Resistance In The Dark

This is Resistance In the Dark by The Five Techniques....

The Five Techniques is a David Holmes project which sees music and art as an act of resistance. Holmes played at a gig for Gaza, put together by Paul Weller. Holmes and Weller decided to make a song, available as a digital and 7" single, with vocals by Roisin el Charif, singing in Arabic, 'If my voice will falter/Yours should remain'. Douglas Hart's video is a powerful and discomforting watch. The bass drives the song on, there is a chaos among the noise, Weller's voice echoes Roisin's but in English, an acid rock guitar solo cuts through, the voices return, 'In no light/This resistance grows strong', the music swirls and urges before fading out leaving just Roisin and the voices of some Palestinians. It's strong stuff. You can get it at Bandcamp. All profits will go to Medical Aid for Palestine. 

David Holmes grew up in Belfast during The Troubles. The name of the project, The Five Techniques, refers to interrogation practices used by the British in Northern Ireland: prolonged wall standing to induce stress; hooding detainees; subjection to long periods of intense noise; sleep deprivation; and food and drink deprivation. In 1978 the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the UK government was in breach of Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights and a 2021 Supreme Court judgement ruled that if they were used today they would be classified as torture. There are some mainstream politicians in UK politics currently who want to take the UK out of the European Convention on Human Rights. Make of that what you will. 

Resistance In The Dark is a song that it is easy to imagine Sinead O'Connor singing on, if she'd lived. Sinead was recording a solo album with David after the pair met at a concert for Shane MacGowan's 60th birthday. They'd never met previously and Sinead knew nothing about David but he introduced himself and proposed making an album together, him producing and her singing, about healing- and she agreed. The album was to some extent contemporaneous with David's solo record Blind On A Galloping Horse so it's fair to assume similarities would exist between the two sonically and musically. The only released fruit of their work together is a one- off single with David's band Unloved, a cover of Mahalia Jackson's Trouble Of The World. Sinead putting the vocal down in one take, at 5 am at his house in Belfast. Given what happened to Sinead subsequently- the death of her son Shane in 2022 aged 17 and the circumstances of it, Sinead's anger and grief, and her own death in July 2023- the song sounds like a premonition, 'Soon I will be done/ With all the trouble of the world'. 

Between 2018 and 2023 Holmes and Sinead recorded eight more songs at David's house and in 2021 Sinead announced that the album would be called No Veteran Dies Alone. The album was a major work for both of them, Sinead moving into David's house for periods. David has said that he wants to see the album released, describing it as 'extraordinary, a very special album... up there with her very best work'. 

David wanted the album to be specifically about healing and it seems Sinead delivered- songs about being reunited with her mother, about God and Mary Magdalene, about her children, about dreams of being in heaven and the value of a soul, about pain, loss and grief, injustice and suffering, addiction and mental health, redemption, survival and about no veteran dying alone. It could be seen as Sinead's final statement, her last will and testament, her reckoning with the world. Unfortunately it has become mired in wranglings and music business murkiness. Its release is outside David Holmes' control and in the hands of Sinead's estate and record company. Maybe it'll come out, maybe it won't. 

In 2023 David's Necessary Genius single listed the misfits and dreamers, outsiders and radicals that have inspired him ending with the line 'I believe in Sinead O'Connor/ I believe in refugees'. Which takes us back to The Five Techniques and Resistance In The Dark. 

Sinead

Sinead O'Connor's death was announced by her family on Wednesday night. We'd been to the cinema and came out into the July rain, the news coming through almost immediately onto our phones. Not long after a neighbour sent a message, a family photo of Sinead and Andy Rourke (with a guitar) smiling in the sunshine in Palma in the 90s (my neighbour's mum is friends with Andy's- both Andy and Sinead gone in a matter of months). Sinead's traumatic childhood, bumpy ride through the music industry in the aftermath of her massive fame in 1990 and struggles with her family, mental health and physical health are well documented. Last year her son Shane killed himself, aged seventeen. To lose a child is an awful, heartbreaking, lifechanging and catastrophic event for any parent, as we know too well. To lose a child to suicide is unimaginable. 

I saw Sinead at Glastonbury in 1990, playing mid- afternoon, singing to 30, 000 people from the Pyramid stage, dressed in black biker jacket, circular shades and a Viz Fat Slags t- shirt. This song, The Emperor's New Clothes with former- Ant Marco Pirroni windmilling on guitar, was a highlight. It's a powerful song, Sinead dropping in lines about youth, fame and pregnancy and a partner who has misjudged her, got her wrong. In the end she decides, 'I will live by my own policies/ I will sleep with a clear conscience/ I will sleep in peace'. 

The Emperor's New Clothes

Those lines are how she lived her life- singular, fearless, battling, courageous, unafraid. In 1987 I watched her on Top Of The Pops performing her single Mandinka. In denim and black boots and with her shaven head she looked amazing, a punk spirit making announcing her entry the world. 

Mandinka

By this point she'd already sacked her producer and re- recorded her debut album, The Lion And The Cobra (an album that includes her debut single, the epic Troy, and the song I Want Your (Hands On Me) which was remixed with rapper MC Lyte and became big in the growing underground club culture).

Sinead took no prisoners in her songs, her brushes with her parents split as a child, trauma, abuse, eighteen months in the Irish care system and her mother's death in a car crash fuelling her fire. When her cover of Nothing Compares 2U went supernova she found herself at a level of fame that would have derailed even the most well adjusted person. She was badly treated by many people. The album Nothing Compares 2U came from, I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got, contains many great Sinead songs, not least this one which takes on new layers of meaning every time I play it, a 17th century poem sung over a Soul II Soul drum beat with a fiddle by a Waterboy arriving at the end as a final lament.

I Am Stretched On Your Grave

I posted the full version of this gig, a performance in Brussels in 1990, earlier this year as part of my Saturday Live series. In this excerpt from it, she sings I Am Stretched On Your Grave on her own on stage, one woman with a reel to reel tape recorder and an audience in the palm of her hands. 

Earlier in the year she appeared on The Late Show singing Black Boys On Mopeds, her evisceration of Margaret Thatcher's government, its hypocrisy, late 80s Britain's racist policing of young black men and how 'England's not a mythical land of Madame George and roses'.

Fridays here recently have been a celebration of Andrew Weatherall remixes. Here are two with Sinead. The first is one of three remixes Andrew did of Jah Wobble and The Invaders Of The Heart's Visions Of You, utterly essential 1992 dub/ pop (Sinead's love of reggae and dub is one of the recurring themes of her albums and her book Rememberings). This 12" was a bit of a dream team assembled, Weatherall's production, Wobble's bass and Sinead's voice- they really should have made an album together. 

Visions Of You (The Secret Love Child Of Hank And Johnny Mix)

Peace Together was a collective formed to promote the peace process in Northern Ireland, formed in 1993. The twelve minute Sabres Of Paradise remix of the song Be Still is very much an overlooked Sabres remix, extended Gaelic- dub. Listening to it yesterday, it felt like a celebration and a eulogy.

Be Still (Sabres Of Paradise Remix)

There are many more songs from Sinead's back catalogue that I could post here but I've probably done enough- You Have Made Me A Thief Of Your Heart, her cover of Song To The Siren, Fire On Babylon and Thank You For Hearing Me ( both from Universal Mother in 1994), 2020's 7" single, a cover of Mahalia Jackson's Trouble Of The World, recorded with David Holmes and Unloved, the first fruits of an album abandoned when Shane died and then restarted later on last year. 

Someone at Youtube left a comment years ago that said, 'So many people owe Sinead an apology'. That's the truth- she was frequently, insultingly, portrayed as 'crazy' in the press but was proved correct about so much. In fact, rather than crazy I think Sinead was someone who had figured out exactly what the world is like. Eventually it took an enormous toll on her. I hope she has found some kind of peace, the peace she referred to in The Emperor's New Clothes. 

'I will live by my own policies

I will sleep with a clear conscience

I will sleep in peace'

RIP Sinead.

Trouble

 

Sinead O'Connor is back, a single released on Friday that is as powerful, moving and heartfelt as anything she's done in the past. Never one to shy away from real life issues and always prepared to wear her heart on her sleeve Trouble Of The World is a cover of a traditional song made famous by Mahalia Jackson (who was on the stage at the March On Washington in August 1963 and was the person who drove Martin Luther King to go off his script when he made his I Have A dream speech- 'tell it Martin, tell them your dream' she is said to have told him). The cover was inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement and all the proceeds will go towards BLM. It was produced by David Holmes in Belfast, a place steeped in it's own history of civil rights and protest. The video was directed by Don Letts. Buy it at Bandcamp. 

I posted this song earlier this year, back in April which seems a long time ago now, but it's worth posting again and going back to. The Emperor's New Clothes is a song about more personal issues- fame, boyfriends, pregnancy, advice being offered, people's views of her and how she should look, being a single mother- but as Sinead knows the personal is also the political.