SHORT OF illicit substances, music is the most effective anaesthetic to the pain of long- or short-term incarceration. Most prisoners these days have CD players and a decent collection of albums to listen to and to share with their neighbours. Many forward-thinking prison governors are aware of the power that music has to touch damaged and broken lives. The more enlightened invite musicians in to gig in their prisons, and many accept.
The Irish singer-songwriter Foy Vance, for example, who writes the most hopeful songs I've ever heard, played in a number of English prisons last year, including New Hall women's prison and Full Sutton maximum security prison, a men's prison described on the HM Prison Service website as "among the most difficult and dangerous in the country".
Yet Vance was in for a surprise. Evidently moved by his experience in Full Sutton, he recounted it in his blog. "The weird thing was how normal they all seemed," he wrote of his captive audience. "I mean, I never expected to meet people that just walked around wanting to commit heinous acts of violence all day, but even still . . . It was quite disarming, quite how erudite and pleasant they all were. It was profound."
The fiancée of a man in the Full Sutton audience posted a comment on the blog: "I will never condone what he did to be in there, but his crime is not the total of who he is and the time you spent with him touched him very deeply. You have made a difference to his life, and therefore to mine."
READING VANCE'S prison-gig blog took me back to my own experience as a prisoner, and being treated to my first performance from a visiting singer. Touching it wasn't. The venue was HMP Long Lartin near Evesham in central England - we called it paranoia city. In the 1980s and 1990s it was the Wild West of the English prison system. The general prisoner population referred to the place as "the gangster's retirement home", except most of the gangland figures held there had yet to retire. During one 2½-year period there were three murders in the prison. Every other week somebody was stabbed or scalded, usually with jugs of boiling water, but one time with a pan of boiling oil. At least half a dozen times a day the "general alarm" would sound, prompting teams of prison officers to sprint along the corridors, Keystone Cop-like, in response. But at least we had music.
And then a notice went up on the wing noticeboards. One of the biggest names in pop at the time, Bonnie Tyler, was coming in to perform. Tyler had a great, gravelly voice and she was one of the sexiest women in rock. The whole prison, holding 600 long-termers - many of whom were in the highest security category - was buzzing with the news.
On the day we filed from the wings to the gym obediently, excitedly, along corridors lined with prison officers. We were about 100 strong when the officer in charge yelled to his colleagues behind us, "No more sir!" Cons at the back ranted and raved as wing gates were slammed shut and locked in their faces.
Giant speakers, microphones and wires were all stacked on the stage at the back of the gym, along with a drum kit and some guitars. We jostled for the best seats among the rows of stacking chairs. The bodybuilding boyos from D Wing shouldered their way to the front, while some Cockneys issued threats. Languid Fat Cat, an Indonesian "Mr Big", calmed everybody with promises of drugs for all at the aftershow party on B Wing, and passed bottles of hooch (a dangerously strong booze made out of oranges, rice, yeast, water and sugar) from his oversized PE kit bag.
When Tyler and her band appeared from a side door, trailed by film cameramen, she shouted, "A'right boys?" We cheered, whooped and whistled. She looked and smelled gorgeous. The boyos were in love. So was everybody else. But we soon knew that this was no ordinary concert. Too much consulting with the cameramen. After an undue wait the band started playing and Tyler began to sing. Then she stopped. Then she started. And so it went on, stopping, starting and always the same song, "Breakout, breakout - you gotta break out . . . " Eventually somebody booed, then feet started stamping. Without waiting for the end, most of us got up from our seats and - feeling cheated - demanded to be taken back to the wings. It turned out that all that Tyler was doing was recording a video for her new single. We were glad when it flopped.
Foy Vance, by contrast, is part of a growing movement of UK bands who gig in prisons with no ulterior motive. To highlight the disturbingly high suicide rate among young males in the UK, Dirty Pretty Things played in Pentonville prison in north London last year. Earlier this year, at the invitation of governor Paul McDowell, Alabama 3 went into Brixton prison, also in London. McDowell had already had old Clash hand Mick Jones playing an acoustic set in the prison alongside Billy Bragg when the prison launched its own satellite radio station Electric Radio Brixton, and last year Bragg gave a solo concert in the prison chapel.
"I saw Johnny Cash play at Glastonbury 10 years ago," McDowell says, "and I remember thinking about the prison stuff he had done. The impact his concerts in Folsom prison and, especially, San Quentin . . . had was massive. I'm not sure that there was anything altruistic about what Cash did. I think he just enjoyed playing in those places and identifying with the underdog. What I'm trying to do is find ways of inspiring people. Some will get that from chalkboard teaching, but most people who find themselves in prison are entirely disaffected from that experience. Music is a good way of getting people to listen. I brought the Alabama 3 in because their stand is in direct relation to our work on anti-racism and diversity programmes."
ALABAMA 3, CREATORS of the opening theme to The Sopranos, have played in a number of prisons over the past few years, including Mountjoy in Ireland and Barlinnie in Scotland. "When we go into those places it's very energising for us," says singer Larry Love. "We don't go in to do prisoners a favour: how smug would that be? We're actually appreciative of them giving us some of their time. At the moment I think it's one in four of us knows someone who is in prison. That is something that society is going to have to deal with. If we can do anything to encourage people while they are in there to believe that there is some alternative when you come out, then that has to be a good thing. Let's face it: but for the grace of God any one of us could be in there."
A prisoner who goes by the name of Fetch, who's serving four years for drugs offences, was in the audience at Brixton. "It was wicked, man," he says. "Those guys coming in was amazing. It was only a couple of weeks after the rumble [a pitched riot on one wing three weeks earlier had left a number of officers and prisoners seriously injured]. They brought us in some peace, man."
Billy Bragg feels so strongly about what prison is meant to do that he founded a charity called Jail Guitar Doors (named after a Clash song) to provide guitars for prisoners. "As musicians, we all understand how music can help you transcend your surroundings," he says. "That is especially important in a prison, where the individual is often reduced to little more than a number in a greater machine. If we are trying to get people to reflect about why they are there and come to terms with what they have done, music might help to get to the root of that."
What does he say to people who might question the morality of giving treats to people who have caused harm to others? "The guitars are not a gift, they're a challenge. People have donated money to provide the guitars to support the people doing this work. We want prisoners who choose to get involved to rise to the challenge. I'm of the opinion that the majority of people in our prisons can be rehabilitated, can be reached. When we go in we are trying to give the message that there are people on the outside that give a shit."
Prisons are officially termed "hostile environments". Did he have any concerns about going in when he played in prisons? "Apart from worrying about giving the show I want to give, none at all, although I do remember the guys in the first prison I went to trying to wind me up. An old guy running the tea urn brought me a cup of tea and somebody said, 'You know he's in for poisoning?'. I guess you would call it heightened workplace banter."
GARETH SANDS IS the governor of New Hall women's prison, which is in Wakefield in the north of England, and is responsible for initiating Foy Vance's recent prison gigs. How much does it cost to put in a gig in a prison? "Apart from the basic expenses, bringing in someone like Foy there is a minimum cost to the taxpayer and the rewards can be great. By introducing people to the performing arts, something that lots of us out here take for granted, it helps to break down barriers and brings some hope into prison life. We do education and offending behaviour work, but music can sometimes get to people and impact on them the way other things can't."
He's a fan of Vance and feels it's not just having music but the message of the songs themselves that counts. He mentions Vance's song Indiscriminate Act of Kindness and explains that "for people who have created victims, but who have been in many cases victims themselves, those sort of lyrics can be very powerful." Vance, who has played in London's Belmarsh prison and is planning another prison tour this month, is both a man of questioning faith and an admirer of Che Guevara, Gandhi and Martin Luther King, which is probably why he struggles occasionally with his motivation for giving so much to prison audiences. "Sometimes it feels selfish because I enjoy it so much," he says. "But I know that if it wasn't for music there is a high probability I would be inside. Many of the friends I grew up with have been through prison. Music allowed me to have another life. To this day I learn about my relationships with my friends, with my wife, with my daughter, through music. I think what people need in those places, if they need anything, is a bit of grace. That's the only way to rehabilitate."
After his New Hall gig, one of the women prisoners wrote him a poem containing the lines: "Creative harmonies homemade by his ear/ Tiers, layers of his pure voice/ Came over loud and clear/ Before so many women were so full of woe/ Gave sugar for the soul, joy, rhythm and hope, to go!" Vance is humbled by it. "What could I possibly say to that?" he says.
After Bonnie Tyler's failure to inspire at Long Lartin, we prisoners were sceptical when, a year later, it was announced that John Martyn would be coming to play. "Mr Martyn is coming to the end of a 48-date tour and has agreed to make Long Lartin his 49th," we were told. We shouldn't have been so cynical: Martyn gave the performance of a lifetime. For two hours, in a place where hope was the rarest commodity, he lifted hearts and humanised souls like nothing I had ever experienced.
Watching him perform May You Never - just him and an acoustic guitar, singing just for us, the unwanted - reminded us that we were members of the human race. Any musician who can go into a prison and do that deserves all our gratitude.
For more information about Jail Guitar Doors, visit http://jailguitardoors.org.uk. Foy Vance's blog is at www.foyvance.com
Despite feeling cheated by the visit of Bonnie Tyler to Long Lartin while he was an inmate there, Erwin James reports that musicians who play to prisoners for the right reasons can touch damaged and broken lives
