Here is an old thing from times gone by.
In the late noughties I was gigging my way around Birmingham’s small venues and the whole thing was very dissatisfying. These little shows felt like the first stop on a pre-marked road toward the capitalist myth of musical success. This was the myth of ‘making it.’ Everywhere we played, it felt like there was an unspoken agreement between us and the audience. They were there because we wanted to ‘make it.’ This poisoned any possibility of a shared event, a connection, a common spiritual experience or any of the higher things that art might reach for. We didn't want to ‘make it.’ We wanted encounter.
So we took a different approach. We formed a band called the Army of the Broken Hearted. We would play public spaces for no money. We were a junk instrument band with songs so crude that no one could ruin them, and so anyone could join in. We were carbon neutral. We were spiritualised and politicised. We had some good ideas and some bad ones. We were trying to interrupt the deadlock of public space which felt numb, controlled by its consumer capitalist messaging. We wanted to re-enchant public space and make it a space of happenings and meetings.
This is the backstory to this recording. Sometimes when you try to break out of the norm, you find yourself doing something delightfully obvious and ordinary. Here we were, a decade and a half back, playing Christmas carols in the alleyway next to the Patrick Kavanagh pub. Extraordinarily, they, who still fill Moseley with the sound of drunken merriment, complained that we were too loud. The recording is scrappy and pitchy and full of sincere Christmas spirit.
Let heaven and nature sing
Fields and floods, rocks, hills and plains
Repeat the sounding Joy
I'll be signing off to re-gather until January, when there will be a new series of writings and a new series of online gatherings and podcasts.
Love and Mirth to you all
DBB
Heaven & Nature Sing