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Jail Guitar Doors
Just back from a showing of the remarkable "Breaking Rocks" a documentary about the Jail Guitar Doors project, which is providing guitars to jails throughout the country for inmates to learn on. It's an idea of amazing simplicity, named after a Clash song as a tribute to Joe Strummer. The documentary lays it out straight. There's no partisan talk of why the prison population is so high, about whether prison works. The nearest it comes to that is a short clip of Mark Thomas saying that, whatever you think of prisoners, one day they will get out of jail, and that they will come and live next to you. So it's in your selfish self-interest to try to help them rehabilitate.
Go check out the web-site, it says it all better than I can.
The highlight of the night for me was after the film, though, when two of the "graduates" of the scheme played short sets, and then The Big Nosed Bard of Barking himself played three songs, "Redemption Song", "April First" (which he wrote with inmates in Liverpool) and, to my extreme happiness, "I Keep Faith". That song came out a couple of years ago, and it's become my favourite Bragg track. Tonight we were in the front row of the GFT, in the centre seats, and I was about six feet from Mr B. I tell you, there wasn't a dry eye in the row...
Go check out the web-site, it says it all better than I can.
The highlight of the night for me was after the film, though, when two of the "graduates" of the scheme played short sets, and then The Big Nosed Bard of Barking himself played three songs, "Redemption Song", "April First" (which he wrote with inmates in Liverpool) and, to my extreme happiness, "I Keep Faith". That song came out a couple of years ago, and it's become my favourite Bragg track. Tonight we were in the front row of the GFT, in the centre seats, and I was about six feet from Mr B. I tell you, there wasn't a dry eye in the row...