If you have attended a left political event around Sydney in the last eight years, you almost certainly have heard PETER HICKS singing his and GEOFF FRANCIS' songs about Bougainville, East Timor, Sydney's airport noise, plus working-class songs which go down just fine on the picket lines or at a political event.
Geoff writes the songs and Peter performs them. Peter also plays in a band, The Born Again Pagans, which has regular gigs around the inner city. Both Peter and Geoff are well known around the folk movement and play and attend the folk festivals. Their song "One More Day Than Them", about holding out on the picket line, is now included in the Wobbly Songbook, a US production in the tradition of Joe Hill. JILL HICKSON interviewed them for Green Left Weekly.
Geoff: I've always, as long as I remember, been interested in both politics and music, but as separate interests. Growing up in the '60s, I came across people like Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan, and they had an effect on me. I was drawn to that strand of music.
I started writing when I got to know Peter. I have never been a musician, whereas he is, and it was getting together and talking to him that it started to happen. We both believe that music is a very important form of expression of people's struggles and political movements.
Peter: I spent my youth in various bands, with dreams of rock 'n' roll stardom. My main interest was in the R&B and bluesier edge material, as well as the folk rock styles of Led Zeppelin. I started working as a teacher after uni and gave up my "dreams" quite sensibly. I would have made a lousy rock and roll star.
I met and began to correspond with Geoff throughout the early '80s and began a friendship which blossomed into love during the mid-'80s. Part of the affair was Geoff's introducing me to the power of the folk and rock music which influenced his youth and politics: the powerful acoustic messages of Dylan and Peter Paul and Mary, as well as the rockier full-on style of Tom Robinson singing passionately about gay love and his hatred of Tory England.
Geoff: Why write political music? It's important to write about events like the struggle in East Timor because — and this might sound pretentious but it really isn't — because all folk music becomes part of our people's history because it comes from the people. It's important to record the struggles and the movements that are going on. And it has to be a living tradition if it's anything.
I believe that it's helping to meet two needs. One is the need of the people in the movement. Activists in the movement like to be uplifted, to have rousing, supportive songs. Some of them, for example "Hold That Line" or "One More Day Than Them", are not what you would say are brilliantly artistically sculptured songs. But they don't need to be. They're not written to win some bloody art competition; they were written to give people inspiration and encouragement to keep going.
The other need is to get the message across to people who aren't in the movement. So you're trying to give encouragement and support to people who are in the movement as well as spread the word wider and involve more people.
Peter: The songs that speak loudest to me are songs that tell of working life and hardships that people go through — only to find the strength to go on and show the triumph of the human spirit. Sometimes these songs are not the most joyful — I love Springsteen's Nebraska songs and anything that has got that Woody Guthrie touch.
I've never been totally committed to just an acoustic style, though I think that in terms of trying to get a message out the most powerful way is always through the human heart speaking simply through the lone voice and strings. Since being introduced to that style of song, I have mainly tended to "like" songs that have strong lyrics and reach out to say something about the human condition. I love great lyrics about love and sing songs that speak of the need for it, but as part of a package, not as the sole statement.
Geoff and I have also been known to do comedy songs; I have quite a few of them in my repertoire. They are not my favourite songs, and I wouldn't like particularly to be remembered for them, but in a concert you have to leaven the load of a song about tragedy in East Timor or hardship on a strike. I have to admit it's fun, and the audiences can deal with your more serious songs a little easier that way. All the best song writers like Joe Hill had a little bit of humour or an edge that kept them popular.
Geoff: It's difficult to get political music played on the mainstream channels, and fewer people are writing it — because if you can't get it played, what's the point? It's not being played because the capitalists' monopoly stranglehold on the media is getting far far worse. Commercialised music with no content is undoubtedly the role big business, big capitalism, plays in the music world.
Independence in the media is being more and more squeezed out as it is networked. Every media outlet in Australia is owned by Kerry Packer or Rupert Murdoch or someone like them. Capitalism gives the impression of a diversity where you have 20 or 30 radio stations to choose from in Sydney, but in reality you don't have any choice. They have to create this market for music that doesn't challenge people's ideas, doesn't make people think, basically anaesthetises them.
Stations like JJJ are important. JJJ is not my particular taste in music very often, but they give expression to bands and particularly young bands that would never ever get a chance to play on Mix FM or 2WS.
Peter: Why am I a socialist? Why do we write socialist songs? Big question. As Jim Percy once said, "Comrades, there is no other game in town". As a youth I became aware of the inequities of society — and began to question why some people have such enormous wealth and some people die of starvation. Not to mention the condition of Murri and Koori people in our own country. It has never made much sense to me and it never will. As I get older, I think I just get angrier about injustice rather than cynical.
Capitalism is based on greed — not an emotion that is natural to the human condition, but one which we can easily drift into when social conditions are oriented around it. No species has ever survived when it is based on greed. When the carnivores eat too much, they wreck the gene pool of their prey and wind up dying out as well. Capitalism is wrecking our environment, and no amount of patching it up with science is going to stop this.
I think the answer is people working collectively together in solidarity because only through collective working can we achieve a better world. Singing about it seems only natural.