Joan As Spokeswoman

I was reminded last night of things as they used to be before we all got smug and self-satisfied and started to trust 'the man'. Watching Joan Baez at the Royal Albert Hall was like being transported back to those heady days in the sixties when we all thought that the world was going to change because the brokers and the sharks knew we were onto them and they had nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. It was all so heady and idealistic and then somewhere along the line their representatives put on their best squaline smile and invited Joe Public to join them at the trough and we fell for it. Not all of us took the bait and, I suspect, Joan Baez was one of the few that remained clear about the threat from naked economic greed. Last night at the RAH she cycled back through a 50 year career in the protest business and proved that she still has what it takes. But Joan does it in such an extraordinary way that it almost defies description. She is like the still point at the centre of events that seeth around her, a gentle but immovable fulcrum providing the focus of the leverage needed to effect change. As we watched her performance it was impossible to think of her as anything but one of the worlds permanent features. An elemental treasure that we are not likely to see repeated given the self-centred self-satisfaction of most of our music industry figures. You could count on the fingers of one hand the voices that stand up for the kind of values that Joan has espoused over a lifetime. They sing and they shout those few, but nobody's listening.