The Sydney Peace Festival
- Feb 4
- 5 min read
As a singer I've been lucky enough to experience what is to be at the epicentre of power generation through music, and to be the focal point of that too. It is the ultimate buzz, it really is. I get why octogenarian rock stars keep chasing it even if they create the spectacle of over-steamed turkeys fussing around the stage looking for their lost car keys.
Take when my band, Andorra, played a 2006 peace festival in Leichhardt, Sydney, in support of the people of Lebanon and Palestine who were suffering through one of their cycles of being bombed back into the stone-age by Israel and co.(1)
From Andorra's rep for putting on festivals and music events with a social focus, I was asked by the organisers to arrange performers for the day.
We also used the occasion to debut a song I’d written called 'Keysar Trad Jazz'.(2) The track drew on the brilliant jazz stylings of our keyboardist Matt Campbell and also featured a message of peace by leading Australian Islamic spokesperson Keysar Trad.
In my inimitable way, I had arrived at singing to the crowd, on that day, by taking my self-amusement possibly too far. From wondering aloud about how something as incongruous as Keysar Trad adlibbing over jazz might sound, I was bound by my own creed to then have to make it so. My foolish fancy was to become a reality.
Well not all foolish. When the concept of the song took shape in my mind, the political reality of what was pushing people like Keysar into the public spotlight, guided what myself and Andorra created.
Geopolitically, the world at the time was in a pressure-cooker again with the deep pulse of war-threats drumming in our temples. The genocide of a generation of children denied medicine continued to play out diabolically in front of our eyes, in Iraq, and opportunists were seizing the chance, as they do, to postulate for personal gain, or shiv their enemies while no-one was looking.
Lebanon was, at this time, in the sights again and, amongst all this, we as a band, wanted to do our thing which was, not just to sing against the idea of more war in our own words, but to find the voices of those being tarred by anti-Muslim rhetoric from above, in an Australian context. We understood that people are people and just want their kids to have a safe, happy life. Most thing beyond that are really just bull.
I reached out to Keysar who was, not unsurprisingly, sceptical at first of our intent and being dragged into the batty fever-dream of my creations. Doing his own research, he determined that I checked out. He warmed to the idea when we explained that he could contribute in his own words alongside our plan to showcase the modern face of Muslim music in Australia, including the youth. I figured to throw in something of those lilting vocal melodies I'd come across and loved when tuning up and down the AM dial and landing on Middle Eastern music stations. I mean, why not? If you're gonna go, go hard.
What came of it was a track where I played a character who MC'd throughout, in a Tom Waitsian smoking-room growl, while other performers from the Islamic diaspora in Australia featured throughout. We brought together the superb Arabic singer Manelle Ibrahim, Lebanese-Australian hip-hop artist Susan Chamma and Keysar himself, who dreaded the idea of being recorded singing but who was happy to orate some considered thoughts, by rounding things out with a message of peace and understanding. Truly just madness but it worked, amazingly, with the heart of everyone involved.(3)
Manelle had laid down her vocals for us in a couple of takes, in her loungeroom, after we were whisked to her house in a community member's four-wheel drive, one afternoon. Susan preached in the studio at the Redfern Community Centre, where we had some cache. And Keysar recorded his piece in our make-shift studio in Smithy's Music Shop in Petersham (where my Andorra co-conspirator Eric Bellingham worked).
From my flight of fancy over a politically-orientated pun, the recording ended up meaning a lot to us all. Keysar tells me that he revisits the recording still, to this day, as a comforting reminder and a delight of his own artistic journey.
It was not all comfortable at the time, though. Not because we were not all on the same page, or because Keysar was a man who had to get in, get his track down and go, with the focus and brevity of Frank Sinatra on golf day. It was because, as we pressed play, war literally started.
I was stunned by the prescience of the situation we were in as Keysar asked for a second, during a level check, to answer his phone. When he returned he told us that aircraft had started flying over Lebanon and bombing Beirut. He was committed to finishing what we were doing but had to keep taking breaks from recording the vocal part he was adding, to take calls. Lebanon was being blown to pieces as we mixed and played backing tracks and parts and pulled our song together.
I was sobered in the realisation that what we were doing was anything but silly, despite the fun play on words I had started out with, and the chutzpah I used to see where that could go. We were recording something that pre-empted the destruction playing out on the other side of the world, with a counter through art, and with the words and expressions of those under psychological and legislative attack, in our own country, and physical attack elsewhere.
Fast-forward to the Peace Festival and I was there, front and centre, as the first notes of my band struck in unison behind me. At such times we often see ourselves in the frame, through observant memory but, on this occasion, my experience was two-fold.
I got to see people's eyes light up as they felt themselves awash with the sonic energy my band was creating and their delight as rhythm took them over.
We’d never played such perfect, unifying and powerful notes. I knew it. I experienced an awe as I tried to keep my attention on singing. As a unit we had arrived at a peak brought together from the years of practice, and the unconscious understanding of players for the movements and improvisations of team mates. This along with our individual hearts, energy and the beliefs that brought us to such a place all combined. The audience were enveloped in the dome made by the power the music was putting out. I could see it travelling across them like the time-lapsed thaw of winter snow as the Spring comes in and lights up the faces of flowers with the warmth of a brighter day.
1. Peace festival
2. Keysar Trad Jazz
3. Everyone involved
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