Dido song shows IRA support

[faceless]

'Thoughtless' Dido criticised over IRA rebel song on new album
6th December 2008

As one of pop music’s golden girls, she has amassed a £10million fortune from her catchy yet inoffensive songs. But one of the tracks on Dido’s latest album takes a surprisingly political twist, and is likely to upset some fans. The singer, whose late father was of Irish descent, has included in it a verse from a Republican protest song once banned by the BBC.

In Let’s Do The Things We Normally Do, Dido (real name Florian Cloud De Bounevialle O’Malley Armstrong) sings lines from The Men Behind The Wire, a rebel tune written 30 years ago in tribute to the provisional IRA men interned in the Seventies. The song, penned by Paddy McGuigan, a member of the Barleycorn folk band from the infamous Falls Road in Belfast, is now associated with extreme republican movements such as Continuity IRA and the Real IRA.

The lines borrowed by Dido include: ‘Armoured cars and tanks and guns, Came to take away our sons, But every man must stand behind, The men behind the wire.’

Last night, the use of the lyrics on Safe Trip Home, the singer’s third album, was described as ‘thoughtless’ and an insult to those whose families had suffered at the hands of the IRA. Gregory Campbell, MP for East Londonderry and Minister for Sports, Arts and Leisure in the Belfast devolved government, said: ‘Given her Irish roots, it is inconceivable that she doesn’t know the background of the wording. She must know it was written about people who were murderers, arsonists and terrorists. She should clarify her position so that her fans and the wider public knows where she stands on these things.’

Dido’s new album is said to have been inspired in part by the death in 2006 of her father William O’Malley Armstrong, a publishing executive. Though he was born in Pakistan, his mother Maeve was an Irish Catholic and his father Alfred was an Ulster Protestant, and he was educated in English Catholic schools. Dido has previously said in interviews that many of her earliest childhood memories are of traditional Irish songs that her father used to sing to her and her brother Rollo as children every night. Rollo, 42, himself a musician, collaborated on the new album.

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How dare a celebrity have a political opinion?!

[nekokate]

Good on her, I say.