'Left Field' for sale

'This is an excellent and inspiring book.'  

Brian Eno

‘Left Field' has been on sale for over three years. You can now buy a signed hardback copy for £10 (includes delivery) or receive on Kindle or audio book for £2.99 . To order hardback book contact david@davidwilson.org.uk

Reviews

Robin Beste - tribute and funeral notice

I first met Robin at the Stop the War Coalition. Like me, he had completed his working years and was happy to spend many hours as a political activist.
Outside office hours, I liked my pints and curries, music and a good film. Robin only had interest in the last two. He seemed to regard eating as a necessity and drank nothing stronger than tap water.
When I watched him open his lunch box of biscuits and cheese, waving his hand to reject the offer of coffee the rest of us tanked up on, I wondered if he'd always lived such a spartan existence. It did cross my mind that he might have left behind a once-dissolute life filled with drunken evenings and ribald songs, leaving him like those medieval hermit-monks who retreated to their caves to do penance.
Robin never spoke much about his life before arriving in London as a teacher, but when he did, he dropped the odd clue. When I told him I had been a devotee of The Pretty Things and found The Rolling Stones too tame, he said The Pretty Things had played at the club he once ran. When I said I had seen Muddy Waters on his London visits, it turned out that Robin, too, had been there. 'Chuck Berry in 1964 at the 100 Club?' Yes that too.
When I told him I was unable, post-stroke, to play my guitar he recommended I get myself a harmonica. There then followed a detailed email with suggestions of where to buy my Hohner Marine Band in C and suggestions for the best online tutorials with links.
Despite our shared love of Blues and Rock 'n Roll, we disagreed about Scott Walker. Robin said that he was a fan of his “in all his incarnations, including his later avant-garde albums”.
Robin was always the 'go to' person for me on what films to watch. He was a devotee of American film noir and would send me emails with lists of 'not to be missed' films. I did watch Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall in The Big Sleep, but confess that I still have a long list of films to be ticked off his recommendations. I promise him, posthumously, to track them down and view.
At his prodding I occasionally wrote for Public Reading Rooms. Among my contributions was A Face to be Punched about Boris Johnson. Recently he tried to get me to review The Deceit Syndrome written by Paul Hobday. Google Books says, “Becoming more and more alarmed about the extra misery and sickness he sees on a daily basis, his concern turns to anger when he realises this is a direct result of Government policy.” Robin said about it, “Even as a graduate with a degree in English literature, I'm obviously not the person to do this review.” At 600+ pages and on a subject I am over qualified to comment on I agreed. I turned the job down. This was not a task for me either.
Despite my occasional refusals, Robin and PRR would promote articles I had written for other online publications and generously offered me a sales platform for my memoir, Left Field.
When I was in hospital after my heart operation and again after my stroke, Robin would visit me. I was to find out later that he too had a heart 'condition' but he rarely spoke about himself and was more eager to bring his politics to my bedside for discussion.
Our political 'platforms' had taken the same route as our music; ex-SWPers but never anti those we recognised as involved in the same fight. With Jewish ancestry he was incensed by the Zionist attacks on Jeremy Corbyn and helped me with my article for The London Economic on the plight of Julian Assange. I will miss him badly from these ongoing struggles.
A few weeks after Mick Jagger had a heart operation, Robin wrote to me, “Being rich, the procedure was by trans-catheter aortic valve replacement. The technique was used to cure Tony Blair of the condition. I have atrial fibrillation. Not being rich, I was refused the procedure under the NHS.”
That was the first I knew he shared heart problems with me. We were in that fight together as well. I am so sad that he lost that one so tragically.
RecentIy I have lost a few friends to that ‘dark night’, but Robin's parting has been exceptional. When I look at his photo I not only see the man, I hear him speaking. And I cry. Something else exceptional. Manuela tells me that one minute after his last child, his son Sam, joined Manuela and his sisters at Robin's bedside, he died. They say he had been unconscious for several days with no electrical activity in his brain. Really?
I used to ring him two or three times a week. Although our conversations started with the political struggle they soon moved on to music. I enjoyed interacting with his caustic sense of humour which made him seem curmudgeonly to some people. But once your metaphoric eyes adjusted to his emotional headlights you became aware of a wonderful soul who was trying to take those around him out of a very dark tunnel. He was, in fact, lighting and enlightening the way. I will miss his headlights.
Robin is survived by his wife Manuela, daughters Dany and Alice and son Sam. Unlike Robin and me, Sam doesn't just talk music. He was a keyboard player for Amy Winehouse and today performs with his own group, Hejira.
Anne and I send our love, our condolences and our tears to them all.
I never asked Robin if he liked Lennon's'Imagine' – but I know he would have agreed with the lyrics. After all, he lived them. I can see him walking beside these two down that path, but he would have turned back at the door and refused the offer of a drink. Watch this, listen and think of this dear friend of mine.


ROBIN BESTE FUNERAL
Tuesday 11th June 2019, 11:00 - 13:00
The West Chapel, Golders Green Crematorium  62 Hoop Lane Golders Green LONDON NW1 1 7NL
No flowers. Donations to Medical Aid for Palestine (MAP) - a cause dear to Robin’s heart. 

If attending please email - manuelabeste@icloud.com

Oha and Mostar Rock School

My close friend, Orhan (Oha) Maslo has been interviewed for the Bosnian magazine, Start, about his life and work with the Mostar Rock School. For those who don't speak or read Bosnian here is my chapter about him and Teo Krilic, from my memoir, Left Field. In the intervening years, the Rock School, under Oha's direction, has gone from strength to strength.


Mostar Sons
When I arrived in Mostar as Director of the Pavarotti Music Centre, I rented a small two-bedroom house and offered the spare room to Teo and Oha, two musicians working at the Centre. Oha’s mother still lived on the west side of town which he could not visit safely and Teo’s widowed mother had no space for him in her tiny flat.
Close friends, they had both been soldiers and had both realised, in Oha’s words, ‘that the “enemy” was bullshit. They feed you enemies.’ While the war was still going on, they helped set up Apeiron, a group of young people who got together to play music.
The three of us spent most of our time outside since the house itself was damp and dark. The plumbing had given up in the kitchen and dirty dishes would pile up at the only other source of water – the bathroom. If you wanted to take a shower, you first had to do the washing-up.
The toilet was not fixed to the floor and, when you sat on the pan, there was more than one movement. There was always a puddle at the base and you could never be sure what it was. Common to all toilets in south-east Europe, the S-bend had yet to be adopted so to the smell of damp was added that of excrement. It was a mystery where it all went, if it did at all. The road bridge at the end of the street had been blown up at the start of the war and the sewerage pipes with it.
Despite the smell and discomfort, we had happy times there. We’d sit on the terrace while Teo played his guitar and sang his sad songs.
When Teo returned home from teaching in local schools, he would smile at me and pace the living room, distractedly clicking his fingers to some inner rhythm. He would then turn and give me a second smile as he opened the fridge door to take out a beer. If there weren’t any, he would tease me and offer to do me a favour: take my money and fill the fridge again. By the end of the evening we’d be out of booze, but he would consider that he’d repaid me by beating me at endless games of backgammon. The game is called tavla there and arrived with the Ottomans. It is as much a part of the culture in Bosnia as the ritual of serving coffee. There is always time for coffee and tavla. In Teo’s case, most of the night.
After multiple victories, he would open the last beers and insist on a final game. ‘Come on, David. You can beat me now. I’m drunk.’
Hearing him slur his words, I thought my time to win had come. It never did.
One morning, not long after he’d moved in, I woke at 4am and went to the kitchen to get a glass of water. Teo was sitting at the table, staring at the wall. I asked him what was wrong and why he wasn’t sleeping.
‘Sleep?’ he said. ‘I haven’t slept for four years.’
I looked at him in shock. ‘Four years? Why?’
‘Let’s drink some of that English tea of yours and I’ll tell you.’
I knew he’d seen terrible things on the front line, but had known nothing of what he was about to tell me. How, at midnight on August 10th, 1993, Croat militia arrived at his house. ‘They asked me where my father was. I was scared and so I told them he was upstairs. Then we were all ordered into the street. Me, my mother, my father, my younger brother and grandfather. They pushed us into the back of a van, but a guy was shouting at my dad, “You’re staying with us.” That’s the last I saw of him. We were driven to the front line and told to cross over to the Bosniak side. All this time, I was thinking how I had given my dad away. We later heard he’d been shot. They said that some of the soldiers who came to our house were shocked that he’d been killed. He was a well-known singer. He wasn’t a soldier.’
I thought how terrifying it must have been for Teo, who’d been 15 at the time. How the guilt must be unbearable.
‘How old was he?’ I asked.
‘Forty three.’
Nine years younger than I was when we sat in that kitchen. That night, over the Typhoo, was the only time Teo ever spoke about the war and about his father. Despite his personal tragedies, Teo was typical of many young Bosnians, wanting nothing more than to return to pre-war days when no one took any notice of religious or ethnic differences. Knowing his history makes it more extraordinary that he was one of the first to take his guitar into the communities of his former enemies.
Many journalists who ran stories on the Centre were fascinated by Teo, but only the US writer Nancy Shalala managed to coax something out of him for the Japan Times when they travelled together to a schools’ project in Ljubinje, a name that translates as ‘place of love’.
She wrote that the presence of Teo, a former Bosnian soldier, in this Serbian village, represented a small but significant challenge to the formidable social and political lines that carved up post-war Bosnia-Herzegovina:
‘... trading his Kalashnikov for an acoustic guitar, Teo now plays for an agitated mob of 60 three-year-olds in the kindergarten of his former enemy. “Three years ago I would have said that another 20 would need to pass before I would even consider entering [a Serbian village],” says the blond, burly Teo, who himself is barely 20, but already ancient in life experience.’
After I left Mostar, Teo spent much of his time looking for his father and, four years after returning to London, I got a call from him. He was laughing and I thought he was ringing from a bar or a party. He would often call me when he was drunk just to say hello and ask when I was next coming to Mostar.
‘They’ve found my dad.’
After completing DNA tests, Teo had been told by the International Commission on Missing Persons that his father’s remains had been located. His body had been part of an exchange of the dead which had taken place between the Bosniaks and the Croats. He’d been buried in a cemetery Teo had walked past every day on his way to the Centre.
Oha is a two-metre giant. You couldn’t meet a gentler man. Aged 14, he had been the youngest fighter in Mostar. I once told him that, as a former soldier, he was entitled to a war pension. ‘I know that, but I won’t take it. I feel guilty for what I did. The money should go to the widows and the wounded.’
He would never speak about the war: what he had done and what had happened on the front line, but he carried the scars of it inside him. I would sometimes see him sitting alone, rocking back and forwards in a chair, in time to some inner anguish, yet always in time. Twenty-five years later, he still does this. I hope it’s now just a habit.
Oha became a talented djembe player and, within weeks of the opening of the Centre, was assisting Eugene with the drumming workshops. I think he had found a way to release his distress with percussion as he pushed away his ghosts.
One of the PMC’s outreach programmes was to a mental hospital in Pazaric , ten kilometres west of Sarajevo. The hospital had been caught between two front lines, the patients left unattended and starving. They were forced to bury their own dead.
The road from Mostar was mountainous and still pockmarked with war damage. In winter, snow chains were essential. Nevertheless, Oha would go there every Thursday and never missed a week.
When I first visited the place immediately after the war, it was a Bosch vision of hell. It smelled of urine and vomit because they’d had to operate with a skeleton staff. When I went there later with Eugene and Oha, I was pleased to see that it was very different.
As the two percussionists climbed out of their car, they were treated like pop stars, mobbed and hugged. One patient, who claimed he had been President Tito’s ambassador in Morocco, was pointing at Eugene’s dreadlocks and shouting, ‘Marley, Bobby Marley.’
It was scary to watch these deranged people getting so excited, but Oha stood there, towering above the tallest of them, beaming.
The percussion session opened with a cacophony of thuds as Oha handed each patient an instrument taken out of his old army bag. Then Eugene worked his magic and came in over it all with his djembe. Oha answered him with a call and response on his drum. Then a sudden stop. Eugene stood up, smiled at everyone, sat down and said, ‘Follow.’ They did. The room was immediately in rhythm with them.
The only person who didn’t join in was the ‘Ambassador’, who stood by the door picking his nose, then placing the thumbs of each hand against his ears and making a waving sign at the group.
But madness doesn’t mean stupid. Oha told me that one day a UNICEF Land Cruiser broke down outside the hospital. One of the wheels had fallen off and spun down a steep slope. The driver didn’t know what to do. He jacked up the vehicle and fitted the spare tyre, but he needed four nuts. He sat down, lit a cigarette and started to call HQ for help on his satellite telephone.
Above him, a Pazaric patient was sitting on the hospital wall and shouted to the driver. ‘Hey, you.’ The driver was scared to respond to this crazy man. ‘Take one nut from the three other tyres,’ shouted the patient, ‘Use your brain.’
Oha’s enthusiasm for people was marked by equal enthusiasm for music. When he heard a performance he liked, his face would break into a smile as he grabbed the nearest person to him to hug. I have even watched while he hugged a JBL loudspeaker in appreciation.
One image of Oha remains indelibly in my memory. Michael de Toro of the Office for Security and Cooperation in Europe in Mostar, arranged for Oha to take a couple of DJs from the Centre to perform one Saturday evening at a gig in Trebinje. Like Ljubinje, this was in the Serb-controlled part of Bosnia, enemy territory for Oha. The town is in the hills behind Dubrovnik, from where the Serb bombardment of the old walled city had been organised.
The musicians travelled to Trebinje, escorted by OSCE. I was staying in Dubrovnik that weekend and met Michael in a café. He asked if I’d like to go and see this first music collaboration between Bosniaks from Mostar and Bosnian Serbs. I told him I’d left my UN card, which I needed to cross the old war borders, in Mostar.
‘No worries,’ he answered with a wink. ‘I’ll put you in the trunk.’
We set off from Dubrovnik. Halfway up the hill and a few kilometres from the border, he stopped the car. I climbed into the boot and we crossed to the Serb side without any problems. I was back in the front seat by the time we reached Trebinje.
When we arrived at the venue where the gig was supposed to be taking place, we were told it had been moved out of town to an old mill in the countryside. By the time we got there, it was 2am.
As Michael parked his car, the sounds of drum and bass could be heard in the distance. We walked along a river and, in the middle of the night, the music was in competition with thousands of croaking frogs and birds singing in the trees.
We arrived at the mill and there were hundreds of young people dancing. Oha was striding towards us, one arm around a young man and his other around a young woman. ‘Hey, David,’ he shouted, ‘these two were at school with me.’ He bent down from his tallness and planted a kiss on each of their heads. He then picked me off the ground. ‘How the fuck did you get here?’
When I left the PMC in 2000, I expected Oha to leave Mostar and the country. He was too dynamic for this broken, segregated city. But Oha is no quitter. He set up a club, Growing from Music, and was the first person to bring bands together from both sides of the city. ‘Every time a project of mine collapsed,’ Oha said, ‘things became lighter and lighter. Nothing was going to be a catastrophe for me. The war had been that. So each project was better than the one before. I hadn’t been defeated in the war and wasn’t going to be defeated by a good idea involving music. And fuck them. I don’t have much money, but enough to invest. I have time for everyone. The rich, the poor, the good, the naughty. War taught me not to screw up.’
Today, he manages the rock school and the recording studio at the Centre and is producer of the annual Mostar Blues and Rock Festival.
The rock school employs five teachers and an administrator. Students come there from all over the region and it is recognised as a place where division and bitter memories are parked outside.
The Blues and Rock festival is in its thirteenth year and performers have included Dr Feelgood, Snowy White, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Sugar Blue and many local groups.
When I asked Oha about his hopes for the rock school he told me, ‘Mostar people lost hope. The internationals came and went. Always with a beginning and end. Too much starting and shutting down. The rock school is like a kitchen. They can learn not just music, but video making and music administration. Most important of all is, fuck it, they don’t even have to be musicians. If they go home with new friendships and new hopes, they can take this into their families and communities. They will have made links which will make renewed divisions and conflicts more difficult for those bastards to organise. I have a long-term view. Fast success is not good success. It’s better to be slow. Maybe in ten years I will be mayor of Mostar and finally fuck up their plans of dividing people.’
He laughed as he told me of two recent initiatives organised in Mostar. Using Facebook, emails and word of mouth, a 16-year-old created an event called Chocolate Mess. Young people were asked to come to Spanish Square on the old front line and bring chocolate to give away to strangers. Over 300 turned up with their chocolate. On another day, 200 high- school children stood outside the old Mostar music school with signs, WILL YOU UNITE US? IF NOT, FUCK OFF.
Oha has, of course, been at the forefront of the recent protests that broke out across the country against corruption and the political establishment. He is a powerful representative of what could be a better future for his country.
Oha and Teo now have families and both have made a success of their lives in different ways. Oha as a musician and impresario; Teo as a musician who now performs in Ljubljana cafés, but whose main task is to be a full-time father to his two sons.
Oha laughs when he tells me the story about taking Teo to the bus station in Mostar to join his Slovenian wife, Sanja, in Ljubljana. ‘He was wearing an old T-shirt and was carrying two plastic bags, one with socks and pants, the other with more T-shirts. His only other possession had been his guitar which he’d left with his mother. Four months later, I was performing in Ljubljana and was told that Teo was waiting for me at the front of the hall. He was standing there in a smart black coat and behind him, a brand new Toyota.’
Oha and his wife, Maša, have two daughters named Luna and Zoe. Luna, the Roman goddess of the moon. Zoe, meaning ‘life’ in Greek. Teo and Sanja have named their oldest son Anej, a shortened version of Anemoi, Greek gods of the winds. Given that Teo’s family name, Krilic , translates as ‘wing’, this name is doubly appropriate. Their second son has the name Elis, also of Greek origin. All four names make it impossible for any future nationalists to decide their children’s religion and ethnicity.
Teo told me that Anej’s aunt gave him a toy gun and he had no idea what to do with it. The aunt pointed it at a cartoon cat on TV and said, ‘Look, I am killing the cat.’ The Bosnian word for kill is ubi. The word for love is ljubi. Teo laughed when he told me that Anej went up to the TV set and kissed the cat.
When Anne and I married in April 2008, Teo and Oha couldn’t be there. Teo had recently moved to Slovenia and Oha was busy preparing for that year’s Blues’ festival. Oha asked that their message be read to our wedding guests:
'First, we want to say hallo to everyone there and we are really sorry to be unable to come and share this special moment with all of you great people. In the case that someone don’t know who we are, we are David’s two sons called Teo and Oha. We would like to ask all of you good people to give Anne and David big hug and make them feel good. We want to say few words about David so you know what is the man that you are dealing with, haha, but we are sure that you already know, right? We met David in 1996 for the first time. I was 18 and homeless. And Teo was all the time with me. David invited us to his place and offer us food. He gave us jobs and introduced me to Eugene Skeef who healed me my war hurt soul and he teached me to play music. This combination of this two people in my life was sat by nature. If there is God, he sat them, or it was their assistent, I can’t remember now, haha. I was feeling so close to David and I asked him one day if is ok if I take him as my father. After while I felt that David is very proud of Teo and me and he speaks of us as his sons. I cryed 100 times in front of David and I never did in front anyone else, even as a soldier with my 14 and a half. I got out all my unsolved rage from the war and all bad feelings went out. Father, thank you for being so patient listening my stories and my harmed soul. Teo and I will never forget where we come from and we come from you. We know that this is very special day for Anne and you and it is for all of us too. We wont bother you guys anymore. We want to tell you that we love you very much. And please, one more time we want to ask each of you, tonight, when you think the time is good for it, just give Anne and David a hug or at least touch them. It feels warm and we all need that. Have a good time and don’t drink more then seven beers if drive ;-) Big Love, Teo and Oha.’ 

Here is a 2018 article about Oha that appeared in The Guardian 

On Assignment in Mostar

"I remember the Centre was the only bright side in town at that time. The place where we could feel Mostar as it used to be, no divisions in any form.”
DJ Amir Groove

ITV's Julie Etchingham returned to the Pavarotti Music Centre after 20 years, She wrote an account of her experiences which you can read here

You can watch her short film here

The Sushi problem is here

You can read the chapter on the Pavarotti Music Centre in Left Field below

You can now buy Left Field for £13 (includes P&P)

Music and War

The Bible says, ‘In the beginning was the word.’Wrong. First there was the rhythm. From the time of the Big Bang, it is the beat that gives the cosmos its pulse. All else may be chaos, but it is there in mathematical time, something primordial.1 In one sense, however, the Bible is right. Man’s first attempt to communicate involved rhythm, movement and dance which represented the first language, the first word.

At the time of what Engels called ‘primitive communism’, when Homo sapiens were hunter- gatherers, humans signalled to each other by beating stick on stick, stone on stone. The first vocal syllables were whistles and calls based on rhythmic patterns which allowed human communication to take place. Rhythm was there at the start of everything. It was there at the start of our species and is there at the start of our individual lives.2  

Whether or not we evolved from the sea, we all emerged from the waters of our mothers, and water is a perfect transmitter of sound. Place a waterproof watch under the surface at one end of a swimming pool. Get there early in the morning when no one else is around. Have a friend swim underwater at the far end of the pool and ask them what they can hear.Both the heart of the foetus and that of the mother beat to a cycle of dash dash, dum dum, dum dum, dum dum. Mother and baby are in syncopated rhythm. Sounds exterior to the womb may also be heard and absorbed by the foetus. Many pregnant women will tell you that they are aware that their babies react to external sounds. So music and rhythm, or rhythm and music to be chronologically correct, are central to our lives. It is a physical and emotional link, both to something in us and beyond us, linking us to the music of the spheres.

Music can move us to extremes of joy or sadness, elation or depression. Perhaps it is a piece we associate with some event in our life: when we first kissed, when we went to our first teenage party, when we first made love. This musical association is strong in all of us. Perhaps it is with Mahler’s ‘Adagietto’, Ali Farka Toure, blues, a song sung by Ella Fitzgerald, an Indian raga, hip-hop or drum and bass. In all types of music we can be emotionally, and even physically, moved.

If you project sound waves at piles of sand, iron filings, water or mercury, you can create varied patterns, from spirals to grids. Given the sound conductivity of water and its high level in the human body, it is hardly surprising that our cells react to sound vibrations, even those at the far end of the spectrum which we are unable to hear. With this knowledge, holistic healers place vibrating forks close to the energy field of the human body and hospitals use high-pitched sound to shatter kidney and gallstones. Conversely, the negative side of the use of sound are experiments undertaken by the US military and other governments, utilising sound waves as instruments of war. Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo have shown us that music can be a weapon.

Music therapist Olivea Dewhurst-Maddock has argued that the vibrational energies of different notes affect different areas of the body. For instance, C major affects the bones, lower back, legs and feet. D major transmits energy waves to the kidneys and bladder,lymphatic and reproductive systems and skin. A major is related to pain and pain control.3

A few years ago, a friend of mine had major heart surgery. This is what he told me about his recuperation:
‘My post-operative experience was quite disturbing. I’d brought some of my favourite music to listen to in the hospital. I have always been passionate about classical music. My mother and stepfather were professional musicians and I was brought up, from the embryo onwards, listening to Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Haydn and Schubert. Once I was a bit more than an embryo, I learned to play the piano, cello and guitar. During the week following the operation, I lost touch with a lot of things – my sense of taste, smell, my enjoyment of books, but the worst was being cut off from the meaning of music. Something central to my life seemed to have died inside me. I would listen to a Mozart piano concerto; I could understand the harmony and counterpoint, but found no beauty in it, nor could I appreciate its extraordinary passion and inventiveness. Listening to Mozart was like listening to Salieri. That loss and the frequent moments when I burst into tears, for no apparent reason, convinced me that lengthy and violent operations have a much deeper effect on our inner selves than medical science acknowledges. Only part of me was put to sleep. Many levels of my subconscious and my body were awake when the knife cut me open. They went into a state of shock. They switched off. They needed time to mourn. My enjoyment of music now, three years later, is even more intense than before. I don’t know if that comes with age, or whether it is the result of the operation, but it is now a passion only second to my closest relationships.’

Perhaps it is for this reason that in ancient Egypt, the hieroglyph for music was also that for well-being and joy. But what about music in non-joyful situations, in war? When the lights go out and all that is left is hunger and the threat of death, you will still find music.

In 1993 and 1994 I was in cellars in Sarajevo and Mostar. Shells were exploding, the snipers were at work, but people – particularly young people – gathered together and, if they could not listen to music as there was often no power, they played it. The louder the shelling, the louder their music. It was an expression of defiance, a testament to the survival of the one thing that kept them human in an inhuman situation – the primordial language of rhythm and music which connected them to their essence.

A young soldier in Mostar visited me after his time on the front line, a Kalashnikov on one shoulder and a guitar on the other. He tapped the guitar and told me, ‘A much better weapon.’
This young man faced his former classmates across a narrow street, playing music to them when it was too dark to fight. Cigarettes were thrown into the building where he was crouching as he performed for his enemies.

Just before the war ended in 1995, I helped smuggle a Bob Marley photo exhibition into East Mostar. Sponsored by Island Records, we took in tapes and CDs with the photos. The local war radio station broadcast these non-stop for two days from their cellar studio. The exhibition opened underground on the front line. I will never forget how the town pulsed to Marley’s rhythms in the middle of the thuds from incoming shells.

These are examples of overt and easily recognisable influences of music in extreme situations: music as defiance with an external enemy in mind. But what of the influence of music in relationship to the enemy within? What is its effect on the disturbed and traumatised minds of those who have been too close to the barbarism of war, who have shot and killed, have been shot at and wounded, physically and emotionally? Who have seen friends die, who have lost mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters?

The PMC was constructed in East Mostar, a part of the city that had been devastated by two consecutive wars: first in the war of the whole town against Serb forces, then in the much worse war between the Croats on the west bank of the Neretva River and the Bosniaks on the east: former allies that had once formed an alliance to defeat the Serbs. When the Croats brokered a secret deal with the Serbs, the Croats turned on the Bosniaks. Thousands of families were driven into what became a ghetto on the east side of the Neretva River.

The term is ‘ethnic cleansing’, but a more accurate phrase would be ‘ethnic purging’.4 The Bosniaks were forced to live in cellars for ten months, eating grass soup and emerging into the streets only to collect water and, in the case of the young men, to fight. When the Anne Frank exhibition arrived at the Centre in 1998, I was asked to say something at its opening. There was not much to say, only that the Mostar Ghetto had contained thousands of Anne Franks.5

The Centre allowed the healing power of music to enter this community. The young were particularly affected by the war and, from the day the PMC opened its doors, they flooded in. Some of them used music to escape their darkest memories. They would tell me that only when they played, or heard music, could they escape their nightmares.

Children and young people were brought together to make and listen to music: to sing, to beat drums, to strum guitars, to act and react together through music. These workshops took on a structured form, thanks to the work of Nigel Osborne. This was to quickly develop into our successful schools’ outreach programme.

The first schools’ project was called ‘The Oceans’. First, our teachers started with the Neretva which flows through the centre of Mostar. They went to the schools and took with them music from the banks of that river – Croat, Serb and Bosniak songs. On the next visit, the theme became the Mediterranean because the Neretva flows into that sea: Tunisian love songs, flamenco, French, Italian and Greek music. Next, the Atlantic because that is the ocean into which the Mediterranean flows: everything from Brazilian, to blues, to Celtic and West African music. Then the Indian Ocean and, finally, the Pacific. The children became aware that they did not just live in Mostar, or more specifically in the small ghetto of East Mostar, but that their town and river had links to the world.
At the opening of the Centre, some of these children performed a Hawaiian boat dance for Pavarotti. After his long and hazardous helicopter journey across the Balkan winter skies, the Maestro looked puzzled, not knowing why these children had chosen a dance so foreign to their experience.
The Centre employed more than 30 young musicians who travelled to schools and kindergartens in Mostar and the surrounding villages to bring music into the lives of the children. Centre staff also worked in special needs’ schools, the Sarajevo Blind School and in the Srpska Republika.

The Music Therapy department, staffed by the first resident music therapists in Bosnia- Herzegovina, worked with the most disturbed and distressed children. The results were amazing and a credit to a small, dedicated department who achieved so much in a damaged town with its equally damaged population. This small team were responsible for groundbreaking work. Traumatised children were treated and, on occasion, responded so well that some of them ended up joining the Centre’s more mainstream activities.

For some in Bosnia-Herzegovina, much that happened at the Centre was dangerously political because music was being used to counter cultural exclusiveness – what I call cultural incest when expressed in its most extreme form. Negative and threatening music comes from this tradition: national anthems and military marching songs. To the contrary, the best music, as with the best art, architecture and whatever else expresses human creativity, comes from cultural mixing.6 Goring once said, ‘When I hear the word culture, I reach for my gun.’ I would counter that with, ‘When I hear the word gun, I reach for my culture.’

This attempt to universalise music and culture at the Centre was deliberate and methodical. For the first two years of our work, Eugene Skeef was responsible for setting up what became African percussion workshops. On Sunday afternoons, you could find up to 60 children and young people taking part with djembes, maracas, handbells, marimbas and wood blocks.

These workshops were developed, both at the Centre and, as part of the outreach work, at orphanages and hospitals. After the first half hour of drum tuition, I saw very young children express rhythmic talent as if it were latent in their essence and being.

On a recent visit to the USA, I came across an article by Feeny Lipscomb, drummer and writer, who wrote, ‘Recently, medical research has testified that drumming produces an altered state similar to meditation, thereby reducing stress. Drumming is also a right-brain activity which increases intuition, shuts down the ‘rational’ mind, and centers us in our hearts... I have often heard drumming compared to the high produced by endorphins. In fact, many people have taken up drumming because they’ve heard it’s a way to get the same endorphin-produced high without running and/or doing aerobics.’7
For millennia, shamans have argued that drumming is ‘the horse that takes you to the gods’. The state induced is a type of meditation and, in fact, the Centre offered meditation classes after an acupuncturist at the Centre was asked to teach it by her patients. Through Chinese medicine and meditation, the practitioner achieved some extraordinary results: helping the traumatised sleep for the first time in years, curing migraines, helping stroke victims and the wounded.

From the start, the ethos of the PMC had been to make a difference, not just in terms of the type of aid work that was carried out, but also the reasons why it existed. It is time that we question those aid programmes which lead to dependency and ensure the continuation of the outstretched hand. This form of aid becomes an appendage to war and does not address the larger questions of physical, spiritual and psychological reconstruction needed to minimise the possibility of future wars.

Europeans travel to Africa to teach the people how to grow their crops. One of the places they go to is in the Rift Valley, where agriculture was practised before Europe was populated. Don’t get me wrong. I am not saying they should not be there doing what they do, but they should be aware of the history, economics, culture and politics of the people they have come to help. If to this is added a passion for justice and, dare I say it, an understanding of the need for political change, then their work can be more than a ‘flash in the pan’.8

In the words of Eugene Skeef, ‘The destruction visited upon the planet in the name of advancement is more than sufficient proof that those of us whose basic education and development was fired in the Western mould need to exercise a rare humility before proceeding to administer aid to others. We all know that the so-called First World (strange notion this, if we are to accept Africa as the birthplace of human civilisation) has a great deal to learn from the so-called Third World, if they can just step back, join the circle and let someone else lead the song with a different rhythmic melody.’

It was my hope that the Pavarotti Music Centre could be a resource centre for a worldwide music-based project whose purpose would be to sustain the lives of those traumatised by war and conflict. To join and widen the circle.

Here is what I wrote on the first birthday of the PMC:
‘One year old, the Pavarotti Music Centre has surpassed all expectations. A schools’ music programme working in more than 20 schools, kindergartens and special schools, the first music therapy department in Bosnia-Herzegovina, a hospital outreach programme, a music school, a busy recording studio, a rock school, percussion workshops, guitar classes, a youth choir, drama workshops, dance and ballet, concerts and exhibitions, even acupuncture and meditation. Above all else, a place where children and young people can find themselves and their friends. In the middle of this damaged country, this wounded town, and working from within that town’s ghetto, we have done what no politician would dream of doing – produced solutions to political problems by ignoring politics altogether. We have let the music play. Of course, none of this was possible without the generosity of the many musicians who performed at the Modena concerts, none of this was possible without Brian Eno and his wife, Anthea. And none of this was possible without Luciano Pavarotti. But with them alone, we would have a building. We needed a ticking heart. That we found in the young people of Mostar who have dedicated themselves to making this place a success. And we have found it in the international workers here who seem, like me, to have fallen in love with the earth upon which the Centre stands.’ 

[An abridged version of this chapter was published in the European Journal of Intercultural Studies, Vol. 10, No. 3, 1999 and in The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, The University of Kansas, Fall 2000, Vol. XV, No. 8] 

NOTES
1 Western orchestral music would not have been possible without Pythagoras’ visit to a blacksmith. Hearing a hammer strike an anvil he asked if he could weigh the hammers. He found that one was two- thirds the size of the first. He showed that by continually dividing by two-thirds, an infinite spiral of notes emerges. He had hit upon ‘natural harmonics’. He concluded that the cosmos was a

harmonic ratio, that we lived in a musical universe and that music obeys the laws of physics.

2 Look at the honeybee to see how this is true for beings other than mammals. In Following The Bloom: Across America with the Migratory Bee Keepers, Beacon Press, Boston 1991, Douglas Whynott says that bees produce ‘sustained wing vibrations and measured sound pulses. Tempo corresponds to distance. [Bees] remain in the hive dancing through the day and into the night, altering the straight run to create a gravity symbol that refers to the sun’s position on the other side of the earth – a position the bee has never seen.’
3 Book of Sound Therapy, Olivea Dewhurst-Maddock, Fireside 1993.
4 The International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights acknowledged in their 1993 report that ‘what is taking place in Bosnia-Herzegovina is attempted genocide – the extermination of a people in whole or in part because of their race, religion or ethnicity’, with the international community (the parties to the Geneva Convention and the United Nations) ‘displaying nearly incomprehensible incapacity; having failed to put an end to a war between one of the best equipped armies in Europe and a civilian population, who were neither psychologically or physically and materially prepared for it.’
5 My opening remarks made at the Anne Frank Exhibition, PMC, September 3rd, 1998: ‘The PMC is honoured to host the opening of the exhibition. On a personal note and, as one born right at the end of the Second World War, my politics, in fact my presence here at the PMC, has been shaped by Anne Frank. My father was one of the first British doctors to enter Bergen-Belsen and I still have his photographs of the emaciated survivors imprinted on my brain. He told me that he had been ashamed at how many died after Liberation because British soldiers fed the people too much, too quickly. Anne Frank would recognise Bosnia and Herzegovina. We should not hide from the facts. Nothing was learnt from her experiences and we sit here today in the Mostar Ghetto, a place where thousands of Anne Franks ate grass soup for ten months at the worst time of the war. We also sit inside a European country where events took place which were the equal of those that happened during the time of the last European Holocaust. It is to our shame that the same speeches were made, the same eyes were averted, Munich went transatlantic. And it goes on. The twentieth century has been the century of Anne Franks. From the Armenians at the beginning of the century on to the Nazi terror, the Stalin Gulags, Cambodia, Rwanda and onwards to Iraq. It has been estimated that in the last decade we have had millions of Anne Franks: two million children killed in wars, four million orphaned and some ten million psychologically traumatised. One survivor of Auschwitz, Bruno Bettelheim, said that there is no meaning at all to life but we must behave as though there is. Anne Frank lived that dictum almost to the end of her short life. If she was here now – perhaps she is here now in all of us present – she would understand and enjoy what we are doing here.’
6 ‘Music is the weapon’ declared the Nigerian musician Fela Anikulapo Kuti (from the 1982 film about Kuti of the same name by S Tchal-Gadjieff and J-J Flori). Aware of that fact, politicians around the world use music and musicians to achieve their goals or try to control musicians who they perceive as a threat to their power; the treatment of Kuti, for example, in Nigeria or Victor Jara in Pinochet’s Chile. Even instruments are sometimes seen as a threat and are banned.
7 ‘Your Child’s Brain’, Newsweek, February 19th, 1996, presented evidence for the brain’s need for rhythm. The article described the stress produced when the brain is deprived of this basic need.
8 For those interested in the aid debate as applied to former Yugoslavia, I would recommend Barbara E. Harrell-Bond’s ‘Refugees and the Challenge of Reconstructing Communities Through

Aid’, in War Exile, Everyday Life, published by the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research,
Zagreb. For an overall political perspective, see Noam Chomsky, World Orders and other writings on Cold and post-Cold War International Politics.

Pavarotti Music Centre, Mostar. 30 years on

Last week was a good one for me with the publication of my Guardian whistleblower article. This week will be good because I am visiting Mostar and the Pavarotti Music Centre to stay with good friends and do research for Julie Etchingham and ITV's 'On Assignment filming there later this year. Going to meet some of the children she interviewed 20 years ago - now in their 30s. And me? Now in my 70s!

Whistles need Blowing

Whistles are for blowing ....We know the names Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange. Forced exile, imprisonment and confinement. They are whistleblowers whose lives have suffered from attempting to better the human condition. I personally know a couple more; Ex-SAS trooper, Ben Griffin and former UK Ambassador, Craig Murray. Ben was persecuted for holding information about the UK military's collaboration with US torturers, Craig for wanting Jack Straw and his then Foreign Office employers to acknowledge that some allies in the 'war against terror' boil their prisoners alive. My respect for these people is great because, at a much lower level, I too was a whistleblower. I didn't suffer their fates, but was sacked from the NGO I had co-founded, and never employed again in that world. Even as an OAP, I was shocked to be refused work stuffing envelopes at an NGO whose work in the Middle East I had admired. When I have spoken out on political matters I have been told by that I must make it clear that I have nothing to do with my former charity. So I recommend Ian Cobain's article in the Guardian, (16 Feb 2016) about the Law Commissioners recent report suggesting a new law criminalising, not only those who disclose official information, but anyone “who obtains or gathers information”. If passed into law this will tighten up even further on the 1979 Official Secrets Act which the Liberal MP, Clement Freud said, “gives the attorney general more power than a bad man should have or a good man should need.” Of course this covers only the state sector, but as in my case, this thinking infects the wider world. Sadly in Trump-World we are going to need an army of Snowdens, Mannings, Assanges, Griffins and Murrays. You can read more about my experiences as a whistleblower in 'Left Field'

Personal battles of the man behind War Child

“From heavy drinking to launching a charity, David Wilson’s life story is an absorbing read” Camden New Journal reviews 'Left Field'

Earlier reviews:  Morning Star     Socialist Review     Kirkus Reviews 


Buy 'Left Field' for £13 (includes P&p) from Public Reading Rooms
 

Kirkus review of 'Left Field'

review of 'Left Field' has been featured in Kirkus Reviews 12/15 issue. Less than 10% of their reviews are chosen, so am well pleased. "His shared heart wrenching observations are clearly a highlight of this richly textured, moving work … Raw and compelling; a story well told of a vital and varied life in a war-torn region."(Kirkus Reviews).
 * Only one month to go to release of audio version of the book 

Signed copies of 'Left Field'

Signed copies of 'Left Field' are available from Public Reading Rooms for £13 to include postage.

ITV's 'On Assignment' in Mostar

Julie Etchingham has confirmed that she will be coming to Mostar in September to make a short film for ITV's 'On Assignment' – about the Pavarotti Music Centre 20 years after its founding. Julie was in Mostar for BBC Newsround when Pavarotti came to open the centre. Here is a film of the opening.

She will meet some of the children, now adults, who attended the Centre twenty years ago and find out what has happened to them in the intervening years and how the PMC affected their lives. People like Adin Omerovic, aged nine at the time, who remembers this:

‘I, together with my classmates, practised a song to perform for the opening of the Pavarotti Music Centre. I had heard of plans for the Centre, but I could not dream that I would be there or near to Pavarotti. At the end of the song, “Big Bam Boo”, I gave Luciano Pavarotti a flower. I still remember that day when we waited for him so long and I cannot forget how strong my heart was beating after his speech. He said, ‘Grazie, grazie,’ I still remember that. I got a toy from him which I still have. I would like to have more memories like this one. Thank you very much, Pavarotti.’

Left Field is available at Waterstones and on Amazon

Buy Left Field here

Miracle at Midnight

A regular guest at our house was Karl Henrik Køster, a Danish neurosurgeon who wrote for The Lancet and who’d met my father in Bergen-Belsen when they were both serving in the RAMC. They became close friends and my sisters and I called him Uncle Karl. Because he always came to stay in December, this large man with his deep voice and Nordic accent was Father Christmas, though now I realise he looked more like Karl Marx.
Uncle Karl always arrived with a large bottle of Cherry Heering, a Danish liqueur, and gifts for us children. I remember the nine-inch-high brightly-painted wooden soldier with its red tunic and blue trousers. It had moveable arms and a detachable lance which was quickly lost.
Karl Henrik was a surgeon at Copenhagen’s Bispebjerg hospital. After operating on a wounded member of the Resistance, medical students asked him to help hide 40 Jews while their escape by boat to Sweden was organised. But how to get them into the hospital? Karl Henrik organised a ‘funeral’ with dark cars, black clothes and flowers. 140 turned up and all of them had to be hidden.
He then arranged for ambulances to take them to the coast. In all, he and his hospital saved 2,000 Jews. Then their luck ran out. One day, when leaving his apartment, he passed the Gestapo on the stairs. They asked him where Dr Køster could be found. As he left the building, he passed the body of a medical student shot in the back. He then followed the same route as those he had helped save and escaped by boat to Sweden. He made his way to the UK and joined the British army.
His wife Doris was at home. The Gestapo imprisoned her.
My father lost contact with him when he retired from The Lancet. The last he knew of Karl was when he heard from a mutual friend that he had, as my father put it, ‘taken up with his secretary’. He had no idea what happened to poor Doris.
Karl committed suicide in the 1980s and didn’t live to see the 1998 Disney film made about his life, Miracle at Midnight. Directed by Ken Cameron, it starred Sam Waterson as Karl and Mia Farrow as Doris.
I recently came across words of his explaining why he acted as he did. ‘It was the natural thing to do. I would have helped any group of Danes being persecuted. The Germans picking on the Jews made as much sense to me as picking on redheads.’
What with Uncle Karl and the Hungarians, I had contact at a young age with people who’d led dangerous political lives. Karl Henrik’s booming voice and wry humour has stayed with me. It has always been important to be able to see the funny side of the grimmest experiences. There is always a Springtime for Hitler.

'Left Field' is a memoir packed full of music and politics. You are invited to a party to celebrate the book with both. It will be on sale at half price with £5 per book donated to MOMENTUM . Live music with Brazilian guitarist Deicola Neves and other guests.
Tuesday 6 December 2016, 7pm, 
Whittington Park Community Centre Yerbury Rd N19 4RS 

"a thoughtful & gentle memoir"

Brian Eno: This is an excellent and inspiring book. David is an adventurer and a freethinker, who, despite the best efforts of an education designed to equip him for obedient anonymity, somehow did something truly useful with his life. His stubborn and yet self-effacing commitment to his ideals carried him through many daunting situations, and his sense of humour kept him able to see the funny side.
 
Haifa Zangana: a memoir where the personal is entwined with activism and woven into a poetic multi-coloured tapestry.

" Left Field is a thoughtful and gentle memoir. David’s obvious good nature and ability to connect with people is demonstrated over and over, from the influential individuals whose support he enlisted in the early days of War Child to the character sketches that he draws regularly throughout the book… I enjoyed his relaxed writing style and the chapters that veered from the chronology to reflect or add narrative detail... His is an enjoyable memoir, reflecting on a compassionate and varied life, and an important reminder of how destructive war is both on individuals and communities, and the important role we can all play in fighting for a better world. Socialist Review (July/August 2016)
 

Left Field - the film

On sale at Amazon, Amazon Kindle , Kindle in USA,  Public Reading Rooms,  Waterstones,   Foyles.  
for non-UK buyers go to BookDepository