Instant Karma's going to get you

"The catastrophe began for the people of Darfur in 2003, when the Sudanese government enlisted Janjaweed militias to carry out the dirty work in its scorched earth campaign to crush rebel activity in Darfur. The conflict is fundamentally about resources, especially the increasingly scarce land that farmers and nomads must share. The conflict spilled over into neighbouring Chad in 2006. And so the nightmare multiplies.”

The sleevenotes say it all.
Instant Karma – The Amnesty Campaign To Save Darfur, features acts such as U2, REM, Aerosmith, Black Eyed Peas, The Cure, Christina Aguilera and Green Day, all covering classic John Lennon songs in order to raise funds to alleviate the forced migration and genocide in Darfur and the southern Sudan. But the decision to focus on Darfur, according to Art For Amnesty Executive Director Bill Shipsey, was primarily artist-driven.
“It started as a way of using musicians to engage 16 to 26-year-olds in the work of Amnesty International,” he says. “But more and more as we approached artists, they wanted to get behind a particular human rights cause, and the one that kept coming up was Darfur. So the choice of linking Instant Karma to the campaign to save Darfur came about because artists like REM, Green Day, U2, and also younger acts like Snow Patrol, said, ‘We want to get behind what is the biggest human rights atrocity in the world at the moment, which is the genocide that’s going on in Darfur.’
“We’ve used the Snow Patrol version of ‘Isolation’, a beautiful version of a harrowing song, as the backdrop for some recent footage we have from Darfur. But once there was an issue to focus around, it was phenomenal. We have over 60 tracks now. The real problem with our project was who to leave off the CD. We solved it to an extent by having a double album, a different CD for the US and Europe, and an extra 10 tracks on iTunes, and also by doing a deal whereby if you buy it with an American Express card in the US you get Paddy Casey, a South African band called Freshly Ground, Maroon 5 and a couple of others.”
Amnesty International’s alliance with artists like U2, Sting and Peter Gabriel was synonymous with the revival of rock ‘n’ roll’s social conscence in the 1980s. The Secret Policeman’s Ball benefit shows, which united the Monty Python crew with prominent pop stars, provided a precedent in 1979, but the 1986 Conspiracy Of Hope tour was a landmark event which doubled Amnesty’s membership in six weeks and also occasioned the symbolic handing over of the stadium torch from The Police to U2.
It was followed two years later by a mammoth world tour featuring Bruce Springsteen, Sting and Peter Gabriel. Amnesty’s involvement in the arts was less conspicuous in the 90s, apart from a concert commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Paris, but the Darfur crisis heralded a new urgency and renewed commitment on the part of musicians.
“We didn’t so much lose the plot as lose contact with a lot of artists,” Shipsey explains. “Then, four years ago, Gabriel Byrne saw either his niece or nephew singing ‘Imagine’ in a school in New York and thought it’d be great for Amnesty to use in a human rights education campaign. He went to Yoko Ono, who liked the idea. We went to Northern Ireland, Croatia, Thailand, South Africa and LA and made this beautiful children’s video, singing ‘Imagine’. Yoko liked it so much she said, ‘Would you like the Lennon songbook?’ She’d never done it for anyone before. And for the last three years we’ve been putting this project together.”
Once permission to record the songs was cleared and the talent was secured, the next step was to arrange distribution.
“Warners came on board in February of this year and have been really terrific partners, because Amnesty is not in the business of distribution,” Bill explains. “We do human rights, we’re good at recruiting artists, but we needed a major label. And Warners have worked extra hours, they’re really getting behind the project. And then another thing fell in our favour: up until February we couldn’t enter into any talks or discussions because of the ongoing row between the Beatles and Apple, but since that was settled, iTunes have given us central billing over the last month on all their sites around the world. They wanted to do a particularly good deal for Amnesty, there’s very little being taken by iTunes in this project.”
Surveying the diversity of the acts involved, one wonders about the protocol for cherry-picking the Lennon catalogue.
“There was none really,” Bill says. “Obviously we didn’t want six million versions of ‘Imagine’, although we ended up with five or six, three or four of ‘Instant Karma’, two of ‘Number 9 Dream’, but the bands chose the songs themselves. But as we added acts we told them, ‘This is what’s taken.’ So I think what generally happened with the smaller bands, they had a better chance of getting on the album if they didn’t cover ‘Instant Karma’, which U2 had done. There was also the issue of what suited their style. One in particular that people keep mentioning to me, and it’s my personal favourite, is Regina Spektor’s beautiful version of ‘Real Love’. But what’s good about it is there is both what you might call reverential versions of Lennon songs and those who really took a different take on it.”
For this writer, the standout is Christina Aguilera’s version of Lennon’s rawest song ‘Mother’, accurately described by Bill as “spine-tingling”. But while the listener can play all kinds of hypothetical parlour games with the track listing, one wonders why, for instance, Oasis didn’t weigh in?
“We didn’t do well in terms of getting English artists on board,” Bill admits. “We got The Cure and Corinne Bailey Rae, but unfortunately the Coldplays and Radioheads weren’t available to us this time for various reasons, which was a bit of a pity, and it’s also reflected in sales. The only disappointing market we have is the UK. The Irish market is, per capita, beating everyone hands down. And Warners tell us that they’ve sold more digital albums with this than they’ve ever sold digitally for any album before. That’s probably a sign of the growing presence of iTunes, so we’re on a rising tide.”
Fortuitously, the Irish launch of the record also coincided with REM’s arrival in Dublin for a string of Olympia gigs.
“I got a shout-out on stage last night,” Bill laughs. “Watching the show, it’s such a luxury, it’s like being in their living room. It was just magic last night. Mr. Stipe thanked us for our involvement with the Instant Karma campaign. They were our first single release (with ‘Number 9 Dream’), they released it on the day they were inducted in the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame back in March. They’ve been great, Bertis Downs their manager has basically said, ‘Anything we can do, we’ll do it.’
“But the great pride that I have in this project is that it’s so Irish driven. Art For Amnesty is based here, but it’s great that Ireland is punching above its weight musically in this, and we had the global launch here in the Hard Rock Café, Green Day have done the signature t-shirt with the Hard Rock, and all the benefits come to Amnesty.”
Indeed, Green Day’s faithful but muscular version of ‘Working Class Hero’ serves as a benchmark of how the Californians have evolved from upstart punksters to heavyweight agit-rock band.
“They went on American Idol,” Bill says, “and when they recorded it there was a huge stand-off with the organisers over the use of the f-word. They asked Green Day not to do it, because under FCC regulations you can be fined hugely, and Green Day just wouldn’t play ball with them, they said, ‘It’s in the lyric,’ and went ahead and did it.”
Shipsey acknowledges that music can provide a crucial means of changing Western impressions of Africa as an ever-worsening vortex of political and economic instabilities. As Martin Scorsese’s documentary film Feels Like Going Home illustrated in 2003, West Africa is the cradle of Delta blues, and by extension, rock ‘n’ roll. Other indicators of the growing impact of African music include the annual celebration of Tuareg music at the Festival In The Desert in Essakane, Mali, not to mention U2’s recent sojourn to Fez.
“Another Art For Amnesty project we’re working on at the moment is called The Root,” Bill reveals, “and it traces the history of rock music to West Africa. If there’s one single artist that helped most on this album it was Edge, in terms of writing letters. I hope he won’t mind me quoting, but he said he’ll do everything he can for me and Amnesty short of getting kicked out of the band. And it was decent of him at a time when he was a little bit conflicted by being so involved in the New Orleans Music Rising project, but he still found time for us on this.
“In fact, part of the – for want of a better word – schmoozing of Yoko Ono was done when she came over in ’04, he introduced her at the Irish Museum of Modern Art and wrote a fabulous poem to John and Yoko which he delivered on the night. The story came back from some wag in the audience that Yoko was trying to persuade him to leave U2 – which you’d only hear in Dublin!”
If rock ‘n’ roll’s core impulses can be often described as narcissistic, self-obsessed and self-destructive, then Bill Shipsey sees Art For Amnesty as a way of harnessing its energy as a humanitarian force.
“In a way that’s true, rock ‘n’ roll is all those things,” he says, “but what’s at the core of Amnesty is the idea of freedom of expression. If artists and musicians ‘get’ anything, they get freedom of expression, because when they don’t have it, they can’t practise. Edge, when he was walking Yoko around the IMMA, said freedom of expression is the oxygen for an artist. And that’s what Amnesty’s been about for nearly 50 years now.”

Instant Karma – The Amnesty Campaign To Save Darfur is out now on Warner Music.