Wild Angles
We are a creative collective and we share our stories and memories around a theme which is different for every episode. We accompany our thoughts with a song or piece of music that we relate to the episode theme.
Wild Angles
Protest
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Hello and welcome to Wild Angles A radio show with a collective view an ordinary every day objects and subjects one theme per episode with various reflections opinions and ideas and of course music Wild Angles Today's theme is protest.
SPEAKER_17Hello. I'm Scott. Let's talk about protest music. The fine art of grabbing an instrument and singing at the establishment until it feels guilty. It all peaked in the 1960s. Back then, if you wanted to change the world, you didn't write an angry tweet. You just bought a guitar, grew out your hair, and listened to Bob Dylan. Bob Dylan was the king of being profoundly poetic, yet completely unintelligible. He wrote Blowing in the Wind song where he asked nine consecutive rhetorical questions about peace and then concluded the answer is literally just floating around in the atmosphere. Everyone went, Woo today you ask a question like that. But then in the 1970s and everyone got tired of it. They realized you didn't need to be poetic if you were loud enough. Their message wasn't how many roads must be a man walked. It was just everything is terrible. It was angry. It was fast. And it was the first time teens discovered you could rebel against the government whilst wearing safety pins as jewelry. By the 1980s, protest music got fancy. We invented synthesizers and joined charity concerts. This was the era of We Are the World and Live Aid. Suddenly protesting wasn't about fighting the power. It was about getting forty of the richest celebrities in human history into one room to sing a chorus together. Bruce Springsteen was sweating. Michael Jackson was wearing one sparkly glove. We collectively decided that the best way to solve global crisis was through the power of multi-platinum harmonies and massive shoulder pads. Finally, the 1990s arrived. Grunge and hip-hop took over the microphone. You had rage against the machine, quite literally yelling at you to fight the system over a bass line that could rattle your teeth loose. Meanwhile, hip-hop acts like public enemy and NWA were delivering raw, brilliant news reports directly from the streets, exposing systemic injustice with a beat so good that you forgot you were learning sociology. So what's the lesson here? Well, from the sixties to the nineties, every generation found a new way to loud talk to the government. So the next time you feel like the world is a mess, you don't just post a meme, grab a microphone, turn up the bass, and go confuse the establishment into submission to peace out.
SPEAKER_05How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man? How many seas must the white dove sail before she sleeps in the sand? Yes and how many times must the cannon balls fly before the forever band? The answer my friend is blown in the wind. The answer is blowin' in the wind Yes and how many years can a mountain exist before it is washed to the sea? Yes and how many years can some people exist before they're allowed to be free? Yes, and how many a times can a man turn his head and pretend that he just doesn't see? The answer my friend is blowing in the wind. The answer is blowing in the wind Yes and how many times must a man look up before he can see the sky? Yes and how many ears must one man have before he can hear people cry how many deaths will it take till he knows that too many people have died? The answer my friend is blowing in the wind, the answer is blowing in the window.
SPEAKER_19This reminds me of when I was younger, I was about fourteen and I was going to church having been brought up in a Christian home. And the sort of church that we went to some might describe as a happy clappy church. We've been to many churches and when I was fourteen we went to an evangelical church which was okay, it was lively enough and there were some really good people there and positive, well-meaning. And I belonged to a youth group. Anyway, one summer our youth group decided to sing a few songs and we were going to perform them on a sort of stage in front of everybody. Anyway, we sang our songs and everyone clapped and it was all lovely. And my mother says to me, Do you know what? Sue came up to me afterwards and said, Oh yeah. And she said that the dress that you were wearing was far too short, and she was horrified. I was even more horrified. My dress. I spent a long time getting ready to look smart, as had all the other kids. To sing these songs. And sorry, not the window on my sails. I was really shocked. Not one word of my mum. Didn't your daughter in the group sing well? Wasn't it lovely? How nice of them to think about singing to us or nothing, just one negative criticism. Do you know what? That made me even more determined to wear that dress. The dress was just above my knee. I couldn't see in any which way, it was too short. It was after all summer. I think yes, I protested. Because to me, it wasn't at all fair. I don't understand. And you get groups of people, you get the good people, and you get the people that try to control. I don't know what her reason was for saying that to my mother, what her real reason was. I honestly don't know. Do you know what my mum said? You keep wearing that dress, it looks lovely on you. Just ignore the old bat. Thanks, mum. I remember that one. Anyway, my song for today about being forced to be conventional is numb by you two.
SPEAKER_09Don't move, don't talk out of time, don't think, don't worry. Everything's just fine. Just fine Don't push, don't hold for too much, don't agree, don't achieve, agree with that.
SPEAKER_08Don't check, just balance on the fence, don't make a dumb ass, don't try to make sense.
SPEAKER_09Don't write, don't talk, don't worry. Don't try about drunk, don't beat, don't spill, don't pick the thing, don't fuck the wheel. Don't take it on the way.
SPEAKER_02But we do have two histories and identities that have to be protected. It's all part of the peace process. So basically the idea is you can identify whatever way you want. As long as I'm not a jerk about yours and you're not a jerk about mine, we'll all get on. Cool. One of the big things you'll see is the flags. What the flags relate to, there's generally nothing nefarious and sometimes it is generally it's just something feeling our colours from the Where you see the Union Jack? That's that community sample. Yes, we are Northern Irish, but we ascribe to the British industry and I dentist. Converse in Conlock is all the Irish trickler. That's that community sample. Well, we're Northern Irish too, but we ascribe to the Irish history and I dentist. So they talk about what's a divided past and a shared future. That's we have a divided past, and we're all working very hard to create a shared future.
SPEAKER_15This week's topic of protests presents me with the opportunity to talk about the most incredible alliance between two very different communities in the 1980s. Now some of you may be familiar with this story, but even if you are, it's a great one to hear again. It's not my place to bring politics or to pass opinion here, so therefore I shall stick to the facts. In 1984, the Conservative Party announced they were planning on importing coal from overseas, meaning 20,000 people would lose their jobs through the closure of many of our coal pits. I'm going to focus on probably the worst hit of all the areas and the place I've called home for the last 20 years, South Wales. The only option the miners felt they had was to protest in the fiercest way possible, by going on strike. They knew that this would mean they would not get paid or receive any benefits, but they felt it necessary to try and convince the government and the entire country that this was a terrible idea. In no time at all, small communities were virtually where virtually the entire male population relied on the collaries for their work became desperate. Wives, mothers, daughters rallied around and did an unbelievable job at creating food banks through the kindness of neighbouring towns and villages, through shops and supermarkets, plus any other donations they could find. Yet it didn't stretch nearly far enough. Meanwhile, there was another group of people in the UK who were feeling equally alienated and downtrodden. The lesbian and gay communities, and especially those in London. The 1984 Gay Pride March in London brought a suggestion that they should carry a couple of buckets to try and raise some cash for the miners. The link being that they too were despised by Thatcher, and let's be honest, much of the UK population too, as AIDS was rife and all over the press at the time. Before long, those buckets started to fill up, and the LGBT community needed to choose an area that needed cash the most. They approached a small mining town called Onwin, about 20 miles north of Swansea, which is where I now live. You couldn't get two more differing sets of people than the hard Welsh miners and the gays of London if you tried. I'll cut to the chase and declare that lesbians and gays support the miners raised over £20,000 for those people. That's about £70,000 in today's money. And it was largely held by the brilliantly named Pitts and Perverts balls in London, headlined by Bronsky Beat, which was even attended by a few from Onwim to help draw further awareness to England's affluent capital of their plight. After one year and two days, the National Union of Mine Workers, the NUM, voted unanimously to return to work. Their breaking point had been reached, yet they never forgot their friends from London. Having experienced firsthand the power of solidarity, the NUM subsequently used their significant influence to support the gay community. They proposed and passed a resolution just five months after returning to work that made lesbian and gay rights an official trade union policy. Plus, later on, their never-wavering support and their union influences led to the Labour Party, including gay rights, in their manifesto, paving the way for landmark equality legislation. If you get a chance to watch the film Pride, it tells this story much better than I have done. Yes, the government won in the end, but it shows that protesting for a cause that you feel passionate about can bring its rewards, even if that manifests itself through simple understanding, friendship, and loyalty with the people you least expect it. The film ends with this corker of a song by a hero of mine, Billy Bragg, and is my track choice this week. There's power in the union. Enjoy.
SPEAKER_11Power in the land. Power in the end of the worker to the power in the year. Come on for the morning the time we always do. I'm just gonna do time the workers who cannot organize that.
SPEAKER_10C'est sa spécialité d'ailleurs, qui s'appelle...
SPEAKER_18Hello. This week we are talking about protests. When I was told on the theme, I must confess, once again, I wasn't too sure how to approach the theme of protest. Protest is such a vast, complicated, multifaceted topic. How could I talk about protests or one aspect of protest in about three minutes? So I decided to go on a bit of a ramble and we'll see where we end up. Many apologies in advance if this ends up being the most boring three minutes of your life. When I think about the contemporary protests, I think about BLM, uh striking for the environment, Fridays for Future, uh Action Against Palestine, all these things, and the more I think about them, the more I realise how strange it is in the sense that well, it's 2026. Surely you think by now we would have figured out and implemented basic human rights. Yet it seems like it's still something we're fighting for in the year 2026. That simply blows my mind. Basic things, access to medical care, universal access to education, that girls having access to education. Stop killing innocent people and protecting our ecosystem. So many aspects of our life still need a voice in 2026. And there are so many defects in our society that sometimes it's impossible to know which one to fight for. I think deep down a lot of people have maybe one or two that they feel particularly for. Mine right now is the protection of the oceans. I study marina natural history photography quite a unique degree, and I really, really want to strive to protect the oceans. So part of me thinks so many people for me have tried so hard. What makes me think that I can make a difference? But I'm still gonna try. I'm going into my final year of university, and I have decided that my major final project will be about ocean and ocean protection. Recent studies have shown that people get bored of seeing the same images surrounding climate change, for example, a plastic cup floating in the ocean or a seahorse wrapped around a cotton earbud, something like that. So I've decided to tackle it slightly differently through means of alternative photography. So whether that be cameras photography or film photography, I'm going to try and represent all the different issues that the ocean faces. So for example, sewage being dumped in UK waters is a massive problem. This is not illegal. There are plenty of sewage outlets dotted all along the UK coast. You can even see online when sewage is being dumped in the oceans. So what I'm going to do for one of my photos is I know where one of the sewage outlets is. And one day when it's going to be dumping all its raw sewage in the ocean, I'm going to be collecting a sample of all this bacteria in a Petri dish. And I'm going to cultivate it, and then I'm going to let it grow on some analog camera film. The mould and the bacteria will eat away the gelatin plates of the film and be left with some random spontaneous shapes nibbled by the mould. But before having my film exposed to all this mould, I was going to photograph a picture of the ocean. Therefore, the final result would be this picture of, say, some waves or some seaweed overlaid with this mouldy sewage bacteria. It will be the literal representation of what sewage is doing to our oceans. Art is a really powerful medium for protest, and this is why my song of choice is Ferguson is Burning by Ezra Furman, a protest song which I think carries the passion and raw energy necessary to make change.
SPEAKER_06Darren Wilson killed Michael Brown. 18 years old, now he's dead on the ground. He shot him six times, his hands over his head. He held not a weapon, he was not a threat. Michael Brown died in the Ferguson street. Officer Wilson got weeks of pain leave. The message was clear, broadcast over the nation. Ferguson The world's turning away. The folks on the side that they could not stand by. We all watched police force felt that I had to step in. Turned out the streetlights, he was not fishing with glasses. The governor urges we must react. Oh, it's not the killers and the power turn into an army. When the world's turning in away turning away. When the fires burn out and the tear gas disperses. When the work is all done for the doctors and the nurses, the cops might stop shooting, and the streets get less wild. But Michael Brown's mother will never get back to child and the hatred and fear white America harbors will only grow bigger beneath their body armor. Don't keep a close eye on our laws and all the leaders. No justice for Mike Brown has done for you to either.
SPEAKER_12I'm thinking immediately about protest songs. Yet anger and raw energy that goes into the writing of these and the on-stage performance. Regular listeners will have noticed that I'm mostly fond of the heavier end of the musical spectrum. It also might sound like I'm an anti-police. I'm absolutely not. I think that they have an impossible job seem to be damned if they do. I'm also aware of the police accountability. I'm particularly taken by the lyrics. Drunk and disorderly was his crime. I think at worst he should be doing time. But he's dead. He was drunk and disorderly, and now he's dead. Those unfamiliar with punk, please excuse the shouty style of the singing. But remember, this is Raw and was a band of angry punks. They were furious and wanted to be heard. This is the murder of Little Towers.
SPEAKER_02If you shape the jar, we'll all start to kill each other each other. So the question in life is to ask, who's shaping a big jar and why? We all get on fine. Black, white, male, female, rich, pearl, don't you will? Until someone says, do we like a bit? Shit.
SPEAKER_04Well, they have everybody at the bottom fighting.
SPEAKER_20So when we hear the word protest, most of us picture a physical protest marching through the streets, demanding rights, um showing support. But one of the more unusual topics of protest that has come to my attention recently is about video games. So the campaign is called Stop Killing Games. Um the idea is simple. Uh imagine yourself as a consumer, you buy a video game, you play it for years, and then one day the company switches off its servers. Overnight a game doesn't work. I think you know the discontinuation of certain earlier Halo series, their servers, certain Call of Duty servers, um, and you know, for example, maybe GTA online uh when a new one comes out. So thousands of players are asking a simple question. If you bought the game, should it really just be able to disappear? Um, and it's not just an internet argument. Um it reached a certain uh threshold. So it was debated in Westminster and Autumn, um, gained significant support uh over the over the channel as well in the European Union, um gained significant fraction in the commission. Um and at its heart it's a debate about consumer rights and what ownership means, you know, in a digital age. But there's another side to it as well. Um so video games aren't just products to be consumed, they're also part of a certain cultural heritage. So the same way the books and films uh do, they capture the technology of the time, there's a certain storytelling aspect of them. Um and when an online game disappears, we don't just lose software, we also risk losing kind of cultural um or we we risk cultural amnesia. Um and pieces of our digital history simply vanish, although they are maintained via YouTube, for example, as like a secondary source, but it's not exactly the same thing. So perhaps the protest isn't only about protecting consumers, it's also about deciding what we think is worth preserving in an increasingly digital world. And so to end this, my song choice is End of Line by Dab Punk. It comes from the soundtrack to Tron Legacy, a film set inside a digital world where systems face deletion and termination, which makes this rather fitting to this topic. For many games, monster servers go offline, it's quite literally the end of the line.
SPEAKER_16When I first moved to France, I got chatting to an old boy, a neighbour of ours, Pierre, who loved to tell me stories of days gone by in the Provencelle village that he grew up in. One day he pointed out an old wreckage of an old British World War II fighter plane hidden in scrub and brambles, slightly visible to those who had the fortune to have Pierre as a neighbour to point these things out. You see, Pierre saw the dining of this plane during the war. I found Pierre and all of his old stories fascinating and inspiring. And it was Pierre who first introduced me to the French resistance. He told me that they had had a massive stronghold in the goal to Verdon, and then struggled against the Nazi regime and fishing France. The French resistance was the ultimate protest against the fascist occupation. An ultimate protest. As if you were called, you paid the ultimate price again, and that was with your life. All arrested resistance fighters were shot or harmed by the German Nazi party, and they did not want their far-right ideology derailed. And executions were sometimes public. And if ordered off anyone else who was perhaps thinking of subscribing to the movement, the resistance was a lot more than an online petition. As you walk around, you were reminded of the sacrificial efforts made by the local resistance fighters of men and women with monuments and statues. They list all the names of those that were holding and killed by the barbaric far-right manifest. The fighters were known as Mackey around here. They were given this name as this is the title of Ranger, and the fighters are married to Roman. It's a sombre moment. When you stand at the foot of a monument, they are usually erected at the spot where the killing took place. And you think about and reflect on what had occurred. Someone was killed for their protest. Their belief in a freedom to choose who ran their country. A protest against a brutal killing machine that found a solution for you if you didn't fit into their ideology. With the shadow of fascism rising again, I find it really hard to believe that history can be repeated. There are so many reminders scattered around all of our landscapes at the cost of human lives and misery. And it feels like we are walking with our eyes closed into a time where hating people who are different to you, and not trusting those who disagree with you, it is accepted as the new normal. He saw firsthand the misery it caused. He knew some of the men and women that gave their lives in the ultimate protest. Would we be prepared to die for our beliefs? Or are we just prepared to die our hair? The song I've chosen is The Partisan by Leonard Cohen. The song was actually composed in 1943 by a Russian-born Anna Marley. And the lyrics were written by a French resistance leader, Emmanuel Dastier. The song was originally called The Lament of the Partisan. And often Anna Marley performed this song on the BBC. And pockets of the French Resistance would tune in, and the song became their unofficial anthem.
SPEAKER_07When they poured across the border, I was cautioned to surrender. This I could not do. She died without a whisper.
SPEAKER_13Mais je n'ai pas peur.
SPEAKER_14J'ai repris mon âme. J'ai changé cent fois de nom, j'ai deux femmes et enfants, j'ai ton ami, j'ai avant son Dieu. Un crime dans un grenier, pour la nuit nous a caché, les amants.
SPEAKER_07Oh the wind, the wind is blowing. Through the graves, the wind is blowing. Freedom soon will come. Then we'll come from the shadow.
SPEAKER_01On the 7th of June 2020, my home city of Bristol made news headlines all over the world following the toppling of Edward Colston's statue during the Black Lives Matter March. And I was there well, nearby, on the bus home from the march with my daughter Mary. Mary had been very keen to go on the march, although it was still the early days of the COVID pandemic. To be honest, I didn't need much persuading. She was only thirteen at the time. A large crowd was expected, and I wanted to make sure she was safe, as well as supporting the causes of equality, justice, and diversity. When we arrived at College Green on the Sunday afternoon, we made our way towards the front of the marsh. As we began to move off, I was amazed that young Maui, who, despite her small stature and tender years, led some of the chants. I can't breathe and say his name, George Floyd. I should explain that. But my wife is from the Philippines, so Maui and her sister both have dual heritage. Even so, I was surprised and proud of her intensity. The march was pretty good natured, despite a few chants of the police. But once we were drawn to a halt near Colston Avenue, my spidey senses, sharpened by more than ten years working in mental health units, began to pick up a sense of agitation developing in the crowd, and that maybe the mood was turning darker. Over the years there have been plenty of examples of peaceful protests turning violent. It was not difficult to persuade young Maui that now would perhaps be a good time to head off to the bus stop and make our way home. So it was only later that we found out what had happened at the city centre while we were on the bus home. One knelt on its neck, mirroring the actions of the cop who had killed George Floyd in Minneapolis. The statue was then dragged a short distance over to the harbour, where it was dumped into the water, highly symbolic given the link between Bristol's waterways and the slave trade. During his lifetime, Edward Colson played an active role in the enslavement of over 84,000 Africans, including 12,000 children. Nineteen thousand of them died en route to the Caribbean and America. Very few Bristolians are sorry that his statue is no longer looking down on us. A few weeks later, a mannequin of Jimmy Savile appeared on the plinth vacated by the statue. A reminder that wealth and influence can blind us to evil in modern times, too. It was only there for about an hour or so. And I'm afraid we missed that too.
SPEAKER_21You will not be able to stay home, brother. You will not be able to plug in, turn on, and cop out. You will not be able to lose yourself on Skag and skip out for beer during commercials because the revolution will not be televised. The revolution will not be televised. The revolution will not be brought to you by Zero's and four parts without commercial interruptions. The revolution will not show your fixtures of Nixon blowing a bugle and leading a charge by John Mitchell, General Abrams, and Spyro Agnew. To eat Hogmars confiscated from a Harlem sanctuary. The revolution will not be televised. The revolution will not be brought to you by the Shaper of War Theater. And will not star Natalie Woods and Steve McQueen or Bullwinkle and Julia. The revolution will not give your mouth sex appeal. The revolution will not get rid of the nub. The revolution will not make you look five-pound thinner. Because the revolution will not be televised, brother. There will be no pictures of you and Winnie May, pushing that shopping cart down the block on the dead run. Or trying to slide that colored TV into a stolen ambulance. NBC will not be able to predict the winner at 832 on the fourth from 29 district. The revolution will not be televised. There will be no pictures of figs shooting down brothers on the instant replay. There will be no pictures of figs shooting down brothers on the instant replay. There will be no pictures of Windy Young being run out of Harlem on a rail with a brand new process. There will be no stuff watching on still like a Roy Wilkins strolling through what? In a red, black, and green liberation jumpsuit. That he has been sleeping for just the proper occasion. Green acres, Beverly Hills lights, and Hoodaville churches will no longer be so damn relevant. And women will not care if Dick finally got down with Jane on search for tomorrow. Because black people will be in the street looking for a brighter day. The revolution will not be televised. There will be no highlights on the 11 o'clock news and no pictures of Harry Hall, woman liberationist, and Jackie O'Neill blowing her nose. The theme song will not be written by Jim Webb or Francis Scott Keith. Lord Son by Glenn Campbell, Tom Jones, Johnny Cass, Engle Bird Company on the ramp earth. The revolution will not be televised. The revolution will not be right back after a message about a white tornado, white lightning or white people. You will not have to worry about a jump in your bedroom, the tiger in your tank, or the giant in your toilet bowl. The revolution will not go better with gold. The revolution will not fight jerks if they cause bad rep. The revolution will put you in the driver's seat. The revolution will not be televised, will not be televised, will not be televised, will not be televised. The revolution will be no rerun, brothers. The revolution will be live.
SPEAKER_03Music was by Johnny Rose. This has been a Go Bion production.