazz scene, but his astonishingly storied career has secured him a leading role as a respected elder to those headline names. It all started back in 1981 when he was just 17. Legendary reggae duo Clint Eastwood & General Saint took him on tour as part of their backing band. He would go on to feature on their second record, 1983’s Stop That Train, one of the very finest reggae album to ever come out of the UK.

As my thoughts wander, Pine is still up there throwing down some sensational post-bop fire. Whilst the reggae of his youth seems a far cry from the virtuosic modal solo he’s just launched into on stage, it is in fact woven through his career in a variety of forms. His 1991 album Closer to Home is one of the clearest examples, featuring straight reggae tunes and hints of calypso, as well as production credits from Gussie Clarke and Aswad. A more rounded outing came in 2004 however, with Devotion, possibly the album in which he most deftly walked the line between his reggae roots and jazz future. The off-beat rhythmic structure provides a grounding bed for Pine’s jagged sax jabs and light flurries of flute as he finds a dissonant home amongst the electronics. For me however, his 2010 album Europa is the most exciting example of his reggae sensibilities creeping into more traditional jazz. Here he uses the down and dirty tones of a bass clarinet to emulate the rumbling bass lines of an old school sound system. Whilst the comparison isn’t necessarily evident on first listen, especially as Pine is exploring the diversity of European musical forms here, the knowledge of his lifelong passion for reggae and bass music leaves the listener in no doubt that deep down somewhere in there, this is a sound system record.

“I love playing the saxophone, I love playing jazz!” Pine is helpfully reminding us from the stage as he proves his point with more jazz, this time on an alto sax. Today, he is backed by Romarna Campbell on drums, Rio Kai on bass, and Robert Mitchell on piano, all three exceptional leaders in their own right. Campbell in particular has been making waves of late with her superb mixtapes Songs #1-#25 showing off her innovative melodic approach to the drums. Her inclusion in Pine’s band speaks to his enduring support for the fresh generations emerging into the jazz scene year after year. A philosophy that has kept his own music relevant and promoted others’ in the process. It started with his most important album, perhaps one of the most important albums in British music: Out of Many, One People by Jazz Warriors. Follow me back to the early 1980s for the story of how Pine and his mates kick-started the modern-day jazz movement that gave us many of the acts so beloved today (including the previous day’s headliners Ezra Collective).

In the 1980s, the British Jazz scene was in a pretty ropey state. Whilst not entirely atrocious, its predominant image was one of white men in small pork pie hats, turtlenecks, and an aversion to joy. There was also a truly inexcusable proclivity for neck beards. Some of the music was broadly fine, even good, but for the most part the scenery was pretty dry. Enter the Jazz Warriors! A collective of some 25+ musicians from all over London, representing between them them myriad cultural background that still make up the city today. Jazz Warriors offered a space and a platform for anyone who wanted to play music outside of societally prescribed racial lanes. The group was led by a core lineup which included Pine alongside the likes of Gary Crosby, Steve Williamson, Cleveland Watkiss, Phillip Bent, and Orphy Robinson. They only ever released one record. 1987’s Out of Many, One People. The title taken from Jamaica’s national motto introduced in 1962 after its independence from colonial rule. A motto reflecting the makeup of both the country and the group. As with any huge collective, coherence was tricky, and the odd ego inevitable got in the way, so the Jazz Warriors light shone bright but short. They would however prove to be a true catalyst for the UK music scene from the late 80s onwards. Gary Crosby would go on to found Tomorrow’s Warriors with his partner Janine Irons; an educational program which would nurture such teen talents as Nubya Garcia, Ezra Collective, Binker & Moses, and Shabaka Hutchings amongst many others. Jazz Warriors simultaneously arrived at the right time and ahead of their time, leaving a colossal legacy of absolutely incredible music in their wake, by the band, its members, and the people they influenced. To this day, the influence of their 43 minutes and 51 seconds of recorded music echoes through the country, if not the world.

As Pine draws his set to a close, he engages in a spot of audience work, starting a call and response with the crowd. Playing increasingly complex lines on his sax as we all fall about laughing at the very idea of emulating them. He then decides to get us all to do 100 jumps (I think we ended up doing 130-odd) which the 62-year-old gamely did along with us! He cheekily played one more short tune pushing himself over his allotted time on stage, and left to rapturous applause and cheers. Kofi Stone and his sweaty fans were a faded distant memory the rear view mirror of my mind as I realise I made the best choice I could have. In fact, seeing Pine that afternoon was the best choice I made all weekend.

Please support my work!

If you enjoy my writing, please subscribe for free.

If you can spare a few quid, please subscribe for a small monthly donation.

If you think anyone else would like it, please share it far and wide.

Subscribe now

I fully intend on keeping the Sunday long-reads entirely free as I want the knowledge, history, stories, and excellent music to travel as far as possible. The research behind each article however requires a lot of time and resources (books, research trips, film rentals, gig tickets, exhibition tickets… etc.), not to mention the countless hours of dyslexically writing and editing myself.

Paid subscriptions help cover those costs and allow me to dedicate more time to producing richer, better-researched articles week after week.

My ambition is to deliver 52 substantial pieces a year as well as the odd bonus. If you reckon this is worth supporting, please sign up for one of the suggested amounts, or enter a custom number.

If on the other hand, you can’t stretch to financial support right now, no worries, Noise Melt will remain free. This isn’t a transaction so much as collective support. Those who can afford it, help keep it accessible for everyone else.

Subscribe now

If you’re already subscribed, I greatly appreciate you. Thank you.

And on the off chance you have found this obscure corner of the internet, welcome!

Accompanying Playlist

I reckon it’s time for another Geo-Disco! (for real this time) For those in the back, these are articles in which I recommend and chat about a bunch of great sounding albums from a specific place in the world. Hopefully, in doing so, we can uncover some essence or musical terroir which might define the sounds of the place in question. Previous Geo-Discos have explored the music of Marseille and Oran. Today, we’re travelling to Australia’s Northern Territory.

I hear some of you shouting “That’s a cop-out mate, Northern Territory is twice the size of France, let alone Marseille!” and of course you’re right, in fact it’s about 2.48 times bigger than France (and 5,621 times bigger than Marseille!) As Australia’s most sparsely populated region however, its 265,500 inhabitants pale in comparison to Marseille’s 890,000-odd. With just two cities (Garramilla (Darwin) and Mparntwe (Alice Springs)), a majority of the territory’s superb musical history has unfolded in its vast rural areas. This is the music of the Outback!

Northern Territory is home to two UNESCO World Heritage Sites, Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park and Kakadu National Park, both of which contain multiple sacred sites for a variety of Aboriginal groups who make up about 30% of Northern Territory’s population. Of course, this wasn’t always the case. Having been in the area for a minimum of 60,000 years (with some estimate going as far back as 100,000 years!), the native population suffered huge displacement when British colonisers arrived in the early 19th century. There are somewhere between 100 and 150 Aboriginal nations present in Northern Territory, each of whom has their own language and cultural heritage, including ancient and enduring musical traditions. I sadly can’t do justice to all of them in this short piece, not least because many of these traditions remain unrecorded, passed through the generations in person. I do hope however, that this short overview will inspire you to seek out as much more as you can!

Ash Dust & Dirt - Ash Dargan

It would be impossible to discuss the music of Northern Territory without bringing up the yiḏaki. For over 1,000 years the instrument has been an integral part of Australian music, in particular that of the north. European colonisers first recorded the yiḏaki in the early 1900s. As per their wont, they neglected to ask for a name opting instead to just spell out its noise, thus the onomatopoeic word ‘didgeridoo’ which endures today as its most common name. ‘Yiḏaki’ is the Yolŋu Matha word, the most common of the 50-odd native names. Others include ‘mako’, ‘yiraka’, and ‘gunbarrk’.

The exact origins of the yiḏaki are tricky to pin down, but it is thought to have originated in Arnhem Land some 1,000-2,000 years ago, although some oral traditions suggest it might date back at least 40,000 years which would put it amongst the very first musical instruments in the world.

Typically, the yiḏaki is a long hardwood (usually eucalyptus) log, naturally hollowed out by termites, into which the player creates a buzzing noise with their lips. The tube amplifies the noise into a deep and resonant drone which is kept alive indefinitely through the use of circular breathing. Like many ancient drone instruments, the effect of the yiḏaki is a truly visceral experience.

Amongst the world’s finest yiḏaki players is master Ash Dargan, a member of the Larrakia Nation, the traditional stewards of Garramilla (Darwin) in the far North of the country. Dargan was adopted as a child and spent his childhood on Australia’s Gold Coast unaware of his Aboriginal ancestry. As a youth, he enjoyed classical training on the trumpet.

From the early 1900s to around 1970, thousands of Aboriginal and Torres Strait children were forcibly removed from their families by federal and state government agencies and church missions. This was done with the aim of erasing the country’s native population by assimilating the stolen kids into white Australian society. These children would come to be known as the Stolen Generations. There is nothing to suggest that Dargan was a stolen child, but he would benefit from a new law passed in 1992, when he was 21, which allowed public access to government records. The law enabled people from the stolen generations to reconnect with their families. This is when Dargan found out he was from the Larrakia Nation.

After connecting with his birth-mother, he bought a one-way ticket to Garramilla where he met his family and newfound community. Here, he was introduced to the yiḏaki for which he discovered a natural aptitude. Over the years, Dargan has become one of the world’s leading players, releasing some 30+ albums on the instrument. My personal favourite, and one of his most popular, is the superb Ash, Dust & Dirt, released in 2000.

Milyakburra - Emily Wurramara

Emily Wurramara grew up between two islands off the north coast of Northern Territory in the Gulf of Carpentaria which separates Australia from New Guinea. Ayangkidarrba (Groote Eylandt) is owned and stewarded by the Anindilyakwa people, as is the tiny nearby island of Milyakburra (Bickerton Island) which holds just 176 inhabitants (according to a 2011 census).

As a youth, Wurramara was raised on the rock music of Yothu Yindi and Coloured Stone, as well as Western jazz and R&B classics. She began playing and writing at a very young age, composing the tune Tapsticks when she was just 12. In 2016, she released her first EP Black Smoke which landed her a Queensland Music Award, as well as the attention of ABC’s public service station Triple J. In 2024, Wurramara’s second record Nara joined the lauded ranks of the ARIA’s Best Adult Contemporary Albums alongside such trailblazers as Crowded House, Nick Cave, and John Farnham. She was the first indigenous woman to win the award.

Today however, we’re listening to her debut LP Milyakburra, named for the tiny island Wurramara calls home, and released in 2018. The record features four of the tracks from Black Smoke alongside seven new originals, including Tapsticks which features a stunning vocal performance from Wurramara’s Uncle Enoch. Indeed, Milyakburra is a beautiful family effort. Besides her uncle, Wurramara’s grandmother created the cover art, her great-grandmother ‘Gayangwa Lalara’ can be heard on the track Carry Me Home, and a choir of kids from Milyakburra feature on the album’s titular track.

Live in Darwin, Australia - Gurrumul

I am confident in saying that one of Northern Territory’s… scrap that, one of Australia’s finest musical artists is Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu. Over a year ago, I wrote one of my very first Noise Melt pieces about him, but I’d discourage you from seeking it out, who knows what state my writing was in back then? Instead, I will be revisiting the original article, fully updated and polished (remastered if you will) as next week’s Sunday dispatch. In the meantime, please enjoy this lovely live record he made in the capital of Northern Territory.

For the sake of this article, all you need to know is that Gurrumul was a founding member of the now legendary Yothu Yindi, the first predominantly Aboriginal band to break into the Australian mainstream and enjoy subsequent global acclaim. I’ll relate the rest of the story next week, see you there!

King Stingray - King Stingray

I’d usually avoid such clichés as calling a band “the next generation”, but in this instance, they quite literally are! Yirrŋa Yunupiŋu and Roy Kellaway are respectively nephew and son of Dr Yunupingu and Stewart Kellaway, both founding members of Yothu Yindi; and Dimathaya Burarrwanga is Warumpi Band frontman George Burarrwanga’s grandson. Perhaps success was inevitable with such hall-of-fame blood running through their veins, or maybe the pressure was on to deliver something good. Either way, King Stingray have carved out a superbly energetic corner of Outback surf punk for themselves.

The three lads populating our opening paragraph all grew up in the small Arnhem Land community of Yirrkala. Alongside Campbell Messer and Lewis Stiles, they formed King Stingray in 2020, and promptly joined the Bargain Bin Records roster alongside fellow DIY punk stalwarts Crocodylus, The Unknowns, and label bosses The Chats. In a nice twist of cyclical history, one of the gigs that gained them broad exposure was the opening slot on Midnight Oil’s final tour in 2022.

Pretty much every interview I’ve heard with the lads eventually veers off into the best way to prepare turtle eggs, cook fresh fish curry in a hotel room, or indeed pickle stingray wings. Researching my Noise Melt articles, I often get bogged down by how horrific humans can be to one another, so it’s been very refreshing reading about this motley band of bon-vivants fishing, eating, and rocking their way around the Aussie pub scene!

Ŋurru Wäŋa - Hand to Earth

Songlines are the ancient oral tales of Aboriginal communities. Passed through the generations in the form of song cycles, dances, art, stories, and music, these epics follow geographical lines across land, incorporating natural landmarks as well as human influences. They are ever-evolving and still alive today. These are the Aboriginal people’s creation myths.

As well as being excellent stories, the songlines, or dreaming tracks also provide guidance to travellers indicating where water, danger, and other important features might be found or avoided. Songlines often span hundreds, if not thousands of kilometres, crossing multiple Aboriginal nations. The verses that pertain to the different lands are sung in the different languages of the people found there. The important parts however, are the rhythms, not the lyrics, these outline the pathways.

Songlines must be kept alive by being repeatedly sung. This job, whilst carried by all people, is especially incumbent on so-called song-keepers. Two such song-keepers are Yolŋu brothers Daniel and David Wilfred. Having enjoyed a long-standing collaborative partnership with the Australian Art Orchestra, the brothers formalised their relationship in 2023 when artistic director Peter Knight suggested forming an experimental music ensemble revolving around Yolŋu manikay (song cycles). And so, Hand to Earth was formed with the Wilfreds on bilma (clapsticks), yiḏaki, and vocals, Knight on trumpet and electronics, Sunny Kim on vocals, and Aviva Endean on clarinet and electronics.

Ŋurru Wäŋa is the ensemble’s third record. The title translates as ‘the scent of home’ which beautifully captures the heart of the album, a stunning piece of work exploring what the idea of home means, and the senses conjured by travel, displacement, and return.

The Next Future - Wildfire Manwurrk

Exact numbers are hazy, but there are an approximate 150 distinct languages spoken around Australia. These languages then divide into some 600-800 local dialects, a vast majority of which are considered critically endangered. These languages are disappearing because of historic forced assimilation policies enforced by successive colonial governments. The stolen children I mentioned earlier were raised only with English, and elders were often shamed and even assaulted for speaking native languages. The result is the extinction of around 100 Aboriginal languages since colonisers first arrived in 1788.

Today, all around Australia, people are doing amazing work to preserve these languages and keep them alive by learning them, teaching them, and carrying out the evergreen act of anti-colonial resistance: creating art. One such person is Victor Rostron who, with his metal band Wildfire Manwurrk is keeping the Kune dialect alive around the remote Korlorbidahdah community in Arnhem Land.

Kune is one of the six dialects of the Bininj Kunwok language. According to a 2021 census, only 257 people speak Kune! Six of these people are the members of Wildfire Manwurrk: Rostron alongside three of his sons and a nephew Johnson, Earnest, Sires, Leo, and drummer Scott Cameron. Each member of the band speaks a minimum of five languages, all of which they are keen to promote alongside Kune, these include other endangered dialects Dalabon and Rembarrnga. Wildfire Manwurrk released their excellent debut EP The Next Future in 2022.

Bardakurru Ngurra - Kardajala Kirridarra

At just 16, Eleanore Dixon formed Rayella with her dad, brothers, and cousins in order to challenge the Mudburra tradition preventing women from performing (or even being) alone with men. A few years later in 2016, she took it one step further and formed Kardajala Kirridarra, an all-female band named for the mysterious bush woman spirit who lives behind their home-community of Marlinja. They quickly started racking up a series of ‘firsts’. First all-female Aboriginal band to play at this or that festival or venue or appear on a radio station etc. They released their debut album Bardakurru Ngurra in 2017.

Sung in both English and Mudburra, the gentle vocals beautifully lend themselves to the light trip-hoppy ambient electronic production provided by Melburnian Beatrice Lewis. Alongside Dixon and Lewis, the band of rounded out by fellow Marlinja women Kayla Jackson and Janey Dixon. The record is a beautiful exploration of femininity with an eye on both past and present Australia. As the sound ebbs from ethereal atmospheric vibes to grounding crunchy rhythms, Kardajala Kirridarra effortlessly remind us that music, culture, and tradition are living, breathing, evolving forces whose endurance benefits us all.

Djandjay - Baker Boy

I love Snoop Dogg and his ability to pop up in the weirdest places and seem perfectly at home there. Dress up as a jockey with Martha Stewart? No hassle. Sit in a bathtub with Psy? Go on. Crop up in a Bollywood film? Obviously. Of all his sporting associations, his weirdest probably has to be the time he performed the pregame show for the 2023 AFL Grand Final. I don’t have time to explain AFL to you, you just need to know that the Australians decided they needed their own version of football with even smaller shorts, no sleeves, and an oval pitch. Watch the performance on youtube, and during Still D.R.E., you’ll see a dude on a riser directly behind Snoop absolutely smashing it on the yiḏaki. This dude is the person who best embodies everything we’ve discussed so far. He’s a Yolŋu performer who’s incorporated elements of his tradition (not least his exceptional chops on the yiḏaki) into one of the most successful hip-hop careers in Oz right now. He is Baker Boy.

The performance also featured Jessica Mauboy, an artist I’d like to shout out but didn’t quite find the space for in this article. Arguably one of Australia’s biggest pop stars, she was the first Aboriginal artist to perform at Eurovision in 2014, before representing the country in 2018 (yes, Australia take part in Eurovision, keep up!) She also supported Beyoncé on the Aussie leg of her I Am... World Tour aged just 18.

Now, I massively undersold Baker Boy in my intro. Before his appearance with Snoop Dogg, he’d actually performed his own song Thick Skin. The tune, off his second record Djandjay is a reaction to the 2023 Indigenous Voice Referendum (more on that next week), a characteristically engaged tune, albeit uncharacteristically angry. Baker Boy has long harboured a reputation for his upbeat and positive character. This doesn’t mean he shies away from political topics, rather that he takes a celebratory tone in his art. This is both an original and in its own way, revolutionary approach to political music.

Baker Boy’s 2021 debut Gela followed a string of stand-alone singles which cemented him as one of Oz’s hottest new acts. Before that, he was a core member of Galiwin’ku dance troupe Djuki Mala (you’ll know them from that Zorba the Great video) with whom he honed his chops as a dancer. By the time Gela was released, Baker Boy was a fully rounded artist with rap, dance, yiḏaki, and production under his belt. The path lay broad and straight ahead and down it he ran. Releasing his second record, the extraordinary Djandjay in 2023.

Through his personal story, Baker Boy elevates the experience of Indigenous people navigating cultural duality in Australia, but also around the world. In spite of the odd slice of anger in tunes like Thick Skin, his general tone remains one of pure celebration. Celebrating his Yolŋu heritage, his home in Arnhem Land, and the myriad cultures and incredible artistic practitioners all over Northern Territory.

Further resources!

Podcasts

• AWAYE! - episodes:

  • Jess Mauboy’s new chapter

  • Introducing Baker Boy’s album ‘Gela’ and Celebrating 10 Years of black&write!

  • Baker Boy’s latest album Djandjay marks a new era

  • Emily Wurramara refuses to be labelled, and ‘kwatye’

• DECOLONISE - episode: Yarnin with Emily Wurramara

• The Music Show - episode: Eleanor Jawurlngali, Duo Ruut and Ana Carla Maza at WOMADelaide

• Take 5 - episodes:

  • Kardajala Kirridarra’s Eleanor Dixon’s ‘Because of her we can’ songs

  • Jessica Mauboy’s songlines

• The Ancients - episode: Songlines: Australia’s Book of Genesis

• What’s Your Map? - episode: Mapping Songlines with Margo Neale

• Betoota Talks - episode: Interview: King Stingray

• AIN’T THAT SWELL - episode: King Stingray’s Roy Kellaway joins ATS to talk Yolngu Surf Rock, Cooking Waves in Arnhem Land and the Billies Collab

Please support my work!

If you enjoy my writing, please subscribe for free.

If you can spare a few quid, please subscribe for a small monthly donation.

If you think anyone else would like it, please share it far and wide.

Subscribe now

I fully intend on keeping the Sunday long-reads entirely free as I want the knowledge, history, stories, and excellent music to travel as far as possible. The research behind each article however requires a lot of time and resources (books, research trips, film rentals, gig tickets, exhibition tickets… etc.), not to mention the countless hours of dyslexically writing and editing myself.

Paid subscriptions help cover those costs and allow me to dedicate more time to producing richer, better-researched articles week after week.

My ambition is to deliver 52 substantial pieces a year as well as the odd bonus. If you reckon this is worth supporting, please sign up for one of the suggested amounts, or enter a custom number.

If on the other hand, you can’t stretch to financial support right now, no worries, Noise Melt will remain free. This isn’t a transaction so much as collective support. Those who can afford it, help keep it accessible for everyone else.

Subscribe now

If you’re already subscribed, I greatly appreciate you. Thank you.

And on the off chance you have found this obscure corner of the internet, welcome!

Accompanying Playlist

I reckon it’s time for another Geo-Disco!

Well actually, not quite yet… Allow me to give you an indecent peek behind the Noise Melt curtain: I approach these Geo-Discos by making a long-list of 20-30 records I love, then start the agonising process of whittling it down to 8-10 entries. Various factors are at play, not least my personal preferences, but the main one is which albums will give me entry-points to the best, most interesting and entertaining stories. When crafting my Northern Territory list, one such album kept yielding more and more opportunities to cover loads of ground and its dedicated section was frankly getting out of hand. So I’ve decided to give the band their own article with several albums! Lucky them right? See this as a little intro to next week’s Geo-Disco on Australia’s Northern Territory. And, if that wasn’t enough, I’m making it a trilogy! But more on that next week, I don’t want to overwhelm you.

We’re kicking off our journey about 240km northwest of Mparntwe (Alice Springs) in a tiny community called Warumpi (Papunya). Its main claim to fame is as home to the Papunya Tula artists who you may know for their colloquially named ‘dot paintings’ but today, we’re heading there to meet two brothers who loved playing guitars, and two out-of-towners with colossal dreams of stardom.

Big Name, No Blankets - Warumpi Band

There are various opposing chronologies available for how Warumpi Band started, but this one’s my favourite so we’ll take it as lore: One fine day in the late 1970s, local Pitjantjatjara–Warlpiri brothers Sammy and Gordon Butcher found an old guitar lying about. As any youth would, faced with such a stroke of luck, they began teaching themselves to play and quickly became absolutely obsessed with the instrument. Another fine day, a little after the first one, the brothers found another cool-looking lad strumming idly on a guitar of his own. This was Neil Murray who had recently moved to Warumpi from Victoria to find work as a teacher, truck driver, and outstation worker. All the Butcher boys saw though, was another guitarist. It wouldn’t be long at all before the three started learning to cover their favourite rock’n’roll songs together.

On yet another fine day, as Murray tells the story, he was idly strumming away on his guitar again when a vision of pure charisma sauntered up to him and, dispensing with pleasantries, simply asked when his next band rehearsal was. A tall lanky dude with floppy hair and a massive smile, George Burarrwanga had also recently moved to Warumpi, but from Galiwin’ku (Elcho Island) off the coast of Arnhem Land. At that time, Burarrwanga was a keen linguist whose proficiency with languages had taken him around Northern Territory learning a variety of Aboriginal tongues. Beyond his polyglottism though, Burarrwanga harboured grand ambitions of becoming a rock star, carrying song books around with him and practicing at every opportunity. After landing in Warumpi, this fortuitous sighting of a guitarist in the wild couldn’t be ignored. Murray duly told him about his next rehearsal with the Butchers, to which Burarrwanga just grinned and said “I’ll see you there.”

It later transpired that Burarrwanga was engaged to Suzina Butcher, that’s right, Sammy and Gordon’s sister! As Murray said, “He was always going to be in the band.” But so much for the better as they had found the rarest of gems: a born frontman.

By 1983, a third Butcher, Brian had joined on bass and Gordon had moved behind the drum kit. The then un-named band were beginning to gain a little traction around local communities. When eagerly spreading the word, fans simply referred to them as Warumpi Band, and the name stuck. Gradually, over the following two years, they built up a substantial following all over rural Northern Territory.

The Dead Heart - Midnight Oil

Enter former Australian Minister for the Environment and Water, The Honourable Peter Garrett MA. I’m kidding of course, his gently controversial stint in government is beyond the remit of this piece. He’s earned his place here (and in the history books more generally) as the magnetic frontman of Aussie pub-rock turned big-rock legends Midnight Oil. You know them, but in case you don’t, they regularly duke it out with AC/DC and INXS at the top of those “greatest ever Australian bands” type lists. They are best known for their grooving bass-lines, idiosyncratic vocals, and punchy social conscience, in particular their care around both indigenous and environmental issues. In 1985, they signed Warumpi Band to their label Powderworks and released their debut album Big Name, No Blankets. The two bands’ stories are far more intertwined than just a record however.

On 26 October 1985, the entirely white Australian government, led by Bob Hawke, officially returned ownership of Uluru (or Ayers Rock as they were calling it) to its Aṉangu traditional owners whose spiritual connection to and stewardship of the Rock dates back well over 30,000 years. The return was unsurprisingly conditional: the land must be leased back to the National Parks and Wildlife agency for 99 years and it must be jointly managed. To celebrate, the government invited national stars Midnight Oil to write a new song honouring the occasion. As five white lads from Sydney, nearly 3,000km away, they were initially reticent suggesting they should commission Aboriginal acts instead. The government insisted however, so the band wrote The Dead Heart, now one of their most famous tunes. It would later feature on their seminal 1986 album Diesel and Dust. The song is an admonishing takedown of European settler colonialism, specifically calling out the mines and pastoral companies that hold more rights than the indigenous people living on the land these companies have stolen. They did make the controversial choice of singing the tune from a first-person Indigenous perspective which has sparked much debate around appropriation and cultural stereotyping versus active solidarity. Nevertheless, all royalties from the song were donated to various Aboriginal organisations and crucially, it caught the attention of Warumpi Band.

Warumpi had decided to invite a prominent politically active band from the cities on their next tour to try and connect remote rural communities with urban populations as well a shine some much needed light on the poor living conditions faced by many of these neglected communities. Midnight Oil fit the description perfectly! And so, the Blackfella/Whitefella Tour began in 1986. The two bands travelled all over Northern Territory and Western Australia on The Oils’ dime, putting on free shows for hundreds of people who would usually never have the chance to experience such music in person. Despite being the far more famous band, The Oils found that in most places, they were completely unknown whilst Warumpi were greeted as major celebrities. They have credited the tour with being a turning point in their political activism which crystallised into their most lucid work, Diesel and Dust, a concept album bringing the issues of land rights and aboriginal reconciliation to a far greater audience than they had ever known.

In 1986, after the tour, Midnight Oil released a 12” of The Dead Heart with Warumpi Band’s Blackfella/Whitefella on the B-side alongside This Land by Coloured Stone. The latter are another highly influential Aboriginal rock band from the 1980s, originating in the Koonibba community of South Australia. They are still active today. This Land is a mournful country-tinged tune discussing the theft of land by European colonisers and the oppression of native people in Australia throughout the centuries.

Blackfella/Whitefella - Warumpi Band

Two songs have defined Warumpi Band and their message more than any other. We’ll get to the big one in a second. The other is the aforementioned Blackfella/Whitefella, penned by Murray and Burarrwanga in 1985, and first released on Big Name, No Blankets.

The general concept of the tune originated in a fairly mundane observation by Murray. As a white man in the Warumpi community, he had had the unusual experience (for a white person in Oz) of being the minority and had found that the acceptance he’d been shown since his arrival, and shared with other outsiders, had led to a generally harmonious daily atmosphere. It seems so simple when it’s put like that doesn’t it? He brought the idea to Burarrwanga, and together they hashed it into the lyrics of Blackfella/Whitefella. Whilst holding a lovely message of unity and acceptance, on first listen, the tune could come across as a little trite: “Blackfella, Whitefella // It doesn't matter what your colour // As long as you a true fella” but they actually go much deeper: In the second verse, we’re reminded that division amongst people actually distracts from the broader issues we face as a global community. “It doesn't matter which religion // It's all the same when the ship is sinking // We need more brothers if we're to make it // We need more sisters if we're to save it”

In liberal circles, I’ve often witnessed the general concept of racism being depicted as a passive evil which can simply be educated away. In Blackfella/Whitefella however, Warumpi have identified that it is an active choice. At the individual end of the spectrum, it is a choice to ignore the experience of others, but at the far more sinister institutional end, it’s a choice to actively divide people who share much more with each other than with the forces oppressing them. Indeed, if the ship is sinking, our divisions will only precipitate its descent.

Blackfella/Whitefella is a superbly effective protest song for two reasons: its simple lyrics and catchy tune make it memorable and have secured its enduring legacy in Australia and elsewhere to this day. But most of all, it is rooted in a very basic first-hand observation. No grandstanding. No philosophising. Just a couple of fellas essentially telling us about the love they share.

Go Bush! - Warumpi Band

After the Blackfella/Whitefella Tour, the Butcher brothers all took a step back from the band to enjoy family life back home. Our two out-of-towners continued on as the core members of a fairly fluid lineup. In 1987, they released their second album Go Bush! with Alan Murphey and Kenny Smith making up the rest of the band.

Go Bush! is another superb outing chock full of highly danceable rock tunes. By this point, Burarrwanga has really found his stride as an increasingly eccentric vocalist, throwing his voice around in myriad thrilling directions. Two songs on the record are of particular note:

The second track, Jailanguru Pakarnu is a revisited version of Warumpi Band’s first ever single, originally released in 1983. The tune has the distinction of being the first ever rock song in an indigenous language. (Probably. It’s always hard to know these things for sure.) The second tune is without doubt Warumpi Band’s biggest success, My Island Home.

My Island Home - Warumpi Band

In the summer of 1985, Murray spent a week with Burarrwanga and his family camping on a beach on their home-island of Galiwin'ku in the far north of Australia. He’s described the experience: “[we were] living like kings on bush tucker and seafood caught by ourselves”. When he had to leave to return home to Sydney, he was overcome with a sense of longing for the paradise he’d just left. He channelled the emotion into My Island Home which he wrote specifically for Burarrwanga to sing.

When Burarrwanga was first presented with the song, he couldn’t believe how perfectly it had captured his feelings. He immediately fell in love with it and set about making it his own. My Island Home quickly became Warumpi’s most popular tune with many Australians calling it their unofficial national anthem. It would however, also sadly turn out to be the seeds of an eventual rift between Murray and Burarrwanga. In a rock’n’roll tale as old as time, the singer and the author couldn’t agree as to who owned the song. In 1988, this and a handful of other factors resulted in Warumpi Band breaking up for a little while. Murray pursued a solo career with his backing band The Rainmakers which featured a young singer called Christine Anu.

This singer would go on to record her own version of My Island Home in 1995, launching her career as one of Australia’s best regarded performers in the process. As a Torres Strait Islander, she tweaked the song’s lyrics to make it her own by reflecting her move to the city as well as changing the perspective to that of a woman’s. She included it on her debut album Stylin’ Up, then recorded another version for her followup record Come My Way, released in 2000. The tune arguably remains her most popular to date. The culmination of the song’s popularity came when Anu performed it at the closing ceremony of the 2000 Olympics in Sydney.

Nerbu Message - George Rrurrambu

Spurred on by the success of Anu’s cover of their song, Murray, Burarrwanga, and Sammy Butcher reformed Warumpi Band in 1995 for old time sake and hit the road. They released one final album, Too Much Humbug, in 1996. A much more edgy, heavy album, Too Much Humbug is a superb effort, but the momentum wasn’t sufficient and barring the odd live show, the band petered out again, officially disbanding 2000.

George Burarrwanga (who’s name in life was George Rrurrambu) began a solo career of his own after Warumpi’s break-up. Whilst he would never again see the success of his days with Warumpi, he did sell out a run of his autobiographical one-man-show at the Festival of Darwin. He also released an album, Nerbu Message in 2000, which he toured around Australia and Europe for a couple of years. This a reggae-tinged piece of work, predominantly sung in Gumatj dialect of the Yolŋu Matha language group. The record includes a new translated version of My Island Home, called Ronu Wanga.

Burarrwanga gradually retired from music, side-stepping into a natural next step of activist elder. He carried on his work of reconciliation and understanding between Aboriginal communities and white Australians until his final days. He sadly passed away in June 2007 after a battle with bone cancer.

Tjungu - Neil Murray & Sammy Butcher

I’ll leave you with a lovely record from 2019. Still friends, Neil Murray and Sammy Butcher reunited to record a handful of tunes. Having left their penchant for rabble-rousing political rock in their youth, this is just a couple of old geezers having a lovely time.

Over the years, Neil Murray has released some ten records as a solo performer, a career he still happily pursues today.

Four years after Tjungu, Sammy Butcher would be inducted into the National Indigenous Music Awards Hall of Fame, 20 years after the honour was launched in 2004. The first ever inductee was George Burarrwanga (alongside Dr Yunupingu of Yothu Yindi). Around that time, Butcher was busy opening a state of the art recording studio and music school back home in Warumpi. The grand opening saw Peter Garrett return to cut the ribbon. At time of writing Butcher still lives in Warumpi with his family as a community leader, teaching the next generation to rock out!

In 2024, he acted a consultant and writer on a stage musical based on the story of Warumpi Band called Big Name, No Blanket. The play was co-directed by acclaimed director Andrea James and Sammy’s daughter Anyupa.

Right, now that I’ve got Warumpi Band out of my system, I’ll see you next week for a broader discussion around the music of Northern Territory more generally. We’ll be listening to plenty more desert rock, alongside a carefully curated selection of pop, country, experimental music, metal, and hip-hop. Make sure you’re signed up to receive it straight to your inbox!

Further resources!

Books

• Strict Rules (1988), Andrew McMillan

Films

• Big Name, No Blanket (2013), Steven McGregor

• The Blackfella / Whitefella Tour (1987), Rob Stewart

Podcasts

• AWAYE! - episode: The Warumpi Band’s Legacy, and GURR ERA OP

• Listen Carefully with Nathan Jolly - episode: Neil Murray - Warumpi Band

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Playlist

Light Succession season one spoilers ahead! Skip to the first dividing line to avoid them.

It’s some of the best edge-of-the-seat-squeaky-bum-time TV I’ve seen in years. Kendall is desperately trying to get back to the office to lead a coup and topple his father as CEO of Waystar RoyCo. However, a terror threat has left New York traffic in gridlock forcing the exquisite sight of Kendall navigating the jam on foot whilst triggering the vote of no confidence over the phone. Of course, Logan crushes the dissent and moves forward unscathed. The final sequence of the episode sees Logan pointlessly keeping the president (of the country) waiting on the phone before asking him for a favour with the FCC, whilst Kendall, having been escorted from the building by security, is wandering beaten, aimless through the city’s busy streets. As Logan delivers the timeless line “I’ve just taken down a terrorist myself… My son.” A faint banjo can be made out, gently rising in the mix as Pete Seeger sings “Come all of you good workers // Good news to you I'll tell // Of how the good old union // Has come in here to dwell… Which side are you on?” The juxtaposition is beautiful. One of the great miner songs over a scene of pure unbridled capitalist extremism.

After the wild ride of the past month, we’re bringing our American semiquincentenial series to a close with a single song. The song I feel best embodies everything we’ve discussed so far and offers a mantra to be repeated daily by anybody forming an opinion on anything, ever. The story of this song’s conception, life, and legacy brings together all the narrative threads we’ve left dangling over the past few weeks. The song is of course Which Side Are You On?, made famous by Pete Seeger with the Almanac Singers in 1941. The song was written a decade earlier though and the story of its inception would set the scene for its enduring legacy…

The notorious gun thugs crashed through the front door and started ransacking the place. Florence Reece shielded her kids and hurled abuse at the men. She knew they were after her husband, Sam. They’d received a tip that the thugs were out to kill him, so he’d escaped. The men destroyed the mining couple’s modest home, pointing their guns into cupboards, under the bed and even into piles of dirty linen. Eventually, they gave up, leaving only chaos and trauma in their wake. Reece was fuming. She had to get the emotions out. She ripped a calendar off the wall and started writing on it. The words cascaded onto the page. In no time, she had written the song that would define not just the Harlan County War but decades of worker struggles to come. She had written Which Side Are You On?

A few months before this, the miners of Harlan County in Kentucky had gone on general strike following a decision by Harlan County Coal Operators' Association to cut wages by 10% to help maximise profit. In response, the United Mine Workers of America (UMW) started organising but it wouldn’t take long for the bosses to start sacking anybody with links to the union and evicting them from their homes. You read that right, a majority of miners in Harlan County (and many other places) lived in so-called company towns, wholly owned by the mining companies. The incredible monopoly over workers’ lives is best exemplified by many such companies paying their employees not in money, but in credit at the company store. This phenomenon was humorously captured in Merle Travis’ superb 1947 song Sixteen Tons, later made famous by Tennessee Ernie Ford. “You load sixteen tons, what do you get // Another day older and deeper in debt // Saint Peter don't you call me 'cause I can't go // I owe my soul to the company store”. In a later version of the song, Travis hilariously tweaked the final line: “I owe my soul to Tennessee Ernie Ford”

Once the strikers of Harlan County found their feet, a clear rift emerged between the workers and owners, with law enforcement taking the latter’s side. Sheriff J. H. Blair headed up the hostilities stating “[…] there was no compromise when labor troubles swept the county and the 'Reds' came to Harlan County." Blair armed the mines’ hired private guards and gave them full county deputy privileges to help break the picket lines and allow strikebreakers (more commonly known as ‘scabs’) into the mines. But with the full force of the law behind them these guards, or ‘gun thugs’ as they came to be known, were able to exercise their powers with complete impunity both at work and elsewhere.

One of the culminating events of this overreach would come in 1932: Harry Simms, then aged just 19, was a charismatic rising star of the labour movement and had been sent by the UMW to Harlan County to help organise the workers. After proving himself as a highly popular leader, Simms was ambushed and shot dead by a gun thug hiding in a bush. Simms was immortalised in The Death of Harry Simms by half-sibling duo Aunt Molly Jackson and Jim Garland. As with many of these songs, it was later made famous by Pete Seeger who learned it from Garland in 1960.

Blair gets a name-check in the third verse of Reece’s song: “They say in Harlan County // There are no neutrals there // You'll either be a union man // Or a thug for J.H. Blair” Her husband Sam was of course a union man, in fact he was a highly respected organiser and thus, found himself at the receiving end of constant intimidation from Blair and his gun thugs. So now the scene is set for the crimes that opened this little section and led to Reece writing one of the most enduring songs in the history of class struggle.

A quick note on the song’s tune for all my folk history nerds: The books repeat that Reece wrote the song to the tune of a Baptist hymn called Lay the Lily Low, but as far as I can tell, no such hymn seems to exist. It appears far more likely that she used the tune of Jackie Monroe, a version of which (known as Lily Monroe) includes the lyric “lay the lily low” in its chorus (check out Burl Ives’ version, the similarities are hard to ignore). The song tells the tale of a young woman dressing in men’s clothing to follow her love into battle, eventually heal him from a mortal wound, and finally marry him. There are also a couple of snippets of interview in which Reece says she based the tune on a hymn, the name of which she can’t remember, but goes on to sing the chorus of Land on the Shore, an old Appalachian farewell song.

By the end of the first year of conflict, the Kentucky national guard had been brought in to break the picket lines and Blair rescinded the right to public gathering. The workers however didn’t give up. Eventually, after nearly a decade of attritional striking, a new contract was signed in 1939 which allowed unionising and abolished company-paid deputies. But that wasn’t the end of Harlan County’s woes. A second strike picked up in the 1970s: In her 1976 Academy Award-winning documentary, Harlan County U.S.A., Barbara Kopple shows the struggle, predominantly led by the workers’ wives. In one of the film’s most affecting scenes, Reece, by then in her 70s addresses a union meeting explaining she was there the first time around when she learned not to give up. She delivers the excellent line “The men know they’ve got nothing to lose but their chains, and the union to gain. So I say hang in there!” before singing her song Which Side Are You On?

Which Side Are You On? would become an anthem for striking miners all over the world, receiving translations and rewrites in myriad different languages. One of the most famous reworks came from Billy Bragg who, in 1985, released his own version in support of the British striking miners taking on Margaret Thatcher’s proposed mine closure. “This government had an idea // And parliament made it law // It seems like it's illegal // To fight for the union anymore” In 1984, Ken Loach made a documentary named after the song, which catalogues the songs and poems to emerge from the very same British miner’s strike.

The beauty of Which Side Are You On? however, is the simple structure it offers to any struggle, not just miners. The most effective example of this adaptability is the version re-penned for the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s, most famously interpreted by Bernice Johnson Reagon and The Freedom Singers. “We can beat segregation // as long as we pray and sing // but are you gonna march with the Ku Klux Klan // or Martin Luther King” This version of the song could be heard at pretty much every civil rights rally, including during the marches from Selma to Montgomery as captured my Smithsonian Folkway on their 1964 album of field recordings Freedom Songs: Selma, Alabama. Another version of the song, adapted by Gillian Booth to a slightly different tune played a prominent role at the landmark Greenham Common women-led anti-nuclear protest, eventually finding its way into the Greenham Common Songbook. This one more pointedly asks “Are you on the side that don't like life? // are you on the side of racial strife? // are you on the side that beats your wife? // which side are you on?”

Over the years, the songs has been covered and adapted by some of the biggest names in conscious music. In 2019, San Francisco punk mainstays The Homobiles made it into a queer anthem calling out a trans friend of theirs who had joined the SFPD. In 2011, modern grand master of furious protest Tom Morello (from Rage Against the Machine) included the tune on an EP of union songs called Union Town. The record also features Travis’ Sixteen Tons. In 2015, Talib Kweli and 9th Wonder sampled a recording of Reece on their album Indie 500, thus neatly closing the folk to hip-hop protest loop.

Finally, I’ll give a quick shout out to my favourite version of the song by the Kentucky black metal one-man-band Panopticon featured on his superbly eerie 2012 album Kentucky. But now, let’s bring it all home to the blind free market corruption of Succession’s Logan Roy with Ani Difranco’s rabble-rousing take on the tune. Difranco invited her long-time mentor Pete Seeger to revisit the song with her in 2012. His original banjo line leads into a riff-heavy foot-stomping anthem calling for a socialist restructuring of America. Released on her 17th album of the same name, the song’s lyrics have been updated to call out election fraud, loan sharks, reaganomics, environmental destruction, and consumer capitalism. But the verse with which I will leave you speaks to the core of this story. This is a story started, carried forwards, and kept alive by women. “Feminism ain’t about women // that’s not who it is for // it’s about a shift in consciousness // that will bring an end to war // so listen up you fathers // listen up you sons // and tell me which side are you on now // which side are you on?”

I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that the past five articles have only superficially been about American history. Every single issue we’ve discussed this past month holds evergreen global relevance. From settler colonialism and environmental catastrophes, to worker’s rights, Civil Rights, slavery, and the evils of war, we are still now confronted with similar issues on a daily basis. Ever since I first heard the song, Which Side Are You On? has been playing on a loop in the back of my mind, pushing me to differentiate between the oppressors and the oppressed, pushing me to pick what I believe to be the right camp, and once I’ve done so, pushing me to look at who my team-mates are. Whenever I’m presented with a moral choice, I hear Reece’s voice in my head asking “Will you be a lousy scab // Or will you be a man?”

Further Resources!

Films

• Harlan County, U.S.A. (1976), Barbara Kopple

• The Wobblies (1979), Deborah Shaffer & Jim Bird

• Which Side Are You On? (1984), Ken Loach

• American Dream (1990), Barbara Kopple

• Pete Seeger: The Power of Song (2007), Jim Brown

• American Factory (2019), Steven Bognar & Julia Reichert

Podcasts

• Dig: A History Podcast - episode: Domesticity and Depression: Kentucky Coal Mining, Song, and Organizing During Bloody Harlan

• Stories of Appalachia - episode: Bloody Harlan: W.B. Jones and the Battle of Evarts

Radio

• Singer-songwriters Florence Reece and Pete Seeger Discuss Writing Songs with Studs Terkel, on the Studs Terkel Radio Archive

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Paid subscriptions help cover those costs and allow me to dedicate more time to producing richer, better-researched articles week after week.

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In this article, I will seek to elaborate on the question through the work of four rappers (and one techno duo) whose experimental approach to art and harnessing of inherited memory, fiction, cultural history, and myth seeks to recover the voices deliberately excluded from the American liberty project.

There Will Be no Super-Slave - Ghais Guevara

Hundreds of fans, critics, and scholars have written about Kendrick Lamar’s iconic Super Bowl half-time show from 2025. One tiny detail many of them missed however is that the first sound we heard (just before Samuel L. Jackson’s opening gambit as Uncle Sam) is a sample of the song The Old Guard Is Dead by a self-proclaimed communist rapper who, in turn, is sampling the staunchly anti-nationalist 19th century Russian composer Anton Rubinstein, or rather his opera The Demon. Those blink-and-you-miss-em’ five seconds of music successfully smuggled a couple of centuries of American bogeyman ideologies into one of the country’s biggest corporate and nationalist events before Lamar’s performance has even started.

The rapper in question was Ghais Guevara. Emerging at some point around 2019 as Jaja00, Guevara has always been vocal about his Communist ideology, once stating "there's no other rapper doing geopolitical communist rap". His political outlook makes up a bulk of his lyrics which are woven through with hilarious imagery, wit, and searing political clarity. His production style is pure challenging chaos, using music beyond words to further convey the myriad and complex emotions, traumas, and victories experienced by oppressed people through American history. Guevara’s style first truly crystallised on his 2022 album There Will Be no Super-Slave.

Taken from the incendiary radical revolutionary 1971 manual Blood in My Eye by George Jackson, the title of the album speaks to the oppressive nature of capitalism Guevara seeks to highlight in his music.

To Jackson, the concept of the ‘super-slave’ is a person (in particular a black person living in the US) who sees the systemic oppression of the capitalist system in which they live, and is able to draw on the wisdom of past revolutionary theory and history to join the collective struggle for liberation.

Jackson’s writing can be distilled into four stages of awakening in the process of becoming a ‘super-slave’. The first stage is that of basic oppression, in which citizens find themselves by default. The basic citizen, or slave, understands the burden of exploitation without a view of the broader picture of systemic subjugation. This is the state of darkness necessarily occupied before light can be brought in. From there, the individual may undergo political awakening followed by self-transformation. For Jackson, this is the study of prior revolutionaries and the true understanding of the governmental systems in which we all operate. For Jackson, the final stage is revolutionary commitment, the understanding that personal sacrifice is necessary in order to support the collective cause for freedom. Whilst the capitalist seeks to elevate himself above others, the ‘super-slave’ is dedicated to elevating others to his state of enlightenment. Therein lies the foundation for Guevara’s practice as an artist.

The album’s Intro pulls together highly memed sound snippets from classic American cultural staples such as The Simpsons, SpongeBob SquarePants and The Real Housewives of Atlanta, and smashes them into far more sinister samples such as White Lives Matter leader Michael Hill calling out “that cursed thing called the Civil Rights movement”. Thus setting the tone for the album to come. This is all American music, in touch with all aspects of the great nation’s culture. Guevara’s radical ideology is the backbone of the record, but his creative practice brings it to life as he collapses the cultural hierarchy between perceived high and low art.

Pulling references from video games, radical literature, internet memes, cartoons, political speeches, and films and TV, Guevara deftly weaves these samples and lyrical nods into a cogent dismantling of his major issues with American life: white supremacy, inherited trauma, settler colonialism, and the military industrial complex. The sampled source material is at once the canvas and the paint giving colour to the very thing it’s criticising.

As the album progresses, it becomes apparent that Guevara has been doing the work of self-transformation mandated by Jackson. When Jackson was imprisoned in 1960, aged 19, for allegedly stealing $71, he started studying. Rigorously analysing the works of Marx, Lenin, Mao, and Fanon, he afforded himself a level of knowledge he believed would benefit his liberation. For Guevara, the self-transformation encompasses the thinkers listed above on an equal plane with the perceived low-brow cultural touchstones of his daily life, all of which he brings together in deeply personal analysis of his experience as a black man in America today.

The Deep - clipping.

Enslaved pregnant women were often thrown overboard from slave ships during the middle crossing, or the Atlantic crossing. From there they would sink to the bottom of the ocean where their unborn babies would evolve to breathe under water. These foetuses would emerge from the womb perfectly adapted to life on the seabed. Over the years, these children and descendants of mistreated enslaved women would descend to the deepest depths of the Atlantic to build a peaceable kingdom under the waves known as Drexciya. throughout the centuries, Drexciyans evolved sophisticated technologies, new languages, and vast cities and civilisations, all hidden away from and far ahead of humans up on the surface. Eventually, the more intrepid Drexciyans made their way onto land and discover that the descendants of their ancestors’ enslavers still walk free amongst human society. As peaceful people however, Drexciyans seek power in knowledge, not petty revenge and send out explorers to infiltrate the surface human world. Their mission, or rather their quest, is to find their true historical origins. From here, the story divides into multiple parallel strands, one heading off into space, another implying an underwater conflict, but the core meaning remains.

The previous paragraph has been pieced together (by myself but mostly others) from scant information dotted across the discography of Detroit techno duo Drexciya. A band founded by James Stinson and Gerald Donald 1992 and brought to a sudden end in 2002 after Stinson’s untimely passing. During that decade, Drexciya produced some of the most influential underground techno to emanate from Detroit, a city famed for its influential underground techno. A large portion of their legacy however, lies in the incredibly rich mythology they created with and around their music. As their career progressed, the world of Drexciya described in this section’s opening paragraph was gradually fleshed out. Largely an instrumental band, they left the concrete world-building to their track titles, minimal liner notes, artwork, and occasional snippets of speculative writing. The textures, energies, and life of their mythology was embodied by their exceptional otherworldly music.

The Drexciyan story has known several stewards since 2002, not least Abu Qadim Haqq who has created two volumes of a graphic novel re-tracing the story. In 2017, Californian experimental hip-hop trio clipping. took up the mantle with their song The Deep. Originally commissioned by the This American Life podcast for their episode on the subject of afrofuturism, the tune presented as a perfect opportunity to pay homage to the legendary Detroit duo. In The Deep, clipping. imagine a present day in which Drexcians were forced to emerge from the deep once more to confront land-dwelling humans who had disrupted their peace whilst prospecting for oil. “Their greed and recklessness forced our uprising.”

Sparse production, aquatic sound effects, and wonky time-signatures lend an eeriness to the tune as the Drexciyans narrating the story remember the uprising. clipping. frontman Daveed Diggs has spoken of imagining that the only pronoun to exist in Drexciya is “y’all”, a word, alongside “deep” he relies on heavily in his layered and textured lyrics on The Deep.

Aethiopes - billy woods

John Maurice, Prince of Nassau-Siegen was governor of the Dutch Brazil colony from 1637 to 1643. During this time, he oversaw the capture and transportation of 24,000 African people who were forced into unpaid labour on the Dutch-owned sugar cane plantations of Brazil. He was also an enslaver himself, as well as being a keen art collector and patron. Upon his return to The Hague, he built a palatial residence which today holds one of the world’s biggest collections of painting by Dutch masters (for my art-heads, it houses Vermeer’s Girl with the Pearl Earring, Fabritius’ Goldfinch, and myriad key Rembrandts, not least The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp). The museum is still today called Mauritshuis, after Maurice. One such painting, from 1661, is Two Moors (sometimes also called Two Negroes or Two African Men) by Rembrandt. One of the first European painting to depict black people as the main subject, and in a respectful light. This is the painting that rapper billy woods chose to adorn the cover of his 2022 album Aethiopes. The album’s title is taken from an ancient Greek word commonly used to refer to the dark-skinned population found south of Egypt. Etymologically, it breaks down as ‘burned face’. These snippets of history subtly reinforce a sentiment woods expressed in an interview during the album’s rollout: “Europeans decided what Blackness was.”

As you can see, there’s a huge amount of information already available before we even get to the music of Aethiopes. Such is the knowledge and cultural weight that woods brings to his art. Once you do eventually drop the needle on the record however, woods’ deep philosophy shifts from factual information to experiential transmission. woods uses abstraction in both his lyrics and music to create an eerie, almost physical sense of unease which preempts any intellectual understanding of his message.

The backbone of the record is the 1970 film Kongi’s Harvest by Ossie Davis, adapted from the 1965 play of the same name by Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka. The story sees an unnamed African nation reeling in the aftershock of colonial occupation. President Kongi, the nation’s newly installed dictator, is seeking to modernise the country whilst simultaneously harbouring the personal ambition of presiding over the harvest Festival of the New Yam, a privilege usually reserved for the spiritual leader, in this case, the recently deposed king who Kongi has had imprisoned. Dialogue from the film is sampled and peppered throughout Aethiopes, juxtaposed over the sparse soundscapes conjured by producer Preservation.

Preservation’s signature jazz-infused style pulls from around the world to create unsettling collages of samples and influences. From Italian prog rock stalwarts Pichio del Pozzo and Ethiopian crooner Alèmayèhu Eshèté to Polish countercultural big-beat balladeer Czesław Niemen and Nigerian psych-funk legends Aktion, the sources of the sounds are myriad, but they coalesce into a formidable, breathing, and dense mass of sirenian thematic threads, both musical and lyrical. Threads which beg to be pulled, followed, and explored.

The Great Bailout - Moor Mother

Any Brit will know that one of the country’s great sources of pride is that it was one of the first western powers to abolish slavery in 1834. Moving past the initial red flag of having had slavery in the first place, the 1833 Abolition Act is perhaps not quite as shiny as it initially seems. Indeed, one of the main clauses of the act was reparations. Not for the newly freed now formerly enslaved citizens as one might expect, but for the slave-owners to cover their “loss of business”. These reparations ran to the tune of £20 million. That was 40% of the Treasury’s annual income that year. For context, by today’s wage values, we’re talking roughly £17 billion. The government (headed by Earl Grey, of bergamot tea fame) took out a loan which would take them 180 years to repay with tax money. The Guardian once called this “the largest bailout in British history until the bailout of the banks in 2009”. This means that if you, dear reader, are a British citizen who was of tax-paying age before 2015, then you have personally financially contributed to the slave trade.

In 2024, Moor Mother started work researching this egregious nonsense and coalesced her findings into an absolutely breath-taking piece of work, The Great Bailout, her ninth record.

Over the course of her previous eight albums, Moor Mother has borne witness to the atrocities and sins posterity has forgotten. For The Great Bailout, her interest was piqued when she stumbled upon a document referencing the events of our opening paragraph which led her to read further into the story. Sifting through various archives, conducting interviews, and tracing the money, she put together a body of damning evidence which formed the basis for the free-form poem that would become The Great Bailout. In this record, Moor Mother creates and occupies a fully formed sonic space in which she sits, patiently unravelling the horror of the bailout and showing how its repercussive tendrils creep into every aspect of modern life in the UK. Around her, the music moves slowly, evoking the sins of our ancestors in dark unsettling soundscapes. A deftly selected coterie of guests drift in and out of the record like spectres in the story, lending texture and voice to the deep, complex emotions wound up in the music.

As a result, The Great Bailout is an astounding cinematic unit which stares history in the face and forces the listener to do the same. There is no shying away from The Great Bailout. It’s challenging, it’s incendiary, and its core is sourced from archival materials processed into a confronting piece of performance art.

The truth of the American revolution is that by the time Thomas Paine had written his revolutionary song Liberty Tree and subsequent pamphlet Common Sense, their content had already been undermined by the realities of colonialism. White Europeans in America may well have needed his words to trigger their revolution, but these societies seeking independence had already been built on inequality, oppression, and death. The American and European colonial machines had already crushed and destroyed countless human lives long before Paine, and continue to do so to this very day.

When I asked in my opening paragraph “Liberty for who?” I perhaps should have asked “Liberty from what?” If the perceived freedom of Europeans in America simply depended on perpetrating the ills they had escaped onto others, then can the project ever be said to have been a success?

By claiming their own voices and using them to convey their own stories and those of their ancestors, the artists in this piece (and many others), are simply illuminating this sordid history and dismantling its accepted narrative foundations and using the fallen pieces to reconstruct their own story. Whether it’s Guevara’s cultural collage, clipping. and Drexciya’s afrofuturist mythology, Moor Mother’s archival reconstruction, or woods’ archaeological remembrance; each of these artists refuses to allow European America to have the final word on their history.

A final note to say I’ve included a longer list of books than usual in the ‘further resources!’ section below, partly because I’ve had to do a lot more reading than usual for this piece, and partly because I’ve barely scratched the surface. If anything here has piqued your interest, I would strongly encourage you to pick one or two of these titles and continue the journey yourself.

Further Resources!

Books

• Kongi’s Harvest (1965), Wole Soyinka

• Blood in My Eyes (1972), George Jackson

• The Black Atlantic (1993), Paul Gilroy

• Black Noise (1994), Tricia Rose

• More Brilliant than the Sun (1998) Kodwo Eshun

• The Price of Emancipation (2010), Nicholas Draper

• The Book of Drexciya vol. 1 (2020) Abu Qadim Haqq

• The Book of Drexciya vol. 2 (2021) Abu Qadim Haqq

• Dear Science (2021), Katherine McKittrick

• Gramsci at Sea (2023), Sharad Chari

• Fusion! (2024), Alex Coles

• Songs in the Key of MP3 (2025), Liam Inscoe-Jones

Films

• Kongi’s Harvest (1970), Ossie Davis

Websites

• Drexciya Research Lab

Podcasts

• This American Life - episode: We Are In the Future

• Bass Agenda - episode: Drexciya Special with A Qadim Haqq, Stephen Rennicks & Andrew Duke

• Switched on Pop - episode: Afrofuturism in Kali Uchis & Clipping

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Paine started small, essentially just asking for a salary rise, but would go on to write some of the most influential texts in the English language. He laid the foundations for British radical thought and played a catalysing role in the American Revolution from which the USA would be born just four years after his debut outing as a disgruntled exciseman.

In the background of his revolutionary writing, Paine enjoyed penning poems and the occasional song. Many of these have been lost to time, and the few that remain are only really interesting as curiosities. One however, has stood the test of time, and remains to this day a fascinating artefact of the birth of the US. Paine wrote Liberty Tree in 1775 in the midst of the unrest that would culminate in the American Revolution of 1776.

In Liberty Tree, Paine uses a real American elm located in Boston as an allegory for the emancipation of America as the true home of liberty. In his later seminal text The Rights of Man, published in 1791, Paine expands on his definition of liberty in punishing detail. Roughly though, he sees it as the freedom to do as thou will, as long as it doesn’t impede on the freedom of others. Freedom of conscience, the right to believe whatever one wishes. Finally, one of the most important aspects of liberty for Paine, is the inherent right to resist political oppression. The latter belief was central to the actions of 1775 and 1776.

Before I dive into Paine’s lyrics, I feel a little refresher may be in order as to the state of America, and Boston in particular by the 1770s: The land on which Boston can now be found was once stewarded by the Massachusett people, from whom the state takes its name. It would seem that they lived in relative peace for a few thousand years until 1616 when an estimated 90% of the population of the American Atlantic coast fell foul of what would come to be known as the ‘great dying’, an illness pandemic brought to the continent by early European colonisers. Three years later, the first enslaved people were brought over from Africa, laying the foundations for the race-based economic system on which the nation would be built. And with that the great American colonial project was off!

Well not quite yet, but by the mid-1700s, the English had successfully taken control of the east coast of America in what was now referred to as the 13 colonies. The next step was for the English in North America to start getting annoyed with the English back home. As colonies, they fell under the rule of the crown, but as with any colony anywhere ever, they didn’t have equal rights, so they started kicking off. In particular against the idea of taxation without representation. The colonisers started congregating to plot ways by which to emancipate themselves from English rule. One of the spots they picked was in the dappled shade of an American elm in Boston. By 1765, they had started referring to this tree as the Liberty Tree.

American Elms are beautiful trees. Broad, tall, and hardy, they provide food, habitat, and shade for thousands of species of insects, birds, and mammals. Their vast sprawling roots help stabilise riverbanks avoiding soil erosion in times of heavy rainfall. They have also been a part of daily North American human life for longer than records show. Long before Europeans landed there, Native American tribes have been using elm in a variety of ways for the past 16,000 to 20,000 years. The elm’s tough, flexible, and water-tight bark was used to build boats, coverings for homes, and liquid transportation vessels. Its fibrous inner bark could be twisted into strong rope used for anything from sewing to building. It is also a key ingredient in much traditional medicine. Throughout history, the mighty elm has also served as a community gathering point, casting cooling shade over its congregants as they share stories, ideas, and wisdom under its leaves. The elm’s more recent history is far less bucolic. In 1928, a pathogen called Dutch Elm Disease made its way to the US on a shipment of logs from Holland intended for the Ohio furniture trade. Confusingly, this shipment has nothing to do with the disease’s name, rather it is so called because it was first isolated by Dutch phytopathologists. In an unbelievable reflection of the tragic great dying of 1616, the novel disease spread across North America killing over 100 million trees, roughly 75% of the country’s population. As a result, American Elm is now classified as endangered by The International Union for Conservation of Nature.

Back to 1765, the British government introduced the Stamp Act by which all printed material (pamphlets, newspapers, legal documents, playing cards…etc.) in the 13 colonies should be printed on approved and taxed paper sources in Britain and paid for in British money (as opposed to new North American currency). The act was implemented to help pay for British troops stationed in North America, and perhaps unsurprisingly, was met with widespread disapproval. Around that time, Paine, still a long way off his political writing, was sacked for the first time as an exciseman for claiming to have inspected goods he hadn’t. That’s right, the dismissal of our opening paragraph was his second one from the same job! Back in Boston, the ominously named Loyal Nine started meeting in private to plan an effective protest to the Stamp Act. They were just nine local businessmen. In August, they planned their first public gathering under a local elm. Now, some of their imagery was pretty high-concept so bear with me as I explain: Firstly, an effigy marked “A.O.” could be seen hanging from the tree’s branches. This was meant to be Andrew Oliver, the secretary of Massachusetts, and Boston's appointed stamped-paper distributor, and stamp tax collector. So far, so good, but the next bit is where the creativity kicks in. They’d hung a boot with its sole painted green. This represented recently-ousted Prime Minister and Chancellor George Grenville and less-recently resigned PM The Earl of Bute, both of whom were considered responsible for the Stamp Act. Get it? The Earl of ‘Boot’ and George ‘Greenville’. Yeah, pretty searing satire. Inside the boot was a small devil holding a sign saying “What Greater Joy did ever New England see / Than a Stampman hanging on a Tree!” The Stamp Act was repealed in 1766.

As clunky as some of the messaging might have been, this meeting was historic. It was the first ever public showing of defiance against the crown. The first beat of the butterflie’s wings that would result in the American Revolution a decade later.

Over the years, the Liberty Tree would remain a place of congregation for protests big and small. Other towns caught wind of this and began designating their own Liberty Trees. Today, there are many bars and squares across the land that carry the name, often on spots where the trees would have stood.

The 1773 Tea Act is now widely known as one of the major aggravating factors of the American Revolution, passed to help out the British East India company with their irresponsibly large stores of tea and to combat illegal tea smuggling in North America. The North American colonisers were having none of it and, in 1773, famously boarded EIC ships docked in Boston harbour and dumped their cargo into the sea. During these events, one of the Crown’s staunchest loyalists, customs official John Malcolm was marched to the Liberty Tree, tarred and feathered, and forced to announce his resignation.

After meeting Benjamin Franklin in London, Paine, armed with a letter of recommendation from the former, hopped across the pond and settled in Philadelphia in 1774. There, he became editor of the Franklin-published Pennsylvania Gazette. It was here that Paine took a greater interest in the American Revolution and it wouldn’t be long before he became one of its leading voices.

In 1775, a group of loyalists, incensed by the increasingly violent dissent from the revolutionaries, felled the Liberty Tree and chopped it up for firewood. It was this event that Paine saw as the perfect image to embody both American liberty, and its oppression by the crown.

In the first stanza of Liberty Tree, Paine rather grandly announces the arrival of the concept of liberty in America, in the form of a celestial being who brings “A fair budding branch from the gardens above” and names it Liberty Tree. In stanza two, Paine lays out the appeal of liberty and seems to suggest immigration and tolerance are the basis for success in America:

The fame of its fruit drew the nations around
    To seek out this peaceable shore.
Unmindful of names or distinctions they came,
   For freemen like brothers agree;

In his third stanza, Paine outlines all the things that the 13 colonies did for Britain with nothing in return. Namely providing the tar and lumber which made up a key part of British trade at the time, and providing men to fight on Britain’s behalf.

The fourth and final stanza take the form of a rousing call arms to defend the Liberty Tree (and therefore liberty in general):

But hear, O ye swains ('tis a tale most profane),
    How all the tyrannical powers,
Kings, Commons, and Lords, are uniting amain
    To cut down this guardian of ours.
From the East to the West blow trumpets to arms,
    Thro' the land let the sound of it flee:
Let the far and the near all unite with a cheer,
    In defence of our Liberty Tree.

After arriving in America, Paine quickly realised the benefits of writing for ordinary people rather than the political elites. When reading Common Sense, the language is markedly simpler than his earlier writing. The knowledge his ideas could only be truly effective if understood by the broadest possible audience likely sat behind the choice to write Liberty Tree as a song instead of another pamphlet. He set the words to the then popular tune The Gods of Greece so that it might be easily learned, sung and passed from person to person irrespective of eduction.

On 10th January 1776, Paine published perhaps his best known work Common Sense, initially anonymously signed by “an Englishman”. In this short pamphlet, he uses a similar style and approach to The Case of the Officers of Excise, but this time to argue for American independence. The pamphlet, amongst other angles, pits self-rule against the absurd concept of monarchy.

So persuasive was his tone and argument, that the pamphlet galvanised the movement around independence. In proportion to the population of the time, Common Sense had the largest sales of any book published in the entirety of American history. It’s estimated every free household had access to a copy.

On July 4th 1776, the 13 colonies announced themselves independent of British rule. Although the British wouldn’t recognise this until the treaty of Paris signed in 1783.

Whilst I love stories of the East India Company getting bullied and comeuppance for snide authority figures, it is important to remember that the USA as we know it today was born out of a conflict between two parties in the wrong. Sure, the British crown had no right to dictate the lives of people over 5,200km away, but those people had no rightful claim to that land in the first place. What’s more, this colonial expansion was enabled by repeated massacres, forced displacement, and extreme violent dispossession alongside the aforementioned careless introduction of novel diseases. It is therefore ironic (and would be hilarious if not so dismal) that these colonisers, settling on stolen land, should continue even today to paint themselves as victims.

Happy 250th birthday, America.

Further Resources!

Books

• The Case of the Officers of Excise (1772), Thomas Paine

• Common Sense (1776), Thomas Paine

• The Rights of Man (1791), Thomas Paine

• Tom Paine and Revolutionary America (1976), Eric Foner

• Tom Paine: A Political Life (1995), John Keane

• An Indigenous People’s History of the United States (2014), Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

• The Lost Elms (2025), Mandy Haggith

• Patriots, Radicals and Revolutionaries (2026), Leanne O’Boyle

Podcasts

• Ben Franklin’s World - episode: Common Sense at 250: The Unfinished Work of Democracy, Live Conversation

• The Modern West - episode: The Great Dying: Shall Furnish Medicine

Please support my work!

If you enjoy my writing, please subscribe for free.

If you can spare a few quid, please subscribe for a small monthly donation.

If you think anyone else would like it, please share it far and wide.

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I fully intend on keeping the Sunday long-reads entirely free as I want the knowledge, history, stories, and excellent music to travel as far as possible. The research behind each article however requires a lot of time and resources (books, research trips, film rentals, gig tickets, exhibition tickets… etc.), not to mention the countless hours of dyslexically writing and editing myself.

Paid subscriptions help cover those costs and allow me to dedicate more time to producing richer, better-researched articles week after week.

My ambition is to deliver 52 substantial pieces a year as well as the odd bonus. If you reckon this is worth supporting, please sign up for one of the suggested amounts, or enter a custom number.

If on the other hand, you can’t stretch to financial support right now, no worries, Noise Melt will remain free. This isn’t a transaction so much as collective support. Those who can afford it, help keep it accessible for everyone else.

Subscribe now

If you’re already subscribed, I greatly appreciate you. Thank you.