A band who were denied a prestigious Radio 3 World Music Award because of their anti-war views, stormed the stage to launch a naked protest at The Ocean in London last night.
Two members and one supporter of the radical British folk-band Seize The Day, stripped off and climbed onto the stage as applause for the final act of the night ended. Their bodies were hidden at first with signs reading "BBC Cover-Up", before they went "the full Monty", to excited cheers from the 1000 strong audience. The slogan "Peace Not War" was written across their chests.
Seize The Day polled the most on-line votes in the Radio 3 "Audience Awards" category, but were disqualified without warning after Radio 3 Executives realised they might express their anti-war believes in song at the ceremony.
Singer Theo Simon, who was one of the three naked protesters, said:
"When I arrived at the Ocean Venue I was ordered at the door to remove my anti-war badge, which said "Not In My Name". This confirmed our view that Radio 3 were trying to silence public opposition to the war in Iraq."
The band hastily improvised their protest, and waited until the Senegalese band Orchestra Baobab had finished their encore, before springing their surprise revenge on the unsuspecting organisers. Earlier they watched as Slovenian band Terra Folk received the Audience Award.
Band member Rich Whistance said, "We didn't want to rob Terra Folk of their moment of glory - which they deserved as much as anyone - but we did want to publicly show the Radio 3 organisers up for their cowardice and dishonesty."
Seize The Day are no strangers to taking direct action against corporations - one of their earliest actions was a naked roof-top protest against " The Genetix Cover-Up" by Monsanto in 1997, and band members have previously been arrested for obstructing road-builders and pulling up GM crops.
However this is the first time they have protested on their own behalf.
"We just felt that a real injustice had been done to the band and the thousands who voted for us," said singer Shannon. "If BBC Radio 3 want to promote World Music, they shouldn't be afraid of songs which express the growing global movement for world peace and justice."
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Many of you may be wondering what happened to Seize the Day in the Radio 3 World Music Audience Awards 2003……indeed we are still trying to make sense of it ourselves. The first we knew of the award was an email from Paul Mobbs telling us that he had entered us for it after being encouraged to do so by a Radio 3 producer at a party.
To be honest our first reaction was 'world music?' … 'we're not world music'…….in the conversations that followed, ironically as it later turned out, someone pointed out that Ian Anderson…..Editor of Folk Roots and sponsor of the award…..had expressed his delight at the inclusion of Eliza Carthy in this particular category….because, finally 'English Folk Music was being acknowledged as World Music.'(Lucky for her she's better known than we are and ever so slightly less political or she might have felt the lash of his keypad as well.)
I'm getting ahead of myself…….So, after we found out we'd been nominated, the lure of 'AN AWARD' began to work it's magic. Maybe we could get through to the next round…..wouldn't that be exciting……perhaps it would help the band reach wider audiences…..our imaginations didn't run riot, but it was fun.
There were 80 bands in the category…we were there with Youssou N'dor….a personal favourite, Eliza Carthy, Praying for the Rain (a band that I love) and many other bands we liked and admired. To be honest l didn't think we stood a chance….we emailed our email list and left it at that. We didn't make any great effort to contact our fan-base.
Even then some of the support we were getting was really uplifting……there are ways that music is shared and thoughts and feelings communicated that are what you could call 'the old way'. The tradition of folk that spreads song by word of mouth…..putting the cause first, often above the need to make a living, has lead in this case to a strong, motivated supportive network.
Seize the Day have been together for seven years this month…..our first ever performance was to try and lift the spirits of people being evicted from the beautiful oak woods of Snelsmore common….on the route of the Newbury Bypass. We have played extensively on three continents….our music has been played in all five. As activists we have appeared on the front pages of almost every newspaper in this country….appeared on almost every news programme and been interviewed on Newsnight and Everywoman for the World Service. We have never used our political work to publicise our music, but what we stand for…..this, genuinely and regularly has earned us enormous respect amongst the people who found us first and the ones who are, every day, being introduced to our music.
How do we know this? Well to be honest it's the only explanation for why we won the award.
The explanations given by Radio 3 for why we were "clearly ahead"(Stephen Wittle head of Editorial Policy for Radio 3 speaking on the Radio 4 programme, Feedback.) do not really do justice either to peoples intelligence …..or to how hard it was to vote via online.
So now we're getting to the crux of the matter…..we found out not because Radio 3 communicated their concerns to us…..or told us they were disqualifying us…..we found out because a friend emailed us and said he couldn't vote….. ' Seize the Day didn't seem to be on the list'. We immediately checked the Radio 3 website to find, 'Radio 3 regrets Seize the Day have been removed from the poll due to voting irregularities.'
We tried every phone number we had for Radio 3 that night….we found out nothing…..as you can imagine it was hard to find a good light to put the phrase 'voting irregularities' in.
We all felt we had been accused of cheating. We were at a loss to see how anyone could have cheated…..and if they knew someone had voted more than once then obviously that vote could be discounted…..there was no possible explanation. The next day Theo and Louise went to London, we felt that if this wasn't just an inexplicable computer error then Radio 3 might appreciate the opportunity to change their minds!
I spent the morning trying all the numbers for the team involved with the award…..voicemail, voicemail, voicemail! Eventually after two hours of trying l received a call from Alex Webb, the poor bastard given the job of telling us that we had been disqualified. Not for voting irregularities at all as it turns out…..(it took us three days to get them to change it on the website)…..but for 'soliciting votes from anti war mailing lists.'
I told Alex that we are a political band and that we appear on the Peace Not War album, I also said that the band had played on the mainstage at Glastonbury Festival for C.N.D. AND that we had spent the Christmas of 2001 with the I.S.M. in Palestine. I wanted him to be clear about our genuine credentials when it comes to people on anti war mailing lists wishing to vote for us, however we might have ended up there. He said you had a link from the Stop the War website directly to the Radio 3 website. I said we didn't. The link was to Seize the Day's website where one of our songs was streamed ……he said it was unfair to the other bands…..I said that that was patronising, not only to the quality of their music and support but to the intelligence of the people voting for us. He said he was unconvinced by my arguments and that the BBC weren't about to change their minds.
I expect I cried at some point around then…..the familiar feeling of injustice and this time directed at Seize the Day ….. what were we going to do about it?
Well that's something we're still mulling over……we won the award but in some ways we are in a worse position than we were before…..we have been publicly labelled cheats and the word 'soliciting' doesn't leave much to the imagination (We were accused of soliciting votes!)…..I don't expect that will make it easier for our management team to get us gigs. The Editor of Folk Roots has taken a personal and offensive dislike to us… so……what does a radical campaigning band do in the face of obvious injustice?
First regroup…..have a good look at how fabulous our support has been….notice that we got 'thousands' of votes…..be grateful for the passion that inspired so many to write to Radio 3 and also to Radio 4 Feedback and the fact that the very anti-war message that Radio 3 admitted to the Guardian they didn't want made at their award ceremony was made a little on that programme……and then what?…..Well we have to weigh up the relative importance of this injustice versus all the other things we could be doing with our time.
It's not an easy decision to make…..the integrity of the band and our supporters has been attacked, and the validity of the position of being a political folk band in its own right has been challenged. Time will tell….
It remains for me to say thank you to all of you who voted for us and to apologise on Radio 3's behalf for not acknowledging that people who care about the world are also capable of discerning musical taste.
Much love Shannon xx March 2003
This is the story of how Seize The Day were nominated for a BBC Award, told not to appear at the Award ceremony, disqualified even though we got the most votes, and then publicly labelled as cheats whose support was "political" rather than "musical". It's also the story of how several thousand BBC "stakeholders" were given a lesson in the Bush/Blair/Corporate model of democracy.
In January 2003, Seize The Day were nominated in Britain for the BBC Radio 3 World Music Audience Award. There were many categories, but this was the only one where listeners got to decide which band they thought deserved recognition.
Voting was in 2 stages. The first was to see which of the 80 nominated bands got enough nominations to get to the top 4. We have never chased any awards, but we did tell some people on our mail-list that they could nominate us. To our surprise we did really well, and on 23rd of January R3 told us we were through to the second stage, along with 3 other great bands - Te Vaka (New Zealand), Oi Va Voi (UK) and Terra Folk (Slovenia).
Radio 3 rang to congratulate us on "mobilising your fan-base", requested songs to play on their web-site, and interviewed us for a brief write-up. We gave them 5 tracks, including our song about The War Against Terror called "united states". We made no secret about our radical content and activities. They told us that if we won the most votes in the 2nd round, we would perform at the Awards Ceremony and be played on Radio 3. We knew that such mainstream recognition would open the way to some of the bigger festival stages, bigger audiences, radio airplay, and possible CD distribution offers, so we decided to try and mobilise our "fan-base".
5 days later, on the 28th January, we sent emails out to everyone on our lists. To vote, you had to go to the R3 website and register online, so we gave out the web address. We know how many email requests people get these days, so we actively promoted the benefits of Seize The Day winning the award to our supporters, with the line:
"If we win the award, it will show just how huge the movement for change has become"
- We knew that the online voting process was not completely straightforward, and also involved registering private information, so we wanted to remind people why our success was important to them . As it happened, the response was so big we probably didn't need to!
According to the BBC, this was when they first began to question our behaviour.
"…concerns over Seize The Day came to light shortly after the group was shortlisted for the Radio 3 Audience Award on 23 January, when others in the World Music community brought to our attention emails being sent on behalf of the group - for example one sent to the 'Peace Not War' mailing list around 1 February which asked recipients to view voting as a political gesture. "If they win the award, it will show just how huge the movement for change has become," it said."
This raises the obvious question - why didn't R3 talk to us about these "concerns" when they first "came to light" ? They were talking to us about other things - requesting songs and video for promotional trailers etc - so they could easily have discussed these "concerns" with us back then.
We suspect that the truth is slightly different - that those "in the World Music community" who brought one email (dated 1st February) to their attention, were actually the people at Folk Roots magazine, who were co-sponsoring the Awards. FRoots also supports the anti-war movement, and is on a "Peace Not War" mailing list - the same one on which our email apparently appeared, after being forwarded by someone else. Unfortunately, FRoots do not support us. They don't review our CDs, and the editor once told a freelance journalist that they "don't like" Seize The Day. The World Music Award is their baby, and they didn't consider us to be either good enough, or "World" enough, to be there. This is what they wrote 2 weeks later:
"On-line technology also made it possible for some opportunists to make a laughing stock of the Audience Award category in the BBC Radio 3 Awards For World Music. Several of the shortlisted acts - they'll be the ones world music fans had never heard of before - got there by aggressively emailing everybody under the sun touting for on-line votes. It must be impossible for anybody at the BBC to identify who's a genuine fan and who's the second cousin of the singer's plumber who's never actually heard the band. Anyway, it's like cheating in sport…"
Sadly, we don't doubt that the FRoots editor genuinely believes this horrible stuff, which among other things suggests that there isn't room in his world for world musicians you haven't read about in FRoots. Neither he, nor the bemused Radio 3 staff he was advising, will have understood how much respect and support - what they call a "fan-base" - Seize The Day has built up over the past 7 years, singing on the frontline from Newbury tree-camps to the Liverpool Dock Gates, from benefit gigs to GM protests, Folk Festivals, Green Festivals and Community Halls across Britain, America and India. That's who we are. And if the Radio 3 "world music community" didn't want us, maybe they should have told us at the beginning, rather than branding us cheats and opportunists at the end!
It's particularly unpleasant to be labelled a cheat when no one ever told you what the rules were. At this stage of the Polls we had no idea that what we did to alert our "fan-base" would end up being described in a BBC press statement as "unfair":
"…use of political and non-musical email lists… is nothing to do with the intentions of the Audience Award and unfair on the other groups, who are relying solely on votes from their musical fan base."
If the BBC want online participation, they should understand how the web works. Our email asking for support from people who had heard and liked our songs - which included all the networks we have played for over the years - was naturally forwarded to other connected email lists. One of these was a "Peace Not War" list, organised around the Peace Not War CD, on which our song "united states" was released in December. It's not unreasonable to think that people involved with that CD would want to know that we had been nominated for an award, and that the song was being played on the R3 web-site.
But that's not how the BBC now claim to see it. To them this was us "soliciting votes" from "substantial anti-war lists" - "Hello dearie, fancy a quick vote round the back? - I'll make it worth your while…" - It doesn't seem conceivable to them that the reason our votes "increased rapidly from this date" was that many people who knew who we were and liked our songs were hearing about the awards and voting for us! Since our fan-base includes many networks of political activists, the BBC concludes that the votes must be for our politics, not our musical skill in expressing them.
If BBC Radio 3 staff were coming under pressure as early as the start of February, they didn't tell Seize The Day, presumably because as yet they could find no plausible grounds for excluding us. It was now however that they found themselves under a different and much more sinister kind of pressure. As the word spread through our "fan-base", not only in Britain but Europe and America too, audience votes for us steadily increased, and so, presumably, did the panic at R3. They began to realise that we were a bigger, and, from the point of view of the Corporation, a more dangerous phenomena than they had guessed. After our eventual disqualification, a BBC spokesperson told Guardian On-line journalist Matt Wells that Radio 3 had feared we
"…intended to use the acceptance speech to promote an anti-war message."
- This explains the mystery of the vanishing Award ceremony. On Friday 31st Jan we were told by phone that someone would shortly be in touch with each of the short-listed bands about the details of their possible performance at the Award ceremony. Then, on 5th Feb, we received the following mail from the event organiser:
"I am producing the Poll Winners Concert on Monday 24th March, and I thought we should let you know now that because of the number of other artists that are already committed to be taking part, it may not be possible to invite the winner of the Audience Award to play live."
This was astonishing news! Last years Award had been a very high-profile event for winners Afro-Celt, and now the BBC had forgotten to leave a space for whoever won this year! It hardly seemed credible. Then, having said it may not be possible, this guy tries to make sure it will definitely not be possible:
"I wanted to let you know this now so that you don't hold members of the group unnecessarily for that date."
Only later, with the publication of Matt Wells' article, were our worst suspicions confirmed - that this was a precautionary move to prevent us, if we won, from singing anti-war songs at the Award event. Radio 3 staff told the reporter they "believed the band would use its acceptance speech at the award ceremony next month to promote an anti-war message. Bosses called in the BBC's editorial policy unit, and a decision was taken to disqualify the band."
But they still needed good cover for the decision they had already taken, and unfortunately for us, we gave it to them on the 9th Feb, when we managed to get a link from the "Stop The War Coalition" web-site to our "united states" song page, where there was a further link to Radio 3's voting page. The wording at "Stop War" was:
VOTE FOR STOP WAR SONG
Anti-War band "Seize The Day!"
nominated for Radio 3 Award,
Register and Vote online, by 13th Feb.
It suits the BBC to say that this link went directly to their voting page - a lie they have persisted in regardless of our repeated protests. Answering one person's query on 18th Feb, Radio 3 Controller Roger Wright wrote:
"The group also benefited from a politically-oriented notice on Stop The War's www.stopwar.org.uk , on which a front page click-through to the Radio 3 website said, "Vote for anti-war song up for R3 Audience Award [by 13 Feb]".
But I had already corrected this error in mail to Roger Wright on Feb 17th:
"On 9th of Feb a link was placed on the Stop War site promoting the Radio 3 Awards. We assumed that some of the people visiting that site would have heard our songs, and would want the opportunity to express their appreciation… the "Stop War" link took people not to R3, but to OUR site, where they had a chance to listen to "united states", read the lyrics, and follow another link to Radio 3."
This is important, because we clearly gave anyone following the link who had not already heard of us a chance to find out about our music before voting. It's also worth saying again that the R3 online voting procedure failed to function for many visitors, and also required registration - it wasn't just a question of mindlessly clicking a button because you were anti-war.
Although the R3 Controller talks about "the encouraging and receiving of votes from other non-related sites" without naming these other sites, Stop The War was the only site we ever invited to link to us promoting the Radio 3 Awards. The day after our "disqualification" we told R3 that we would accept it if they discounted every vote that came to us via that site, but curiously they rejected our offer, even though, thanks to our web-counter, we could give them the precise number of visitors using our Stop War link.
This was a very generous concession by us, as we have no reason to accept R3s' claim that these were "political" not "musical" votes. Very few people would bother to vote for a band they didn't know or like, or pass through our site to R3 without checking out our music first. Would you?
It's even possible that some people changed their minds once they got to R3 and voted for another band. This kind of vote-switching certainly happened the other way, to our benefit, when one person went to vote for Terra Folk, heard "united states", and voted for us instead! Incidentally, it's worth noting that other bands in the final 4 have also had web-links promoting their place in the Awards, with one cultural site saying that "if you all vote" it might help bring that particular genre of music "to a wider audience", and another saying that a vote could get the band "on television".
Radio 3 don't really object to bands using their entry in the awards for self-promotion, since it all helps to raise the station's own profile and increase their audience. What they objected to was our radical music - and the massive sub-culture it represents - finally getting through to the mainstream, at a time of both unprecedented anti-war feeling, and high-level BBC efforts to censor it.
The BBCs concentration on the web-link and email issues completely ignores the other major sources of Seize The Day votes - sources they would have been aware of if they'd bothered to ask us.
Some additional votes will have come via our regular web-site visitors - 71,432 in January - mainly via search-engines. But there were two other significant reasons for a surge in votes in the final week. The first was the arrival of our band mail-outs in 1000 UK letter-boxes. These were to people on our land-mail list. They advertised the award, and also gave the R3 voting-line number, which we had only just discovered and now included for all the folk who didn't have PCs, or couldn't make the online system work.
The second reason was reports of the Award Poll in our local and regional press, reaching thousands of people. We had favourable coverage in every publication from the East Pennard Parish Magazine to the Western Gazette, which covers the whole of Somerset. These articles also positively emphasised the band's anti-war message, and this will have helped to motivate our local fan-base.
Many people approached us in the street to tell us proudly that they had voted for us. Within 4 days, the Radio 3 website was announcing that we were "no longer eligible" for votes because of "voting irregularities" - a term which sounds very objective and official, but hides the fact that Radio 3 made no serious investigation of where our support was coming from before unceremoniously giving us the boot, on the grounds that
"It was clear from the voting process that the votes for Seize the Day were motivated and organised for political reasons."
It isn't R3's place to decide which votes were based on musical judgement and which on political. In the particular aesthetic we work with, such a distinction is virtually meaningless. Obviously at a time of heightened protest a good protest band will increase it's support. But it is extremely insulting to our listeners to suggest that they are acting without musical judgement, and voting as if they were sheepishly following instructions from a political party.
"There is no question in our minds that Seize The Day did warrant disqualification and that "voting irregularities" is an appropriate, indeed neutral term to describe what happened. We do not believe that an appeal in these circumstances could be justified."
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