Preview: Stone Flowers @ Manchester Food & Drink Festival

As part of this year's International Peace Day on 21 September, Stone Flowers will be performing two sets at Manchester Food and Drink Festival.

Formed via working with the Musicians Without Borders and Freedom From Torture charities, the open collective of torture survivors has been raising awareness and fundraising to support other survivors, who often endure difficulties even after the experiences. Following loss of home, culture or family, they are then mistreated even in a place of refuge, such as the UK, where they can experience social isolation, threat of removal and mental health problems.

“Stone Flowers raises awareness about refugees and asylum seekers and the violation of human rights," says Frank, member of the band. “It enables the world to hear us and learn about us. It’s the only way to take out the pain inside us.”

For Stone Flowers music is not an exclusive club: you don’t have to be a virtuoso to join and many members never tried performing before they started. Through an organic creative process, which draws on diverse cultural influences, members are encouraged to express themselves through the languages and rhythms of their home countries, which include Iran, Iraq, Sri Lanka, Cameroon, Democratic Republic of Congo and Sudan. The act of expression is cathartic, and by being empowered to voice what they have been through, Stone Flowers members are the architects of their own recovery. Members take ownership of the creative process, making positive connections with audiences, leading the way in speaking out against war and torture.

Last month, supported by Manchester charities Freedom from Torture and Musicians without Borders, Stone Flowers started a fundraising appeal, asking the public to support a professional recording and album release of their original music. They well on the way to the £7,000 needed, been featured on Radio 1’s ‘War Children’, and even received a mention from the legendary label Ninja Tune.

Words: Anastasia Connor

Their appeal runs until the end of September. Click here for information on how to donate.

Hulme and Rights @ Work for Change Co-op, 31.05.14

Playing to a packed audience in the small but strangely cavernous space that is The Yard at Birley Street in Hulme, Daniel Kitson, Josie Long and Molly Naylor came together for the Hulme and Rights fundraising gig in aid of Freedom for Torture, a cause which clearly doesn’t merit any humour but whose important work gained wider prominence among a hugely enthusiastic, ‘up for it’ audience.

For fans of wryly observed narrative humour on the minutiae of everyday life, Kitson, Long and Naylor have clearly honed their comedic craft to perfection with each of them providing whimsical, sometimes anarchic and hugely self-deprecating observations on the trials of modern life.

Daniel got the evening off to a great start in his role as compère and warm-up merchant for Josie Long. He explored a mix of narratives, including his paranoiac outsider observations from taking a solitary trip to a campsite in North Wales the day before the gig and making boastful reminders of his globetrotting exploits as a comic (“Did I tell you I was in New York?”), ricocheting mercilessly off his heckling audience to fuel his ironically immodest fire of self-importance. Effortless and genius.

Josie Long, meanwhile, provided a quaintly acerbic counterfoil to Kitson’s humour with some touching and profound observations on personal relationships. I always get anxious when comics – or any performer for that matter – seek audience participation, but I found myself charmed by Josie’s entreaties to join her in her fatalistic, guitar-accompanied elegy to disappointment and heartbreak. It was funny and touching in equal measure.

Finally, Molly Naylor had me in stitches with her all-too-honest and self-knowing observations, amongst other confessional narratives of her failed attempt to get to the right airport for a flight to Berlin for a gig. All based on the heroic wrong assumption. I loved the way she conveyed that self-righteous ‘London’ sense of knowing her stuff and her insistence of being right, even at the checking in desk, when clearly arriving at Stansted for a flight taking off from Southend was wrong, wrong, wrong. Hilarious.

Laughs all-round from a trio of comics whose narrative craft deserved the energy and adulation from a crowd who believed in them as much as the cause they were supporting.

Thanks also to Laura Harper, a volunteer, who talked about the work for Freedom From Torture and to the artists who donated their work for the fundraising raffle.

Words & photos: Tom Warman