An Evening of Rebel Sounds

An evening of Rebel Sounds is part talk, part music listening session. Joe Mulhall will be telling stories and playing a selection of the records covered in his new book Rebel Sounds: Music as Resistance.

They are stories and hidden histories about how music has provided light in the darkest of times over the past century. How it steeled souls and inspired resistance to oppression. How in moments of unimaginable fear and suffering just playing and listening to music can be an act of resistance.

He will tell the stories of those rare and brave people who loved a record so much they risked imprisonment or even death just to listen to it. Those who danced through the night in back rooms and derelict warehouses of bombed out cities to forget pain and vanquish fear. Those who resisted not with guns and bombs, but with trumpets and drums, guitars and microphones. Those people who remained free despite the oppression that surrounded them.

Of course, music itself doesn’t change the world, its people that change it. But music can give us hope when we have none. It can heal wounds and force us to our feet when we don’t think we have the energy to stand any longer.

An evening of Rebel Sounds will cover everything fromrock’n’roll behind the Iron Curtain, musical resistance against authoritarian dictatorships in Brazil and Nigeria, institutionalised racism and police violence in America and South Africa, far-right street violence in Britain, right up to resistance records in war-torn Ukraine today.

Come hear their stories and listen to their music.