PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE PART B
Seize The Day: The Band the Beeb Banned.
INITIAL RESEARCH
For this part of the project I chose the text Seize The Day: The Band the Beeb Banned. This story stood out to me as it was both engaging, inspiring and quite funny. It covers the politics of censorship and the Iraq war whilst also talking about band culture and folk music and I thought illustrating this would provide a unique challenge for me!
Here is the text-
Back in 2003, Seize The Day were nominated for 'the Radio 3 World Music Awards' for our powerful and moving anti-war song 'United States,' written by Theo Simon, who is the cofounder of Seize The Day.
It was a complete surprise when we were nominated for the award in the first place, we are just an English folk band but then, we are in the world, we do play music and people do like our songs.
As soon as we heard we had been nominated we told all our fans (of course), it seems our song was quite popular because with only a few days to go before the polls closed, the BBC told us that we were clearly in the lead in the audience vote it looked like we were going to win, so they started giving us details of the awards night in Hackney to which the winner would be invited - 'good luck' they said we'll be in touch!
To think that our fringe activist band could suddenly be thrust into a global music spotlight-wow! Perhaps our message would be meaningfully heard by the masses, not just the activists!
Then, the day before the polls closed we received a weird phone call from a producer at the BBC, telling us that due to a 'scheduling error,' they would not have time for the winner of the World Music Award 'audience category' to play the winning song at the awards gala so if we did win I'm afraid we wouldn't be able to come! Okay, we thought, this is pretty weird and a shame, but if that's the media, that's the media and we hadn't even been confirmed as winners yet.
So, while we were still a bit disappointed, we still thought we would get the award for our efforts and more importantly get some publicity for our campaigns. We are a genuine outfit with a long history of supporting social and ecological justice; and we walk our talk, we are not in music to be vain glorious.
Then on the day the polls were going to close, we started getting emails from fans saying, I'm sorry they kicked you out of the competition!' and 'what's going on' ...and 'wtf' etc My heart skipped a beat. I quickly went online, checked out the BBC voting page, and yes, we had been disqualified with no explanation in advance.
In place of our voting button was just a sentence on the BBC website saying that 'due to
'voting irregularities', Seize the day has been suspended from the competition.' The BBC had accused us, in plain English, of 'cheating,' and that was like a red rag to a bull because our band is all about honesty and integrity, and we had a fan base running into many thousands and that accusation was not going to be taken lightly.
Theo first went to London to meet with the producers and appeal, our case was even featured on Radio 4's 'Feedback' program.
The BBC's line was that our vote was 'political and not musical' and was thus against the spirit of the world music awards. Really?
What the producers didn't know is that we had sympathetic friends inside the BBC, and they told us what really happened. Our anti-war song would have been played at a BBC event just as the UK and USA were starting to bomb Iraq, and so it appears that the Government had slapped a 'D notice' on our song being played!
A D-Notice is a government notice sent to newspapers or broadcasters requesting them to withhold information for reasons of state security. 'Walk like an Egyptian' was also D-noticed at the time! The thinking is such songs will lead to 'sympathy for the enemy'-how quaint!
Being activists, we thought, how dare they deny audience democracy because of the deadly lust of a [well-oiled] war machine. The BBC is, of course, state-run, so as the mouthpiece of the government, we thought we should teach the BBC a lesson, protest the war and thank our fans for voting for us.
The Radio 3 World Music Awards was a very prestigious award for global music, and the ceremony was a black-tie BBC event with VIPs and the great and good of the music industry attending.
After many nights of pipe smoking and plotting, we hatched a cunning plan.
Firstly, 'The leaflet': We decided to produce an A5-sized leaflet that appeared to be an official BBC communication entitled 'BBC APOLOGY.' It was a great fake if I say so myself.
In the leaflet, we went on to tell the story as to why the audience wouldn't hear the winning band Seize The Day sing their song tonight because of BBC censorship. We handed this leaflet out to every single person in the queue outside the Hackney Ocean Club.
Secondly, 'Gaining entry.' Clearly, once we were disqualified we weren't going to be invited to the award ceremony, so we had to find a way to get in and carry out our plan.
A quite famous VIP on the guest list knew the band well and he got in touch to say how outraged he was at our censorship. So, he used his VIP status to add some 'plus 1's to his ticket, and invited us to the party.... and thanks to a mixture of luck, distraction and 'using the force' we managed to get 5 of us in the club on just 2 plus-1 tickets... lol. This meant we could do the full plan A.
What was interesting is that the bouncers were telling anyone at the door who was wearing a
'stop the war' badge to take it off or be refused entry [one of us had that badge on and ironically that's what caused the ruckus that enabled us to get in]. Have you ever heard of such a thing as removing a 'stop the war' badge? We hadn't, and it gave us even more impetus to carry out our protest.
With 5 people now in the club; 1 decoy, 1 on a camera to film the whole thing, and the 3 of us who had planned to do the protest, we set to work.
Firstly, 4 of us piled into the disabled toilet to change while number 5 kept people away from the door - our protest was going to involve nakedness!
With 1 person to help, 3 of us slipped off our clothes and put on the long coats that we had all smuggled in our bags, made sure we all had the right banners, and then we daubed some words on our bare chests ready for the action.
The decoy assumed her position at the very front of the stage, the camerawoman went to the upper tier to start filming, and then we patiently watched all the bands play through the night in the dark in our long coats and we waited for the last band to finish their song before we started. (In our world, it's just not okay to disrupt another band's set unless the place is on fire, so we let them have their encore and applause).
As soon as the applause had died down, our decoy went into action. She started screaming and ripping off her clothes, jiggling her pendulous breasts to the astonished stage security, it worked a treat and they all swooped in on her.
In the confusion, myself, Theo, and our 3rd [female] comrade slipped off our long coats, grabbed our 3 banners, and leapt up on stage stark naked to a huge roar from the crowd.
On our naked chests were written, in black paint, one word each; Peace. Not. War. On one side of our banners was written BBC. COVER. UP. which we held in front of our genitals at first to cover them, and then, after some mock dancing, we lifted the banner up to reveal the other side that said SEIZE. THE. DAY.
How we laughed, unlike the 3 massive bouncers who were heading for us from the wings as they called out on their walkie-talkies for assistance.
I won't say they were rough, but they did dump all 3 of us naked outside the Hackney Ocean club without our clothes, which was quite a surprise to the homeless guy who was observing us from his doorway and the passengers of the 277 bus which was stopped over the road.
So what did we achieve?
Well we didn't stop the war, and nobody in the media seriously reported the action, but we did reach our fans and we wrote a very funny 15-minute song telling the whole saga from start to finish.
If you have enjoyed this story, you can hear the 2 songs for free on the Seize The Day website. You can also buy and download them if you want to support our work.
https://seizetheday.org/song-downloads/
The 2 songs are:
United States and
Radio 3 World Music Awards
VISUAL THINKING WORKSHOP
PLANNING
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DRAFT SPREADS AND EXPERIMENTS WITH PAPER MECHANICS
FINAL SPREADS
EVALUATION
For my final zine I decided to focus on showing the narrative of the story as that is what initially attracted me to the Seize the Day text. I managed to fit this story into 7 double page spreads which I believe sums it up nicely. The main aspect of my zine is that it has flaps and pull tabs- I made this choice as I thought it would be interesting to have some parts of the image hidden at first sight like a decoy (mentioned in the text) and then the truth is revealed when the viewer interacts with it. This to me is linked to the theme of censorship! Overall I think the paper mechanics are a great touch although I do wish I did more of them maybe on every page.
The imagery I chose for each page has an important factor in storytelling as although I used some text the story I chose is very detailed. I think that the iconography I used really helps make it more understandable and provides extra context (for example the don’t attack Iraq badges). The type I created was inspired by folk sign-writing and I think matches the vibe of the band and brings all the pages together. One of the biggest struggles I had making this zine was the colour scheme, I knew I wanted it to be vibrant and joyful so I used a huge range of colours but looking back it would’ve been easier if I just chose maybe 2 or 3 colours to work with. To improve I think I could’ve printed it more professionally as I just used printer paper as I thought it would be easier to construct. I also would have used better binding methods for the printed version as the spine is exposed. I think that I have learnt many editorial skills in this project that I will use in future projects!
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