Left Field: CHAPTER 16 - Ned of the Hill

Sarajevo was under siege from Bosnian Serb forces from April 1992 until the end of the war in November 1995. During that time, an average of 320 shells landed on the city each day, destroying homes, government buildings, hospitals, communication and cultural centres. Approximately 5,000 civilians were killed and the same number of soldiers. The city had been under attack for nearly two years when I decided to join Bill on a visit there in January 1994. We were taking in a batch of BBC and MTV CDs for the independent radio station, Radio Zid. 
 
A week before we left we were at a Ron Kavana gig at the Stags Head in Camden Town. Ron is a folk/rock singer and a friend of Bill’s.

After he had sung ‘Young Ned of the Hill’, composed with The Pogues, he told us that he had enjoyed performing this on tour with them to enthusiastic British audiences who seemed to appreciate its sentiments – that Oliver Cromwell rot in hell.

When Bill said we would add his albums to our Sarajevo collection, he asked if he could join us.

‘Why do you want to come?’ said Bill.

‘My grandma was a fiddle player in Limerick.’ That didn’t seem to answer the question. There was a long pause. ‘She was killed by the Brits in 1921. What you tell me about Sarajevo reminds me of her. She used to perform in cellars, out of sight of the Black and Tans.’

He didn’t need to say more about them. They were British ex-First World War soldiers and released prisoners with a reputation for murderous brutality. They were recruited to support the Royal Irish Police in suppressing the War of Independence.

‘One night they heard her playing, took her away and shot her. If I come to Sarajevo I will play music and will be honouring her memory.’

We flew from Zagreb on a UN Russian Ilyushin cargo plane. Arriving in Sarajevo, we found that airport security was in the hands of the French and we ran from the aircraft into a maze of sandbagged alleyways. They were signposted BOUL’VD ST MICHEL, CHAMPS-ELYSÉES, AVENUE FOCH. Border control was under the Danes, who stamped our passports with ‘Maybe Airlines, Sarajevo’. Then a lift into town in an APC driven by Egyptians. 

The soldier who stamped my passport told me that the French had little contact with the Danish and the Danes even less with the Egyptians. ‘Watch their drivers,’ he said. ‘As soon as they start the engine, jump in the back. They won’t tell you when they’re about to leave.’ The road into town passed through Dobrinja which was Serb-controlled, so this was the only way to get into the city.

The Egyptians dropped us off at the UN Headquarters in Džemala Bijedica Ulica which was some distance from our destination, the Holiday Inn. We had to hire a taxi to go any further.

Our driver said he was unable to drop us at the hotel, and we were left to run there from the main road, nicknamed ‘Sniper’s Alley’. I was carrying Ron’s guitar which I dropped. I went back for it as Bill shouted, ‘Don’t get killed for a guitar.’

The Holiday Inn was a bubble set within an inferno. The cavernous eight-storey lobby set at its centre was the only safe place apart from the basement restaurant, where waiters in bow ties put on the pretence of normality, serving the only proper food in the city. Their sunken cheeks and sallow complexions gave the lie to that, as did the continuous sound of urban war. The bedrooms, those not gutted by shell fire, had no glass in the windows, and the only protection from the cold and wind was UNHCR plastic sheeting. When the shelling and gunfire seemed to be too close, I spent a lot of time in the bathroom.

The hotel was full of journalists and aid workers. At breakfast (a boiled egg, bread and Nescafé) I sat beside someone from the International Committee of the Red Cross. He already had on his flak jacket and asked me where mine was. I told him we had left ours at the airport, along with the helmets. You were not allowed to land without wearing them. He was shocked and accused us of being irresponsible. I answered that since the people we worked and met with didn’t have this protection, why should we?

Sarajevo was a city of Kalashnikovs, armoured personnel carriers (APCs), rocket-propelled grenades and people who’d been pushed back into the Dark Ages: horse-drawn carts, backs bent to the weight of firewood and water containers. A Hieronymus Bosch landscape.
After not getting shot, its citizens expended their remaining energy on trying to keep warm and finding food, yet the people seemed intent on creating a sense of normality.

That normality applies to fear. In her book, Zlata’s Diary – A Child’s Life in Sarajevo, Zlata Filipovic describes how her mother coped well with the war. She would risk her life to get the family food and water, but when a mouse entered a room she would jump on chairs and beds.1

Ivana Maček talks about how she found the city full of ‘“magical thinking”, “macabre humour”, artistic expression, and other survival mechanisms aimed at helping civilians regain a sense of control over their lives.’2

On our first night, we went to the Obala Bar near the Miljacka River which was practically on the front line. Bob Marley’s ‘War, No More Trouble’ was playing as we entered: Everywhere is war, me say war.
The city was without mains electricity supply. The more ingenious managed to rig up car batteries, telephone jacks or bicycle dynamos. For the very lucky, there were generators. I can’t remember what they were using that night at Obala, except that the power didn’t last long. Bob Marley gave way to unplugged live music supplied by Ron and some local musicians. One of them told me that his sister had recently killed herself because she’d had enough. He said this matter- of-factly, as though her death was what had become expected of life in Sarajevo.

There was a young actor there whose mother lived on the Serb side of the lines. He’d not seen her since the start of the war two years before. He said that unless he moved to the hills, joined the Serb forces and bombarded his friends, there would be no chance of meeting her.
The next day we went to Radio Zid so that Ron could perform live on air and we could hand over our CDs. We were told that these broadcasts were listened to in the hills above, but the guys up there obviously didn’t appreciate ‘Young Ned of the Hill’. The shelling was heavy that day.

Radio Zid was a 24-hour independent radio station determined to promote Sarajevo’s non-nationalist urban culture. Over the three-year siege, there were 185 theatre productions in the city, 170 exhibitions and 48 concerts, much of this supported and promoted by Radio Zid. When children couldn’t go to school because their schools were too dangerous or too cold, Zid organised Zimska Skola – Winter School – educational broadcasts. In blocks of flats parents would gather the children together and they would listen to Radio Zid. If they were lucky, a teacher would be there to give the semblance of a real school.

At the radio station we met Jasmina, a 16-year-old who asked us to correct her boyfriend’s love poems which he’d written for her in English. They were in an exercise book at home. ‘Please, will you come with me?’

We drove her there, but she didn’t want us to come inside with her. She said her parents would be ashamed because they were all living in the basement. She retrieved the poems and we sat with her in the back of the taxi.

They were sad, wistful words of love, life and death. After discussing prepositions and possessive pronouns, Hussein, our driver, got edgy and pointed at a sign on a nearby wall, PAZITE SNAIPER – Beware of Snipers – and said that we were parked in direct line of fire from the hills and needed to back into a side street. Jasmina shrugged. She didn’t think it mattered.

When we took pathetically small gifts of food and drink into homes, we were stroked, wept over and offered back what we had brought them. The dregs of whisky in my almost- empty hip flask created such excitement with an old man that he called his wife over. They put the flask to their noses, before sharing what was left. This couple lived on the hillside above Bascarsija, the oldest part of town. They considered themselves lucky because they were able to grow some food in their small garden: onions, beans, chard and squash.

The human spirit finds expression in extremes, the barbarism above the city matched by a civilisation below. An actor from the National Theatre had both legs shattered by shrapnel and they had to be amputated. On the day of the operation he and his wife were in the same hospital, she to give birth. ‘I’ve lost half my body,’ he said, ‘but my wife has given birth to a whole one.’ He joked that he was a big drinker and said that now he would have to be carried into bars rather than out of them.

The women of Sarajevo kept up their appearance with whatever cosmetics they could lay their hands on. Many were smartly dressed and wore high heels in the streets as a message of defiance. Getting water involved great risk because the Serbs targeted water taps. An elderly woman told us that she washed her hair every week which involved a two-kilometre walk. ‘I am,’ she said, ‘a resident of Sarajevo.

Sarajevo has always been proud of its cosmopolitanism, its ethnic mix and strong cultural traditions. Before the break- up of Yugoslavia, thirteen per cent of marriages in Bosnia- Herzegovina were mixed, but in Sarajevo the figure was above thirty per cent. One street had a mosque, Catholic and Orthodox churches and a synagogue. All four buildings were destroyed or damaged by mortars
  
Back at Radio Zid, director Zdravko Grebo told us that his diabetic daughter and many others like her didn’t have any insulin. He’d gone to the UN medical agencies, but they’d told him that the problem was too small for them to deal with. He showed us a list with the names of the young diabetics he had compiled with help from one of the doctors at the city’s Kosevo Hospital.

It was this chance encounter that was to result in War Child’s diabetic project: taking insulin and diabetic equipment to Sarajevo and later, Mostar and other towns. Small NGOs such as War Child ended up being major players in bringing in vital medicines.

On our last day in the city we visited the Markale market because there were no shops left in Sarajevo. Cooking oil was 40 Deutschmarks a litre (£16), sugar 70DM a kilo and coffee 150. The monthly salary for a doctor in the hospital was 5DM.

After four days, we were on the same Russian plane flying back to Zagreb. Ron had already left and Bill and I were its only passengers, sitting strapped to the side of the cargo hold. At the front, there was a hissing samovar. The navigator came over with hot mugs of Russian tea. I think he saw how worried I looked and invited me to sit beside him in the glass bubble directly under the pilot.

Before take off, he opened a wooden drawer and took out a map. He then used a compass to work out a flight route. If he hadn’t been wearing a Russian air force helmet, I would have mistaken him for Vasco da Gama. Above the noise of the engines, he threw aside his broken intercom and shouted directions to the pilot above. And we thought the Russians threatened the West with World War III.
We arrived back in London on the evening of February 5th, 1994 to find out that that morning 68 people had been killed in a mortar attack on the Markale market and 144 had been wounded. We had walked through it only the day before.

Watching the news on TV my partner, Anne, asked me if I had been frightened. I thought of the young people at Obala, of Jasmina and her poems, of the old couple and my whisky. ‘How could I be? The people there are under permanent siege. I was just a visitor.’ 

Now go to CHAPTER 17

NOTES

1 Zlata’s Diary – A Child’s Life in Sarajevo, Zlata Filipovi , Penguin 2 Sarajevo Under Siege: Anthropology in Wartime, Ivana Ma ek, University of Pennsylvania Press 2009

Left Field: CHAPTER 19 - Little Pieces & Big Stars

War Child today still emphasises the charity’s historical connections with the music world, but one of the first money-raisers for our work involved animals. 

Over the 1993 August Bank Holiday we organised a three-day event at London Zoo. There were sitar and sarangi players near the elephants, Peruvian pipers serenaded the llamas and didgeridoo players the kangaroos. There were African drummers and giraffes, gamalan players entertaining the Indonesian rhinoceros, Brazilian berimbau players and the squirrel monkeys. The Chinese percussionists were kept well away from the giant panda, Ming Ming, because she needed all her concentration to breed.

The most amazing sights for me were a string quartet playing Bach in the Butterfly Grotto and a lone cellist in the shadowy depths of the Aquarium entertaining the circling sharks.

On the lawns, pathways and courtyards there were clowns, jugglers, stilt walkers, magicians, dancers and acrobats, storytellers, poets and pavement artists. Inside the monkey house we held children’s workshops, art and photo exhibitions. 

The promotional brochure said that ‘during these three days, London Zoo, with the help of its animals, will come to the rescue of another endangered species – children threatened by the 30 wars raging across our planet.’ 

One of War Child’s first money-making fundraisers was not with Pavarotti, Bono or Brian Eno, but thanks to Sue Lloyd-Roberts. As a BBC investigative journalist, Sue travelled to Mostar several times to report on War Child. On her first visit, she was travelling with a War Child convoy when it got shot up. I was in London and was rung up by the BBC to be told that their correspondent had been forced to take refuge in a ditch. She said of her experience, ‘the part of my brain that recognised fear doesn’t exist. In such situations people scream or pray, but I picked up my camera’.

This didn’t stop her organising a fundraiser for War Child, ‘Bop for Bosnia’, which took place at the BBC TV Centre in February 1994. Sue recruited Chris Jagger as the musical director and Dave Gilmour, Leo Sayers and Ron Kavana were among the performers. As well as live music, there was a dinner and auction and she helped raise a few thousand pounds for the charity. 

It was early 1994 when Nigel Osborne arrived in Mostar carrying a large bag full of percussion instruments. A big, bearded bear of a man, Nigel was Professor of Music at Edinburgh University. He’d heard that we were co-operating with MTV and taking music tapes into Sarajevo where he’d been organising music workshops with the Sarajevo String Quartet and collaborating with the poet Goran Simic on two children’s operas.

He said he would like to run workshops in East Mostar in what was to be the start of a long association between Nigel and War Child.
It was no problem gathering interest. I had been amazed how quickly news travelled across this bombed-out ghetto and, in such a desperate place, anything out of the ordinary was news.

After two years of shelling, the upper floors of the UNHCR building had been blown away. The lower floors, housing the UN office, were as secure as it got in East Mostar. By the time Nigel arrived, there were 20 children and their parents. They sat very quietly and few of the children smiled. They looked as though they were about to be told bad news, not be offered the chance to bang drums and blow whistles. I looked around the room and realised most of them would have had no memory of anything but fear.

One mother sat with her blind, impassive, six-year-old daughter. I watched while Nigel tried to get the girl to play a triangle. She refused to hold it. This went on for some time until, finally, she grabbed the triangle with one hand, the metal stick with the other and struck it over and over. Her face lit up. Her mother told us that it was the first time she had seen her daughter smile in over two years.

War Child were able to develop and extend Nigel’s work because an unannounced visitor turned up at our Camden Town office a few weeks before this workshop. Brian Eno’s manager and wife, Anthea, heard Juliet Stevenson talking about War Child on the radio and turned up at our office with a cheque for £2,000. She asked if the money could be used for music aid for the children of Bosnia.
Her arrival was a turning point. We had our first funding for music workshops and a door had been opened that led us to Brian and other major figures in the music business.

Bill and I wanted to let the Enos know what their support could achieve. They took us out to dinner in Notting Hill and we told them about the workshop and the little girl. That evening Brian and Anthea suggested we should think about raising money and support for a permanent music centre in Mostar. 

Brian had never been involved with charities. Ten years before, he had scorned Band Aid, admitting that he had been cynical about ‘egocentric compassionates’ who made themselves feel better by helping people about whom they knew nothing. I asked him why he had changed his mind with his support for War Child and he told me that Anthea had influenced him.1 

She had been involved with the Nordoff Robbins music therapy charity and was keen to reroute money flowing there from the music business to help the children of Bosn about the issues involved in the wars in former Yugoslavia, but liked what he’d been told about our work: a charity, Anthea told him, which operated by the ‘seat of their pants’. Under these circumstances, helping children seemed pretty uncontroversial.

Brian agreed to join Brent Hansen, Head of MTV Europe, Tom Stoppard and Juliet Stevenson as a patron. He didn’t come alone, persuading David Bowie to join him. And he and Anthea didn’t come without a plan.

Anthea set up a think tank to generate ideas as to how funds could be raised for War Child and our Mostar plans. We had fortnightly meetings at her Roland Gardens flat. There were Anthea and I, Brian’s assistant Lin Barkass, Paul Gorman, Jeremy Silver and Rob Partridge. They all came with excellent pedigrees. Paul wrote for Music Week and Mojo, Jeremy was head of A&R at Virgin Records and Rob had set up his own music PR company after managing Bob Marley and U2. 

The team got to work on the first fundraiser which we decided to call ‘Little Pieces from Big Stars’. Music and art celebrities were asked to contribute something, the only condition being that they had to make it themselves and it had to be small.

In September 1994 the exhibition of 150 works opened at the Flowers East Gallery in Hackney. It included contributions from the two McCartneys: Paul’s 2” x 2” driftwood carving and four of Linda’s photographs. David Bowie exhibited 17 computer-generated prints. Bono, a music box containing sunglasses. Charlie Watts, a drawing of a hotel telephone. Billy Bragg, a brass rubbing of a manhole cover. Pete Townsend, a 2.5” x 2” model of a Rickenbacker guitar. 

Brian surpassed them all with six contributions, including four sculptures made from plaster and nails: ‘Ancient Head’, ‘Nude in Light Victorian Snowstorm’, ‘Siren’ and ‘Fruit Prison’, and a Japanese forest ambient recording played on a camouflaged cassette player.2
After a two-week exhibition the pieces were auctioned at 140 the Royal College of Art. Paul McCartney’s contribution alone sold for over £12,000. The evening resulted in a £70,000 donation to War Child.

In less than a year, we’d come from wondering how to pay our office overheads and trips to Sarajevo and Mostar to a situation where we were feeding thousands of people a day and a piece of driftwood could make the charity £12,000. It didn’t stop there. 

Nine months later, Anthea and Brian’s office organised ‘Pagan Fun Wear’, described by Brian as being one of the ‘all- time weird events in London’s recent cultural history’. The idea was to model costumes designed by pop stars which would then be sold at auction to benefit War Child.

As with ‘Little Pieces’, Anthea and Brian’s small staff at Opal coordinated the event. They recruited 35 big names from the music and design worlds, 45 garment and shoemakers and 30 models, organised the catering, music, permissions from 17 recording companies, ticket sales, production and publicity.

I wondered how Brian was coping with his life as a musician and producer. Everything seemed to have been put on hold to cope with these extraordinary events.

Iggy Pop designed penis sheaths; Jarvis Cocker modelled his own shoes; David Bowie contributed ‘Victim Fashion’, which consisted of a model wrapped up in bandages; John Squire designed his own underwear; Brian, his coat and pants; Dave Stewart, a bikini and mac. Other contributors included Bono, Adam Clayton, Michael Stipe, Phil Collins, Bryan Ferry, Anton Corbijn, Laurie Anderson, Joan Armatrading and Jaron Lanier, one of the pioneers of virtual reality. 

Getting everything together was a nightmare. Iggy Pop’s design for his penis sheaths came by fax with scrawled and difficult-to-decipher graphics. They were to be three feet in length and made of multi-coloured papier mâché. All these ideas were then manufactured by students from the London School of Art and Design.

Last, but not least, everything had to be modelled on the big night which concluded with an auction of the designs. Paul Gambaccini and Janet Street-Porter hosted the evening. The event raised more than £200,000.

‘Pagan Fun Wear’ was held at the Saatchi Gallery in St John’s Wood. They didn’t normally let this out for non-gallery events, but Brian had promised them there would be no damage. As he walked around at the end of the evening, he saw that the floor and walls had been squirted with jets of black poster paint. They had been taken from a room being used by Damien Hirst for his spin paintings. Brian spent the rest of the night scraping this off.

When he told me later about the paint, I was horrified. Being Brian, he didn’t tell any of us at War Child. If I’d known, I would have helped.3

I thought that we would be very lucky to benefit from further Opal money-raisers, but I need not have worried. Thanks to the Enos, we’d hardly started. They had opened a door to the music world that was to result, not only in further funding, but to the dream of the music centre being built.

In August 1995 I was asked to speak at a demonstration in Trafalgar Square in support of the right of Bosnians to defend themselves. Other speakers included Michael Foot and Brian. As a director of War Child, I was breaking British charity law by speaking politically. I said: ‘I would like to speak on behalf of the young people of Bosnia. They are like young people everywhere. They take pleasure in music. They party, they study and are interested in all that is happening beyond the prison of their war. They have the anger of youth and they can love like only youth can love. Something I will never forget is the sight of young girls watering the flowers on the graves of their dead boyfriends in Mostar. Where indeed have all the flowers gone? They are covering thousands of graves of young people in south-east Europe. It is the young who die when they are the ones who should live. It is the teenage soldiers who die on the front line, rarely their older commanders. In this war, it is the child who is killed because it is the child who plays in the street. This is a war of the calculated and deliberate targeting of children.’

Tony Crean of Go Discs!, the record company that represented Paul Weller and had recently launched the band Beautiful South, happened to be walking through the square. He had been recovering from flu and later told The Times, ‘For once, I was getting further into the papers than just the sports pages – watching more television than normal too – I was reading about ethnic cleansing and mass graves, seeing genocide on the tea-time news – I realised that I didn’t really understand what was going on.’

A few days later, we got a call from Andy Macdonald, the head of Go Discs!, to come and see him and Tony. They had an idea for helping War Child: to bring together musicians and record an album on one day, a Monday, and release it the following Saturday. 

What was to become the Help album had more than 20 artists, including Oasis, Blur, Radiohead, Orbital, Massive Attack, The Stone Roses, Neneh Cherry, Sinéad O’Connor, Paul Weller, Paul McCartney and Portishead. It was recorded on Monday, September 4th, 1995, in studios across Europe and released, on target, five days later.

Help sold over 70,000 copies on the day of release, becoming the fastest-selling album in British music history. The artists and Go Discs! waived royalties and Help raised more than £1.5 million. Brian produced the album and was responsible for making sure the recordings were ready for pressing in time for the Saturday release. Racing against the clock, he said of the experience, ‘Enjoyable panic, but I went into Hitler mode in the last few minutes.’

The income from the album was used to provide artificial limbs for wounded children, food and clothing to orphanages, the purchase of a refrigerated truck to supply insulin, funding for school meals in central Bosnia, support for a mobile medical clinic in Bihac , the supply of premature baby units to Banja Luka, as well as baby milk, contraceptives and even funding for mine clearance programmes. Linda McCartney supplied 22 tonnes of her veggie burgers which we delivered to three Bosnian cities. Help monies were also used towards the running of the War Child bakery and to expand the charity’s music programmes.
 
That summer, Brian had been working with U2 in Dublin when the phone rang. It was Luciano Pavarotti inviting Bono to perform with him at the ‘Pavarotti and Friends Concert’ that September. When Brian told Anthea about the call, she persuaded him to get Bono to take part and do it for War Child. Pavarotti’s partner, Nicoletta Mantovani, then came to London and met with Anthea. Nicoletta was soon to marry Pavarotti and was to prove instrumental in winning and retaining the Maestro’s support for War Child.

Anthea told Nicoletta about War Child’s music work in Sarajevo and Mostar and said that she and Brian had been discussing the construction of a music centre for children in war-shattered East Mostar.

Nicoletta said that Pavarotti had been looking for a project to support in Bosnia and that the suggestion might appeal to him. It did and the result was that he became a patron of War Child and the next ‘Pavarotti and Friends’ concert would be held to make the idea into a reality. 

The concert took place at Modena’s Parco Novi Sad on September 12th, 1995. Pavarotti, Bono, The Edge and Brian performed ‘Miss Sarajevo’, a song Bono had written for the event and which became a hit single. The words were about the young women of Sarajevo who had staged a beauty contest at the height of the war. Lined up in swimsuits with the crowned Miss Sarajevo in the middle, they carried a banner. DON’T LET THEM KILL US. 

When I heard Pavarotti come in over Bono’s voice singing, ‘Is there a time for high street shopping, to find the right dress to wear, here she comes with her crown,’ there was a lump in my throat. I remembered Jasmina and her boyfriend’s poems, resigned to being killed, but not willing to be defeated.

Other performers at that concert included Meat Loaf, the Chieftains, Dolores O’Riordan of the Cranberries, Zucchero, Jovanotti and Simon Le Bon. I sat one row behind Princess Diana and watched him flash his eyes at her the whole time he was on stage.

Afterwards, I walked backstage to find Pavarotti holding Anthea’s hand and singing ‘Happy Birthday’ to her. There were three tenors serenading her, but the other two were not Placido Domingo and José Carreras. They were The Edge’s and Bono’s dads.

The following year Pavarotti held the second concert in aid of the music centre. In June 1996 the musicians included Eric Clapton, Joan Osborne, Elton John, Liza Minnelli, Sheryl Crow and Zucchero. Clapton sang ‘Holy Mother’, and Liza Minnelli, in a War Child T-shirt, joined Pavarotti for ‘New York, New York’. 

In the finale, Elton John and Pavarotti sang ‘Live Like Horses’ and were joined by the other artists from the show. The audience of many thousands waved banners declaring PEACE, NOT BOMBS.

As the TV boom camera swung over our heads, I had the feeling that music can make a difference to the world. The last time I had felt this was when I was standing in cellars in Mostar during the war, with children singing and drumming to the background sound of shelling.
After the concert Anthea said, ‘We’ve had an idea for another fundraiser. We want to get music stars to make art works on the theme of a musician or band inspirational to their own work.’ 

‘Milestones’, which was held in February 1997, involved, as Brian put it, ‘the usual suspects’. Pavarotti sent a handkerchief on which he’d drawn Enrico Caruso. Graham Cox of Blur did an homage to Syd Barrett of Pink Floyd. Paul McCartney, a drawing of Buddy Holly, aged 60. Bono’s inspiration was Frank Sinatra – a music box containing Jack Daniels, shot glasses and a blue napkin. It was signed ‘To Frank, Love, Bono’.

Yoko Ono contributed her bronzed ‘Lennon eyeglasses’. Bob Geldof celebrated the Rolling Stones with a wall-size London map that included a River Thames with moving water. Bowie’s tribute was to the Walker Brothers. Sinead O’Connor’s was to Bob Marley. Brian contributed his musical dedication to the Velvet Underground, which sold for £40,000.4

With more than 20 contributors, the exhibition was held at the Patrick Litchfield Gallery and the private view and auction at the Royal College of Art.

Lin Barkass, from Brian’s office, summed up her feelings about these fundraisers. ‘Bloody hard work, bloody brilliant, best things I have ever been involved in. People did it all for free, designing, printing, staff at the Daily Mirror running off posters after work, designers from Warner Brothers. Too many good people to name here, like Jenny Ross, Paul Gorman, Greg Jakobek. People had caught the spirit of War Child, that they could all make a difference. If they think they can, then they will.’5

Writing this now, I feel stunned at what we’d been able to achieve. We had received not only significant funding, but also enormous encouragement to use music as a new form of aid to children and young people in conflict situations. We now had the chance to place music at the centre of our aid work. 

Now go to CHAPTER 20 

NOTES

1 Brian Eno: ‘My acquaintance with War Child began with Anthea, who’d been to a meeting and was quite fired up about it. She’d earlier been involved with the Nordoff Robbins Music Therapy charity, and seen how much money was flowing from the music business into that: her plan was to reroute some of that money towards War Child. She volunteered my engagement early on, before I really had a clear picture of what was going on in Bosnia. I’m sure you’ll recall how confusing things were in those early days – it wasn’t clear who was doing what. Anthea remembers that my initial inclination was somewhat towards the Serbs, though I have to say, I don’t actually remember very clearly what I was thinking then. I do remember that Anthea was never in any doubt where her sympathies resided – with the Bosnians. I also remember that a very close friend of mine was a Serb supporter and this may have influenced my position. Anyway, what I realised quite early on was that it didn’t really matter that much who was “right” and who was “wrong”: the fact was that we had a major conflict in the middle of Europe – the first since 1945 – and not much was being done about it. There didn’t need to be any politics involved. War Child was trying to help the child victims of the conflict and that seemed pretty uncontroversial. In time, of course, my sympathies went very strongly towards the Bosnians, not least because of the complete imbalance of power. In time I began to realise that it was the Bosnians who were the pluralists and hence the hope for a fairly shared future. Subsequently we all met up – you, Bill, Anthea, myself, and I think we both liked you and the way you were doing things. It had a “seat of the pants” feel which inspired my confidence.’ 

2 Other contributors included: Anton Corbijn, four photographs; Vic Reeves, a drawing of ‘Elvis and Frank on Their Way to the Shops’; George Michael, his original drawings for the Faith album; The Edge, a Polaroid ‘Self-Landscape’; Iggy Pop, 16 black-and-white self-portrait photos set one above the other like mug shots for 16 passports; Steve Reich, the first page of his ‘Variations for Winds, String and Keyboards’, three Davidoff cigars, two 18-carat nipple rings, a Ronson cigarette lighter and a Gold American Express card in a distressed resin cast; Joan Armatrading, an ink drawing; Michael Nyman, 36 Sony video prints from an original video of Ayers Rock (he actually sent a VHS of his holiday at Ayers Rock from which were produced the 36 prints). Contributions also came from Boy George, Kate Bush, Nick Rhodes of Duran Duran, Bob Geldof, Shane MacGowan, Adam Ant, Massive Attack and Russell Mills.

3 A Year With Swollen Appendages, Brian Eno, Faber 1996: ‘“Pagan Fun Wear” went brilliantly – just the right balance between gorgeously stylish and improbably improvised. Lots of people came and they all seemed to have had a really good time. Anthea and I worked for two days and nights almost continuously without sleep in the run-up to this – so much to do and so many people to organise. Lynn Franks said this was “the most stylish charity event I have ever been to – and I’ve been to a few.” So it was a tremendous relief at the end of the evening, at 12.30, when it was all successfully over and time to go home. I took one last walk round the various huge rooms of the pristine Saatchi Gallery to make sure no one had left anything behind. I was feeling fine. I’d especially pleaded with the staff at the Saatchi Gallery to use a room they don’t normally let out – a particularly beautiful space. I’d promised them faithfully that there’d be no damage and they shouldn’t worry and my word was my bond etc. “There won’t be any mess at all, I promise you that.” The walls and floor of the room had been squirted with huge jets of black, red, green and yellow paint. It turned out that some of the youngsters who worked for one of the record companies had got drunk and run amok. My heart dropped a thousand miles – and I set about scraping the whole mess off the walls. (It was poster paint, so it couldn’t just be painted over – it would have mixed with the white paint.)’

4 Lou Reed exhibited a small bottle of perfume labelled ‘ODE for Ornette Coleman’, blended by himself with the bottle’s graphics designed by Laurie Andersen. Dave Stewart’s homage was to Bob Dylan. Bryan Ferry’s – Charlie Parker; The Pet Shop Boys’ – Saturday Night Fever; Holly Johnson of Frankie Goes to Hollywood – the Beatles; Karl Hyde of Underworld – Captain Beefheart. John Squire – The Beach Boys. Tim Booth’s homage was to Patti Smith’s Horses.

5 As well as these three major fundraising events, Anthea and her team also organised a set of Christmas cards in 1995 with contributions from Brian, Bowie, Kate Bush, Peter Gabriel, Oasis, Pulp, Iggy Pop, Radiohead’s Thom York, The Blow Monkeys and Dave Stewart.

The Unkillable Human

Last night I cooked shepherd's pie for Jane Glitre. Word of warning. If I ever invite you for dinner make sure I am NOT cooking shepherd's pie. I have known Jane for over 20 years and first met her at the time of the Bosnian war. She and a group of brave women calling themselves 'Through Heart to Peace' walked across Mount Igman into besieged Sarajevo. She tells me how they entered the city through the famous tunnel, with the older members of their group at the front. As they emerged at the far end there was a line of open-mouthed Bosnian soldiers waiting their turn to go the other way. 'Don't worry' said one of the first women to emerge, 'the younger ones are at the back.' On one trip there they took in Frederick Franck's sculpture, 'Unkillable Human'. After the war Jane ran the Spitz music venue in Spitalfields market and I used to volunteer there. A wonderful place killed off by the developers who turned it into another expensive restaurant for expense-account bankers. Here is Eric Bibb who I saw there as well as Bert Jansch, Beth Orton, Tom Paxton, Honeyboy Edwards, Martha Wainwright and many others. Today she runs the Spitz Charitable Trust, bringing music to older people. Check her work out.  A great evening, reminiscing the years. And next time it will be a curry. Oh, and you can read more about Jane in Left Field.

Srebrenica

Twenty years ago the Srebrenica massacre was the deadliest of the Bosnian War and followed a short-lived NATO bombing of Serb positions. That would culminate four years later with intensive bombing against Serbia itself. I was in Mostar at the time and could hear the planes as they headed for Belgrade. Only more recently, when researching weapons used in the Iraq war, did I find out that their bombs were tipped with depleted uranium. (articles for Future Trust  & Counterpunch).  Srebrenica has since been invoked to justify military interventions elsewhere. In 2005, Christopher Hitchens defended the US decision to invade Iraq with an article entitled , “From Srebrenica to Baghdad”. Guardian columnist, Peter Preston, advocated military intervention in Libya, with these words, “Remember Srebrenica”. Most recently an article on ISIS in the New International Business Times warned of a “New Srebrenica”. Srebrenica was the largest mass killing in Europe since the 1940s. Eight thousand Muslim / Bosniak men and boys were killed and, according to an investigation by the Dutch government, “Muslims were slaughtered like beasts.” But, according to Swedish diplomat Carl Bildt, European Union mediator during the Bosnian War, Bosnian government forces assigned to protect Srebrenica were “not putting up any resistance. Later it was revealed that they had been ordered by the Sarajevo commanders not to defend Srebrenica.” Bildt’s account is supported by military correspondent Tim Ripley, who has provided evidence that the Bosnian government ceded the town to Serb forces. There is evidence that a similar policy was applied in Mostar, where I was living. Bosnian forces were withdrawn from a strategic hilltop in the town on orders from the Sarajevo government. International talks to resolve the Bosnian conflict began in early 1992, shortly before the war began. The effort was directed by Portuguese diplomat José Cutileiro. He brought the leaders of all three Bosnian ethnic groups to Lisbon and out of the talks came a plan for an ethnic confederation. In March 1992, all three agreed to a preliminary version of this peace plan, but it broke down under US pressure. Were they afraid that the European Community might emerge as a distinct power bloc in the post-Soviet world, acting independently of the United States and NATO? The US ambassador to Yugoslavia, Warren Zimmermann, encouraged President Izetbegović to reject the peace plan. According to former State Department official George Kenney, “Zimmermann told Izetbegović … [the US will] recognize you and help you out. So don’t go ahead with the Lisbon agreement.” Zimmermann himself has denied blocking the agreement, but a wide range of sources, including James Bissett, the Canadian ambassador to Yugoslavia; Peter Carrington, a former UK foreign minister; and the official Dutch investigation of the Bosnian War, confirm that the US government played a disruptive role. In light of US pressure, the Croats and Muslims both withdrew from the agreement and the stage was set for war. The idea that international diplomacy emboldened Serb aggression is a myth that has helped justify later efforts to scuttle diplomatic settlements elsewhere. The ensuing levels of slaughter has resulted in the death of hundreds of thousands. It continues. I doubt the victims of the Srebrenica massacre would welcome this as their epitaph. ( my memoirs, "Left Field" will be published by Unbound in March 2016)

For fuller accounts read here,  here and  here

Missing kidneys

Soon after the wars in former Yugoslavia, politicians from all sides actively nationalised their languages. Antun Vrdoljak, Croatian TV chief in the 1990s, declared that,"Language preserves the nation's history and culture ... language is the womb." At its most xenophobic, the Croatian Education Minister, Jasna Gotovac, said, "The fight for our language and culture is a part of the war." Alija Isakovic, a linguist who published a Bosnian-language dictionary in besieged Sarajevo warned against a purge of Turkish words. "If they do," he said, "none of them will have a kidney." The common word for kidney being 'bubreg'. This might all seem to be archaic thinking, but this process applied to contemporary words as well. 'Helikopter' was to be zrakomlat, 'telefon' – brzoglas, 'aeroport' - zračna luka; making the internationally comprehensible into a jumble of incomprehension. We were criticised for calling the music centre in Mostar, ‘Muzički Centar Pavarotti’. Croatian politicians had recently discovered an ancient term for music, 'glazba' and were offended that we were not using that in place of a word recognised from Beijing to Buenos Aires. When a politician from the west side of town visited my office I gave him coffee from a džezva, served with rahat lokum (turkish delight). At that time, even coffee breaks could be political acts. Read more about the politics of language in 'Left Field'.

Ned of the Hill in Sarajevo

A week before we left for Sarajevo we were at a Ron Kavana gig at the Stags Head in Camden Town. He is a folk/rock singer After he had sung 'Young Ned of the Hill', composed with the Pogues, he told us that he had enjoyed performing this on tour with them to enthusiastic British audiences who appreciated its message – that Oliver Cromwell rot in hell. We told him we'd add his albums to the CDs we were taking into the city for radio stations. Ron said he'd like to join us. 'Why do you want to come?'  I asked him. 'My grandma was a fiddle player in Limerick'. That didn't seem to answer the question. A long pause. 'She was killed by the Brits in 1921. What you've told me about Sarajevo reminds me of her. She used to perform in cellars, out of sight of the Black and Tans.' He didn't need to say more about them. They were British ex-First World War soldiers and released prisoners with a reputation for murderous brutality. They were recruited to support the Royal Irish Police in suppressing the war of independence. 'One night they heard her playing, took her away and shot her. If I come to Sarajevo I will play music and will be honouring her memory.' More about Ron in Sarajevo here.

Rachid Taha with Brian Eno (guest Mick Jones from the Clash)

27 November 2005 at the Astoria in London (now buried beneath Cross Rail's new station at Tottenham Court Road). I helped organise this gig for the Stop the War Coalition with Rachid's UK manager, Rikki Stein. What a night! And what a great surprise when Mick Jones turned up to join them for 'Rock the Casbah'. And we raised some serious money for the anti-war movement.  Music has been an important part of my life: the Pavarotti and Friends concerts, the daily events that took place at the Pavarotti Music Centre, music workshops in Sarajevo and Mostar, smuggling Island Records Bob Marley exhibition into war-torn Mostar, organising gigs for Stop the War. And I have seen music change the lives of others around me. Greetings to all the great musicians you will come across in Left Field - Oha, Teo, Eugene, Senad Suta, Atilla Aksoj, Dubioza Kolektiv, Siktar, Mostar Sevdah Reunion, Deicola Neves,  EM, Paul Belben and so many others. Enjoy 'Rock the Casbah'