Opinion

From Dylan and Baez to Geldof and Sting there’s a long history of music and activism – now artists including Coldplay and Jacob Collier have climate change in their sights, says Steve Harris

By the time you read this, you might have been assailed by another year’s horrifying statistics about the loss of polar ice. But you can still watch the six-minute video that music superstar Jacob Collier made in the Arctic last year.

When Greenpeace invited Collier to take a trip to the far north, he boarded the Arctic Sunrise along with Norwegian alt-pop singer Aurora and sailed to Sveabreen, Svalbard, beyond the Norwegian coast and far into the Arctic Circle. There, on a floating platform like a small ice floe, just big enough for an upright piano for Collier and a bit of dancing from Aurora, they performed, as Greenpeace puts it, ‘A haunting mash-up of their two songs, “A Rock Somewhere” and “The Seed”, in a rallying cry for ocean and climate protection’.

Sign of the times

Of course, the idea behind the trip was to raise awareness and get support for Greenpeace’s petition to protect the oceans. Teasers in the run-up to the video’s release on YouTube ended with the message ‘Sign the petition for exclusive content’. At least one commenter wondered whether viewers would sign the petition because they believed in it, or to get the promised content.

But no one could doubt the sincerity of Collier’s performance, or his support for the cause. In 2023, along with Anna Calvi, Stormzy and others, he’d joined Brian Eno in adding ‘Earth’ to his songwriting credits, sending part of his royalties to Eno’s EarthPercent charity to fund environmental activism.

Also in 2023, saxophonist Joshua Jaswon and his octet tried to focus minds on sea and ice with Polar Waters. A follow-up to 2020’s Silent Sea, this again featured fabulous Dutch singer Anna Serierse in adventurous jazz settings of contemporary protest poems.

Meanwhile, British rock band Coldplay had begun collaborating with Greenpeace in 2021. In October that year, on releasing their ninth studio album Music Of The Spheres, they announced a plan to cut CO₂ emissions on their next tour by 50% compared with the 2016–2017 Head Full Of Dreams tour. Starting in March 2022 and still ongoing, Music Of The Spheres has become the most-attended tour of all time.

But it’s not easy being environmentally conscious megastars. Coldplay were quickly lambasted by the pan-European Transport & Environment (T&E) campaign group for partnering with Finnish oil company Neste as their biofuel supplier. Despite Neste’s claims on sustainability, T&E pointed to earlier deforestation by the company’s palm oil suppliers and suggested that Neste was cynically using the rock band to ‘greenwash’ its reputation.

Similarly, SumOfUs, the campaign group that’s since renamed itself Ekō, criticised Coldplay for partnering with BMW as supplier of electric vehicle batteries to power their tour equipment. ‘Coldplay have been taken for a ride’, campaign manager Eoin Dubsky told The Guardian in May 2022, pointing out that BMW was lobbying to prevent the European Union from setting a 2035 deadline for zero emissions from vehicles.

Speaking out

There’s a lot about music and activism on the website of The Climate Reality Project, the non-profit founded and chaired by former US Vice President Al Gore. ‘Musicians today are speaking out on the climate crisis like never before’, says the organisation in an article celebrating ten musicians who are ‘discussing climate today’.

The list is headed by unpronounceable American activist/hip-hop artist Xiuhtezcatl, but also includes Sir Paul McCartney and Neil Young as well as Billie Eilish and Lana Del Rey. Climate Reality compiled its citation back in 2020, and there are many new voices that could be added to update it. We can only hope that they’ll make a difference.