Frontlines: Anti War

Rory Gallagher (The Revs):
"Obviously we’re not the most politically lyrical band in the whole world but over the past couple of years we’ve really been getting into the whole thing. We wrote the last album around the time of the invasion of Iraq.
Now we feel that there’s a mood on the streets where people don’t believe the bullshit anymore and it’s relating back to people like ourselves. You can’t help but notice there’s a general feeling about the place. People are starting to see behind the façade of the media. We’ve always been anti-capitalist on the music side anyway. I saw a guy called Rory Hearne from the Globalise Resistance group on Primetime and he’s the same age as myself and he was wearing a Radiohead t-shirt, so he grabbed my interest straight away. I met up with him a couple of times and had some very interesting conversations. Then we did a gig a couple of weeks ago in Dublin were we’d sing a couple of songs, then there’d be a speaker, then we’d do a couple more songs and so on. It worked really well. It was quite an eye opener for us and I’m sure it was for some of our younger fans who were there. Politics isn’t just for old men in suits."

Katell Keineg:
"Gigs like this won’t change George Bush’s mind about anything but they let people know that we’re registering dissent at the situation. Do people care what musicians think? I don’t know. There is a lot of fear about saying anything, especially in Ireland because there are such strong links with the US and no-one wants to upset them."