The Protester – the ideas behind the album – part 1

So we’ve been asked a lot about the second album recently and what’s it’s going to be like, what it’s about etc. So I thought i’d write a bit about the ideas that helped create the songs.

We’d been starting to sketch out ideas for a while and were conscious that we didn’t want this album to be just a collection of songs like the first album. We wanted there to be a theme, something joining everything together as one body of work. We’d started piecing some songs together but hadn’t found the story…

It was early 2012 and I was reading some magazines when a copy of Time magazine caught my eye. The front cover had the words ‘Person of The Year’ and ‘The Protester’ emblazoned on it. I picked it up and read the article which went into great detail about the Arab spring uprising and the world wide level of protesting that had started in early 2011 and carried on (and are still carrying on now in places like Brazil as well as the Arab countries). The slogans ‘we are the 99%’ started appearing in 2011 and the Occupy events began in New York, California, London and even Tokyo. And protests were happening worldwide with Spain, Greece, Russia, Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Syria and other countries.

The opening of the article said – History often emerges only in retrospect. Events become significant only when looked back on…Protests have now occurred in countires whose populations total at least 3 billion people, and the word protest has appeared in newspapers and online exponentially more this past year than at any other time in history. Is there a global tipping point for this frustration? Everywhere it seems, people said they’d had enough. They dissented, they demanded; they did not dispair, even when the answers came back in a cloud of tear gas or a hail of bullets. They literally embodied the idea that individual action can bring collective colossal change.

This got me thinking. We are living in the midst of something massive. The music we create should reflect that story. The first ideas for The Protester were being sown…