Roots

Look around any crowded street, bus or subway carriage almost anywhere in the world and you see people experiencing music. It spills from a sea of headphones and reverberates from shops, cars, buskers, bars, places of worship and homes. Our lives are steeped in the stuff. It lulls us to sleep when we are babies and helps us acquire language. It's part of children's play and expresses our identity as we navigate our way into adulthood. It walks us down the aisle and marches us off to war. To paraphrase Quincy Jones, it is the 'emotion lotion' applied to adverts and films. It can help create the atmosphere in which we seduce our lovers, make babies and reminisce when we are old. Finally, it plays tinnily from the speakers of crematoriums as we slip behind the final curtain.

For me, music is also a job. I'm writing these words from seat 27H of an American Airlines Boeing 777, 36,000 feet above the Atlantic. My current boss, the Irish singer Sinead O'Connor, sits a few rows ahead in business class. We, along with the rest of her new band, are flying to Los Angeles, where we are due to perform in a couple of days. I've been lucky in my career. Getting the call to play guitar for Sinead was the latest piece of good fortune. Over the past 20 years, I've toured four continents and countless countries with some amazing artists. I've seen people, places and events that an ordinary Essex boy like me would never have otherwise seen. Before I joined the group Faithless back in 1996, I'd hardly left the country. There are downsides. More late nights, long flights and free booze than any doctor would recommend and a creeping sense of financial insecurity, occasionally abated by a big tour, though never for long. But questions of health and wealth are not those that spin around my head like old shellac 78s. As I sit wakeful on this long-haul my thoughts settle on questions of music. There is no doubt that music matters to people, but what is its impact on society? How does this universal human activity reflect changes in economics, technology and politics? How has music shaped our world – and what contribution can it make to the struggle for a better one?

My political awakening began when I was a teenager. I'd grown up in the 1980s in a seaside town known for spiteful proto-punk rhythm & blues and a very long pier (1.34 miles). Local musicians like to describe our area as the 'Thames delta'. I somehow rose from the coveted position of 'Saturday boy' in the local guitar shop to roadie for blues-rock heroes the Hamsters. My world became the backseat of a splitter van, pubs, bikers' clubs and late night truck stops across the UK. Politics may well have remained largely off my radar, were it not for one August night spent in a field in Northamptonshire. Some mates had invited me to a music festival called Greenbelt, run by left-wing Christians. In a packed marquee between bands, the DJ dropped a tune by the Special AKA: 'Free Nelson Mandela'. I had no idea who Nelson Mandela was, but I knew by the end of the first chorus I wanted him to be free. In that moment, surrounded by thousands of festival goers hollering the hook, I learned – instinctively felt – that the future is unwritten and ordinary people like me could have a say. Music, I realised, is our weapon.

In 1996 I got my first real break. After playing for a string of semi-professional bands I was finally offered a fulltime gig. Faithless had started as a studio project assembled by the ambitious dance music producer Rollo Armstrong. With their tune 'Insomnia' racing up charts across Europe demands for a tour started to flood in from label managers convinced that a 'proper' live band would secure sales and longevity in a way DJ sets alone would not. I was one lucky beneficiary of this foresight. Until then I'd been content squeezing into old splitter vans, but now my lift took the form of luxury tour buses and aeroplanes.

Being a part of a band when it breaks onto the international circuit is exhilarating. I don't think anyone considered, in those early days, the possibility that Faithless would go on to become one of the biggest dance music acts in recent history – or that our occasional singer Dido would one day sell over 30 million albums in her own right. Back then just being on a tour bus, flying to a gig and having a crew were thrilling signs that we'd 'made it'. One of the first things to learn was the language of touring. Europe hadn't yet agreed to monetary union, so every day meant a different currency. All were labelled 'shitters', as in: 'have you got any shitters?' Distances were measured in 'clicks', fans were 'punters', gaffa tape found stuck to the sole of your shoe 'gig turds' and bottle openers 'gig spanners'. Tour bus rules included sleeping with your feet facing forward (less likely to break your neck in the event of a crash) and no pooing in the toilet (pees only). If during a night-time gas-stop you get off the bus to find a toilet, make sure you tell the driver. Our percussionist learned that lesson the hard way. Wearing only boxer shorts and a T-shirt, he emerged from a petrol station restroom somewhere in Germany to see the tour bus disappearing into the distance. It wasn't until the soundcheck, some twelve hours and two national borders later that we realised he was missing. The crew guys – and on that first tour they were all male – seemed to be seasoned sages of the road. They were lovable, sometimes scary, often hilarious, and by far the hardest working and hardest drinking of all the music professionals (I hadn't yet met any riggers). One of their mantras, repeated with dry irony, was 'Hurry Up ... And Wait'. There's a LOT of waiting around.

'Free Nelson Mandela' had planted a seed in my mind. Soon after I heard it, other artists caught my ear. Billy Bragg, Public Enemy, the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, Ani DiFranco and Rage Against The Machine all underlined the idea that music could be a political force in the world. Now I was part of an up-and-coming band, I wanted to know more about this strange power. I decided to use all that waiting around time to read about the politics of pop.

Culture

Jukebox Suckers

I soon discovered the relationship between music and politics has been contemplated for quite some time. In 380 BC, Plato noted Socrates' warning that 'a change to a new type of music is something to beware of as a hazard of all our fortunes. For the modes of music are never disturbed without unsettling of the most fundamental political and social conventions'. The emperors of China set up an Imperial Music Bureau tasked with supervising court music and keeping an ear on the music of the masses, believing it to be a telling portent of social unrest. Music was also deployed by both sides during Europe's reformation and the hundred years of state sponsored terror that followed. The Catholic Church even set up a...