Left Field on Film

Left Field: The film

Brian Eno interview

Waterstones book launch, 5 May 2016

Craig Murray at Left Field Waterstones launch

Miss Sarajevo 

Miss Sarajevo 2 

Help album; Dream a Little Dream

Pavarotti & Friends

The Healing Drum

Dodgy, Mostar Keep Smiling

Rock the Casbah 

LEFT FIELD: slideshow

                                                                                     
further films to follow shortly (with Amir Amirani and music from Eugene Skeef, Deicola Neves, Vanessa Lucas-Smith, Peter Wilson)

To buy Left Field - The memoir of a lifelong Activist, by David Wilson go to Waterstones, Amazon, WH Smith, Penguin Books and most good retailers. Best offer to date is from Public Reading Rooms at £13 including p&p

The Cherokee and Left Field

Two days ago, my wife Anne Aylor and I went to the screening of 'Hidden Histories - Discovering Indigenous London' at Kings College. It is a project of the world theatre group, Border Crossings, as part of their Origins Festival. The artistic director, Michael Walling, is an old friend of ours and directed my first play in 1989. Anne had been interviewed as part of the film. It may seem surprising for those who know her to find out that she is part Cherokee – she calls herself a homeopathic Indian. On her mother's side her great grandmother was full-blooded. Her father was dark-eyed, relatively hairless, and looked like Elvis Presley. Did you know that Elvis, too, was part Cherokee? And did you know they called themselves the Aniyunwiya and that their pronounciation of Cherokee is Tslagi. They are part of the Southern Iroquois nation. Members of the northern tribe built the Empire State Building. The southern Iroquois were the only First Nation people to have an alphabet. Enough of interesting details. The important fact is that 'Left Field' would never have been written without my homeopathic Tslagi partner who, as an award-winning writer, follows in the literary tradition of her ancestors.

Anne Aylor interview with 'Origins: Heritage of First Nations

To buy Left Field - The memoir of a lifelong Activist by David Wilson, best offer to date  is at WH Smith who are selling it at £13.60.  


Also on sale at Waterstones, Amazon and Penguin Books.

Behind God's Back

When writing my blog on Dragan Andjelic, I came across this photo of Anne Aylor and me standing in front of his installation at the Pavarotti Music Centre. She is wearing her white coat having just come out of her busy treatment room where she practised acupuncture during her nine-month stay in Mostar. Anne had originally come to Bosnia Hercegovina at the tail-end of the war in the summer of 1994 and had written up her experiences in an article submitted to The New Republic with the title, “Behind God's Back”. On her journey there she wrote about a surreal traffic jam that had been caused by two toppled vehicles. “When the road has been cleared and we are given permission to continue our journey, we see what has caused the delay: two overturned container lorries full of pigs. The ones that are alive are being hosed down by soldiers. What is eerie is that the animals are completely silent. They are traumatised, dead or dying in the 40 degree heat. I wonder if it is the first time in history that an army has been deployed to help animals on their way to slaughter. We pass the containers and see dozens of UN vehicles facing the other way. It has been seven hours since the accident and these drivers will be here for hours more. Seeing our War Child sticker, one of them waves at me. I ask him if he speaks English so I can tell him what is causing the delay. He shakes his head, says that he is German. ‘Schwein,’ I say, the only word I can remember from my high-school German, and thumb in the direction of the overturned lorries.” A year later, War Child released the Help album with contributions from more than 20 artists including Oasis, Blur, Radiohead, Sinéad O’Connor, Paul McCartney and Portishead. It made the charity millions. The income from the album was used to provide artificial limbs for wounded children, food and clothing to orphanages, funding for school meals, support for a mobile medical clinic, the supply of premature baby units, even funding for mine clearance programmes. It was at this time that Linda McCartney heard about Anne's article and asked to read “Behind God's Back”. Perhaps that was why she decided to donate 22 tonnes of veggie burgers to War Child to be distributed in Bosnia. You can read more about Anne's work in Bosnia in Left Field.

Seventy miles speeding

La Torre de Dalt is a large 'Mas' (a Catalan traditional farmhouse) in the hills above Girona. It's the place where, for the last five years, Anne has run her annual writing retreats. When her course ended this June, I hired it for a second week and invited friends and relatives to join me. I told them this was a celebration for my 70th year, but it also marked the completion of Left Field - bringing together some of those who have played their part in my life and without whom I would have had no memoir. I had worried how these people from my past and present would mix: a political banner maker, a businessman, a bereavement counsellor, musicians, writers and journalists. I need not have. Widely and in some cases, wildly, disparate people spent the week talking, eating, drinking, walking and partying together. No one there will forget how we all fell in love with Alice Kilroy as she encouraged us all, willingly or not, towards the Revolution. The writers soon became known as the 'murmuration of writers' as they met in corners of the building to create new work or read excerpts from their novels and poems. They seemed to flock and flow through the building like birds. In the evenings, during their 'open mic' nights, they read their work and invited the rest of us to join them. Oha Maslo, who had driven from Bosnia to Spain with Teo Krilic and his family, apologised for turning down their invitation to hear them: “As soon a I see the first comma,” he told me, “I go into a coma.” If I'd told him that one person was writing a novel about setting up a whorehouse in Australia, he might have forgotten his problems with punctuation marks. In any case his apology was adopted by Julian Herbert, one of the poets there, as the opening phrase for his paean to the week: Comma coma? Trace back through castles, Until, until they're in the sky, And we hold hands together, While we fly. Teo played guitar while Oha joined him on the cajon drum. They sang Na Klepeci Nanulama – about a woman hearing the clogs of her dead mother on the stairs. La Torre looks across at the Cap de Creus above Cadaqués where Dali had his summer home. Some guests visited his museum in Figueres, but they didn't need to go there to experience the surreal. The week took on a weirdly wonderful quality when the Balkan rock group, Dubioza Kolektiv, dropped by. They were en route from Barcelona to France, a tour which was to end at the Glastonbury Festival. When someone asked them where they were from, they answered from practically every country of ex-Yugoslavia. “What was that war all about?” said Mario, “Here we are all together again.” With funky haircuts and dressed in black they didn't touch the bottle of whisky they had brought for me, but drank tea and coffee and ate dainty biscuits. The whisky was emptied that evening, but with no help from me. I am no longer allowed to drink much alcohol. Oha and Teo shook their heads in bafflement each time I turned down an offer of another beer or glass of wine. The only advantage of not joining in, apart from staying alive, was that I was able to talk a bit more sense. On the last day, Maureen Larkin read a 'haiku' for me, which pretty well sums up my life in 18 syllables: '70 miles speeding, The cops have not caught me yet, No point braking now'. Check out La Torre: The Film!

(Left Field has reached its target of 100% . If you haven't bought your copy yet it's now 100% certain to be published)

Order here

PIC: Alice Kilroy' 'banner inspired by the haiku

Writing in Spain

I am back at La Torre de Dalt in Spain to help Anne Aylor run her annual creative writing course. This is now in its 6^th year and I am looking forward to this week, including G&Ts in Banyoles where this pic is taken. The work is not too onerous, her students are lovely and our chef, Lee Pennington, is amazing. Not just for his food, but his radical Manchester humour. I have learned a lot about cooking from my time in the kitchen with him. And after the course (pardon the pun) we are staying for a further week with over 30 family and friends to celebrate my 70^th! My two Mostar 'sons', Oha and Teo, are coming from Bosnia so there will be a lot of drinking and music. I am not able to drink any more so will have to play guitar! You can read more about Anne, Oha, Teo, and my family in 'Left Field'

Viva Anne Aylor & La Quince Brigada

Without Anne Aylor I would never have written Left Field'. Author of two books, No Angel Hotel and The Double Happiness Company, she is now working on her third novel set in the Spanish Civil War. Much of her research has involved finding out about the US Abraham Lincoln Brigade volunteers. 'The House of Wild Beasts', a chapter from this forthcoming publication, won the 2014 Historical Novel Society Award. Every June she runs a week-long creative writing course – in Spain! This year, after her writing retreat, we are staying on to celebrate my 70^th birthday - “Ten years before I saw the light of morning a comradeship of heroes was laid.” My own birth year was one more than Christy Moore's in Viva La Quince Brigada, which honours those who fought against fascism in Spain. Check out his amazing Glasgow gig. A free copy of 'Left Field' to the first person who correctly names where this photo of Anne was taken. Reply to messages at my FB.

Christy Moore Viva La Quince Brigada

Anne Aylor

Left Field contains this dedication to writer Anne Aylor, the instigator and editor of my memoir:

"Without whom I might not be alive and

if alive, I would be dead. Alive or dead,

without her, I would not have been able

to write this book."

Subdural haematoma in Huffington Post

New Huffington Post blog on subdural haematoma


http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/…/planet-zembar_b_6885600.h…