I LOVE THE ROUNDHOUSE 

We were just getting over having the coldest winter since whenever (and our New Years eve hangover), when on the 13 January, the TV news and the newspaper front covers were screaming at us about a massive earthquake in a place called Haiti. The headline writers were trying to out do each other as to how many 100,000s had been killed. And which one of them could come up with the most graphic of photographs. But that kind of stuff is only front-page news for a few days at best. The run of headline stories always ends with a heart-warming story of a baby being pulled out alive after spending X days under tons of rubble. And that is it, all over and done with, as if it was a stoppage time winning goal for both teams and we can all go away happy and sleep soundly. 

But the story does not end there, well not for the families of however many 100,000s of people who died. 

If I had been asked six months ago, what I knew about Haiti, I might have vaguely known it was in the Caribbean.  And wasn’t it the home of voodoo, where zombies came from? And didn’t they have one of those real bad dictators – Papa Doc or something? But then I got asked, by a thing called the Ghetto Biennale, to go to Haiti and lead a performance by The17. Now is not the time or place to go into all the hows and whys of what The17 are. It is enough for you to know that The17 are a choir and this choir can be made of any bunch of people anywhere, and if you want to hear The17 you have to be part of it.

So I accepted this invitation and the week before Christmas, myself and colleague John Hirst, were working in a school in down town Port-au-Prince – the capital of Haiti. This school was in the poorest area of the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. The school had next to nothing. This did not hold back their openness, creativity and enthusiasm when performing as The17. They were smart, intelligent and had a thirst to learn. And we learnt from them. This performance we were doing with them was twinned with a performance we had done in Kingswood School in Corby a couple of months earlier. The kids in Port-au-Prince wanted to know all about the teenagers in the UK. The girls wanted to know how the girls over here did their hair, the boys wanted to know about the football, they all wanted to know about what sort of music our teenagers were into. On the last day, fellow Ghetto Biennale artist, Tracey Moberly joined us at the school to take photos of what was going on. 

For the first few days after the news of the earthquake broke I was numb, unable to know what I should do or think. I turned down all requests for interviews. All I did was stare at the photos on my screen that Tracey Moberly had taken. They seemed far more powerful than the usual horror and disaster photos that the media were using to shock us with. When I was asked to be a patron of a fundraiser media led event, my immediate reaction was to turn it down. I have always loathed the idea of the Sir Bob or Saint Bono thing. But as we began to get news of who had been killed and who had lived from the people we had got to know in Port-au-Prince, I felt I owed it to those smiling faces on my screen to do something. John Hirst and I put into motion a long-term relationship between Kingswood School and the school in Port-au-Prince, something that would last longer than the immediate needs. A week after the earthquake I had a meeting with these Fundraiser @ The Roundhouse people, went through what the money they would raise would go to. Did research into what their charities of choice, Action Aid and Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), were doing. I committed myself, went to a café and wrote this. 

And this is the bit that I am going to hate doing the most: Buy your ticket, come to the Roundhouse, listen to what people have to say, go wild, think, laugh, think some more and then go wilder – it will be worth it for far more reasons than I could ever know.  

And as to why I’ve called this piece I Love The Roundhouse, it is because I have been to some of the best gigs in my life there. 

Post Script: And for those of you that might be thinking – ‘isn’t that Bill Drummond one of those blokes that…’ I promise not to bring a box of matches. 

Bill Drummond

21 January 2010