Rory McLeod: Left-wing troubadour
By Alex Bainbridge
Rory McLeod is in Australia until April 20. If he's playing somewhere near you, make the effort to see him.
Rory is hard to pigeonhole. His bio says he's an "ex-circus clown and fire eater — a one-man-soul-band, poet and storyteller singing his own unique, upbeat dance stories". That captures the essence of it.
I caught up with Rory after his recent Hobart performance. He is one of the most unpretentious internationally renowned performers I have met. The woman in front of me at the concert remarked that Rory had been sitting up the back throughout the first part of the evening merrily chatting to the people around him. And the energy he throws into his performances is amazing: he played for nearly three hours.
Rory taught himself music. He has been making up songs since he was very young and later picked up a harmonica and started playing popular music. Later, after being let down by someone, he began performing his own songs. "I was playing with a guitarist who never showed up for gigs. I decided well, I'm here on my own, I might as well play my own songs."
"One day, I was asked to play and they gave me some money — 80p for my bus fare — and I thought, 'Oh, this is good'." These days he is always playing and "sometimes getting paid, sometimes getting fed or a place to stay".
Rory is passionately political. "To me politics is all to do with people", he told me. "Politics affects your life whether you know it or not."
"Everyone's going to say they're not interested in politics until something affects their lives directly. And then, whether they realise it or not, whether they're fighting for their homes or their jobs, they're suddenly involved in politics.
"People learn. They don't realise what they can do until they do it. And even when there are defeats, there's little victories. You suddenly realise what you can do if you get together and organise."
Rory has always been into grassroots action, "because that's obviously to do with people, rather than parliament". Recently he has been fighting evictions on the estate in England where he lived. "I was writing songs we could all sing together, and I was involved in the action too."
The residents set up an action group and began campaigning when the council tried to bring developers in. During the day, they would gather everyone who wasn't working and go to the developers' offices with petitions. "We used the government's law against them", he said, referring to the law introduced by former PM Margaret Thatcher forcing public tenants to buy their houses.
"[The council] owed us £53 million because they hadn't done any repairs." There still are financial difficulties, he said, but "the people who were living there are still living there".
Rory also played benefit gigs for the miners during the 1984 strike, for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and for Greenpeace, Reclaim the Streets, the Liverpool dockers and a host of other campaigns.
Music and activism are "all connected", he said. "It's about people being humanised instead of dehumanised."
Rory doesn't see himself as a preacher. "I don't think of myself as a protest singer. They're just love songs, only some of them are angry love songs. Anger is valid too. All my songs come from the same place. It's about a love of life, wanting to build heaven on earth."
"Music is often just to make people feel good, to have a party." He once made up a "picket dance" just to keep everybody on a picket line warm in the mornings.
Rory is a socialist. "Rich people fight in their own interests. We need to fight in our own interests too."
Rory's will be playing: in Canberra on Tues Feb 24 at Tilleys; in Adelaide on February 25 at Flinders Uni; in Margaret River on February 26 at Settlers Tavern; in Denmark, WA on February 27 at the Denmark Arts Centre; in Fremantle on February 28 at Fly by Night; at the Port Fairy Folk Fest in Victoria on March 6-9; at Byron Bay on March 19 at the Great Northern; in Coffs Harbour on March 20 at the Moonee Tavern; in Nambucca on March 21 at the RSL Club; in Wauchope on March 22 at the Community Arts Centre in Bain Park; in Melbourne on March 28 at the East Brunswick Club Hotel; and at the National Folk Festival on April 10-13 in Canberra.