(This image was used by Greenpeace to celebrate the January 2014 announcement from Shell that it would stay out of the Arctic, at least for the rest of this year. It seems apt in this context too!)

Campaigners celebrate as Shell’s sponsorship of Southbank Centre ends

Oil-branded concerts come to an end after creative campaigns expose Shell’s record of social and ecological devastation

Campaigners are celebrating after the Southbank Centre announced that its sponsorship relationship with Royal Dutch Shell would be coming to an end in June 2014. The artistic director, Jude Kelly, announced the new classical music season on Thursday 23rd January, with the ‘Shell Classic International’ concerts now replaced with an ‘International Orchestra Series’. The change comes after a period of heightened campaigning, with the Shell Out Sounds protest choir, open letters from concerned artists and performers, and comment from public figures appearing at the Southbank, all adding pressure.

The Southbank Centre claim that Shell decided to end its sponsorship after eight years and seek new opportunities. However, the Southbank has known of Shell’s decision for only a few months and the Southbank has now been left without a new sponsor to take its place. Such an abrupt turnaround suggests that this was not a well-planned conclusion, but the consequence of internal tensions and external pressure. The Southbank Centre needs to make public the real motivations behind the end to this relationship in order to demonstrate that it is an institution which is now wholeheartedly committed to sustainability and social justice.

Kevin Smith from Platform, (a group that researches oil industry sponsorship), said:

‘If the Southbank Centre is dropping Shell as a sponsor, it will be positioning itself as ahead of the game in terms of ethics and sustainability. Oil company money, made from trashing the climate and trampling over communities and ecosystems, is an unpleasant stain on the UK cultural sector.’

Chris Garrard from the Shell Out Sounds choir said:

‘In a recent interview with the New Statesman, Jude Kelly admitted that climate change was her greatest concern for the future, a public comment that would have been difficult to make while collaborating with a company responsible for over 2% of historic carbon emissions. In our performances, we have demonstrated that art-making does not need big oil and that cultural sponsorship should not exist to hide injustice – we are thrilled that the Southbank agree.’

Shell has been widely criticised for a range of environmental and human rights injustices: extensive spills and contributions to the military in Nigeria, extraction of tar sands oil on Indigenous people’s lands in Canada and attempts to drill in the Arctic. its reputation threatened to tarnish that of the Southbank Centre by association. Over many years, groups including Platform, London Rising Tide and Shell Out Sounds have protested and raised awareness at the Southbank. Last October, the Shell Out Sounds choir gave an unsanctioned performance from the Royal Festival Hall’s choir seats before a Shell Classic concert could begin, following-up multiple choral ‘flashmobs’ in the Festival Hall foyer during concert intervals. In November, on the anniversary of the death of the Nigerian activist, Ken Saro-Wiwa, twenty-one artists who had previously performed at the Southbank, including actor Mark Rylance and composer Matthew Herbert, signed an open letter asking for Shell to be dropped. The author Margaret Atwood and environmentalist Jonathon Porritt have both also raised the sponsorship issue when they made appearances at the Southbank in 2013.

The successful campaign at the Southbank is part of a growing movement against oil sponsorship. Liberate Tate, a collective of performance artists, recently performed ‘parts per million’ at Tate Britain, where fifty veiled performers recited historical increases in carbon emissions as they moved through the BP-sponsored chronological galleries. Only last week, the Reclaim Shakespeare Company performed an adapted version of Macbeth in the gallery, where sinister BP executives tempt a fictional Tate director into a shady sponsorship deal. All these groups are part of the Art Not Oilcoalition, a growing community demanding an end to cultural sponsorship by large oil companies. The Southbank’s decision now clears a path for other institutions, such as the Tate, the Royal Opera House and the Science Museum, to end their relationships with companies such as BP and Shell. The campaigns to end these relationships will press forward with renewed energy and innovative, creative strategies.

This evening, just as a Shell-sponsored performance by the Sao Paolo Symphony Orchestra was about to start, a 15-strong choir suddenly stood up in their seats behind the stage, in full view of the audience, and began to sing. They launched into a version of the classic spiritual song Wade in the Water, with rewritten lyrics drawing attention to Shell’s controversial human rights and environmental record. The audience listened and clapped along as the choir sang verses based on Shell’s polluting activities in the Niger Delta [1], the Canadian tar sands [2] and the Arctic [3], and applauded as the singers unfurled a banner reading “Oil in the Water” and bearing an evil-looking Shell logo. There was further applause as the song ended, and the choir then proceeded to the bar where they performed again before leaving the building. Security guards looked on but did not interfere.

The second half of tonight’s concert included a movement called ‘O King’, which is a tribute to Martin Luther King [4]. To draw attention to the fact that a piece of music about such a famous supporter of social justice was being sponsored by a company associated with decades of human rights abuses, the performers handed out flyers at the end of the show:

The flyers also contained the full lyrics to the protest song:

This was the fifth performance led by Shell Out Sounds [5], a group of musicians and concerned concert-goers who are challenging Shell’s sponsorship of the arts through music and song. Tonight’s intervention also hoped to draw attention to Shell’s current activities in Brazil, the homeland of the Sao Paulo Symphony Orchestra. Shell has been forced to withdraw from a controversial deal to purchase ethanol from lands taken from the Indigenous Guarani people, and are also under fire for the purchase of Brazilian oil fields in what has been widely reported as a bad deal for the people of the country, carrying a serious risk of future offshore oil spills [6]. One chorus of the choir’s song was performed in Portuguese in reference to these problems:

Petrolio na agua

Petrolio na agua, filhos

Petrolio na agua

Shell vai perturbar a agua

Morag Carmichael, who sang in the Shell Out Sounds choir, said: “Sponsorship deals like this one allow companies like Shell to present themselves as a responsible and necessary part of society. This helps them to get away with all kinds of polluting activities, from failing to clean up decades’ worth of oil spills in Nigeria, to poisoning Indigenous communities’ lands and water in Canada. Scientists are telling us that we need to leave 80% of known fossil fuels in the ground to have a decent chance of avoiding disastrous runaway climate change, but that won’t happen unless we reduce the influence of companies like Shell in our political and cultural institutions.”

Dr Anna Goodman, another member of the choir, said: “The Southbank gets less than five percent of its funding from Shell. Of course we can have world-class musical performances without fossil fuel sponsorship – it’s absurd to suggest otherwise. We are all supporters of the Southbank Centre and want to see it thrive into the future, free from the discordant intrusion of Shell sponsorship.”

The composer Matthew Herbert, commenting in the Guardian earlier this year, said: “Arts institutions are giving oil companies a social licence to promote fossil fuels. Climate change is getting to a pretty alarming stage and part of art’s responsibility is to point that out, to suggest alternatives, to imagine the horror of environmental disaster in ways that might stimulate action…There’s a really unhealthy point where music and art instead of trying to prick the bubble, become the bubble, and that particularly music seems happy to become a soundtrack to consumption – that’s very dangerous really.”

Shell Out Sounds is part of the Art Not Oil coalition, along with other groups seeking to kick oil sponsorship out of the arts such as Liberate Tate, the Reclaim Shakespeare Company and London Rising Tide.

[1] Shell has operated in Nigeria for over 50 years and oil spills have become an almost daily occurrence in the oil region of the Niger Delta. A 2011 UN report confirmed the horrifying extent of pollution in the Ogoni region and estimated it could take 25 to 30 years to clean up. The UN condemned Shell for falling below its own operating standards and under-reporting pollution.

[2] The tar sands are one of the most carbon-intensive and environmentally destructive sources of oil in the world. Current production is located mainly in Alberta, Canada, where tar sands deposits cover an area of 140,000 km² – an area nearly as big as England and Wales combined. Shell is one of the largest players in the tar sands, producing approximately 276,000 barrels per day or roughly 20% of total exports from Alberta, and has applied to expand its capacity to a projected 770,000 barrel per day capacity. However, strong community resistance to Shell has damaged its reputation with both shareholders and the public. It has been named in five lawsuits related to tar sands developments and has faced shareholder resolutions demanding greater clarity over the risk of tar sands investments.

[3] Shell has been the most aggressive company seeking to exploit the pristine Arctic Ocean for offshore oil. Shell has been planning for years to drill outer-continental shelf wells in the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas off Alaska. Dozens of support vessels and aircraft would patrol both seas, emitting pollutants and risking oil spills. If an oil spill were to happen in the Arctic’s extreme, remote conditions, there is no proven method to clean it up.

Following a global campaign to revoke the drilling licences Shell has received from the US government, at the end of February 2013 Shell declared that it was cancelling its plans to drill for oil in the Arctic during 2013. However, it has not cancelled its plans altogether, and without stronger legal protection for the Arctic Shell will almost certainly try to return.

[4] The movement “O King”, dedicated to Martin Luther King, is part of Berio’s Sinfonia which was performed in the second half of tonight’s show with the Swingle Singers.

[5] Shell out Sounds has performed at the Southbank on four previous occasions, but this is the first time the choir has sung inside the Royal Festival Hall itself rather than in the bar or the foyer.

Concert-goers taking their interval drinks in Festival Hall Bar were greeted by an upbeat chorus, snapping fingers as they sung close harmonies about the toxic legacies of Shell’s misadventures in the Arctic, the Niger Delta and Alberta.

We’re going well! from Danny Nemu on Vimeo.

The tune for this crisp little jingle was put together by the clever folk at Shell in the 1950’s (marked on the graph below)

On the afternoon of Sunday 9th June, a flashmob of over 30 singers gathered in the foyer of the Queen Elizabeth Hall as audience members arrived for the Shell-sponsored performance by Spira Mirabilis of Richard Strauss’s Metamorphosen. The singers launched into a version of Leonard Cohen’s classic song, Hallelujah, with rewritten lyrics drawing attention to Shell’s controversial human rights and environmental record. They unfurled a banner with Yoko Ono’s quotation ‘Art is a means for survival’ and handed out flyers to audience members. They gave a number of repeat performances around the Southbank which drew applause and support.

Concert-goers listen to Shell Out Sounds’ performance in the foyer of Queen Elizabeth Hall

This was the third performance led by Shell Out Sounds, a group of musicians and concerned concertgoers who are challenging Shell’s sponsorship of the arts through music and song. The performance was a direct appeal to Yoko Ono, the curator of next week’s Meltdown festival at the Southbank, to speak out on the issue. Ono is an outspoken opponent of the ‘fracking’ method of gas extraction, a method that is widely used by Shell in South Africa and elsewhere. The song detailed ‘fracking’ and Shell’s other controversial activities in its lyrics: ‘It goes like this, you drill and dig; You frack the rock and you crash your rig; The tar sands are a poison, Hallelujah…’ The choir’s flyer also highlighted the irony of performing Strauss’s meditation on wartime destruction with financial support from a company who fund Nigerian Security forces and other armed groups.

Shell has sponsored the Shell Classic Concert series since 2007 and opposition to oil industry sponsorship of the arts and sciences has been steadily increasing. Shell’s directors recently faced a barrage of questions about their human rights record at their Annual General Meeting and a few weeks ago, the University of Oxford faced heavy criticism for launching a new funding partnership with Shell. The university’s student union voted to formally oppose the deal while a number of respected alumni wrote to The Guardian condemning the partnership.

Jean Adams, a member of Shell Out Sounds, said:

‘Yoko has asked people in New York to ‘Imagine there’s no fracking’, and next week we would like her to raise her concerns and ask the Southbank to imagine a future free of Shell. Our vision, which we express through singing, is something we also recognise in Yoko’s work: a space for optimism, renewal and change.’

The singers also performed next to a bust of Nelson Mandela, to highlight the irony of Shell’s fracking operations in South Africa.

Sam Chase, who sang in the performance, said:

‘This is the last concert in this season of Shell Classic International concerts, and while the Southbank already has the next set of concerts planned, it really should look long and hard at whether this association is sullying its otherwise terrific reputation. Shell is buying into the reputation of renowned musicians for a small price and co-opting powerful, peace-promoting music, such as Britten’s Sinfonia da Requiem and Strauss’s Metamorphosen, as a smokescreen for its injustices elsewhere.’

Yoko Ono’s Meltdown festival runs from 14th-23rd June at the Southbank Centre. Shell is not a direct sponsor of the festival but it contributed substantially to the initial redevelopment of the Southbank Centre complex.

Interval halted at Shell Classic International concert, as ‘Shell Out Sounds’ highlight the sponsor’s human rights record

On the evening of Monday 22^nd April, a group of about 10 singers and musicians called ‘Shell Out Sounds’ (SOS) returned to the Southbank Centre to give another musical intervention, during the interval of a Shell-sponsored performance by Imogen Cooper and the Budapest Festival Orchestra. The ‘flashmob’ ensemble premiered a new piece called ‘The Riddle of the Niger Delta’, written specifically for the concert, setting the poignant words of the Nigerian environmental and human rights activist, Ken Saro-Wiwa. The group handed out flyers about Shell’s human rights record to audience members, many of whom stopped to listen and applauded at the end of the song. The Southbank Centre duty visitor manager said the performers were welcome to come back and perform whenever they liked, and were invited to discuss the issue of Shell sponsorship with the Southbank Centre PR team.

This was the second public performance by Shell Out Sounds, a group of musicians and concerned concertgoers who are challenging Shell’s sponsorship of the arts through music and song. Tonight’s performance highlighted the ongoing damage caused to the Niger Delta region through massive oil spills, continued gas flaring and Shell’s financial contributions to the Nigerian military and other armed groups. Dressed in black with purple sashes, the singers were joined by a cello player who provided a rich accompaniment to the lyrics ‘I am a man of peace, appalled by poverty’ and ‘Shell is here on trial, there is no doubt in my mind!’ Saro-Wiwa’s words draw attention to Shell’s long history of exploitation in the Niger Delta which has been investigated extensively by Amnesty International and the United Nations Environment Programme among others. Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court disappointingly ruled against Nigerian citizens in the Kiobel vs. Royal Dutch Petroleum (Shell) case. They allege that Shell aided and abetted the Nigerian military dictatorship in the ‘torture, rape, and extrajudicial killing of unarmed protesters in the 1990s’.

The Southbank Centre recently re-allocated tonight’s concert on their website, an attempt to perhaps disassociate the concert from the ‘Shell Classic’ name. The reason for this change is currently unknown – pressure from performers or the risks of negative PR are conceivable. [1] Shell has sponsored the Classic International series of concerts at the Southbank Centre since 2007 but oil industry sponsorship of the arts has become an increasingly controversial issue as the motives of the companies have been questioned. BP’s sponsorship of the Tate Galleries [2] and the Royal Shakespeare Company [3] will be under the spotlight again as the third anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico passes.

Chris Garrard, who sang in the performance, said:

‘Shell’s sponsorship of the Southbank Centre makes them appear generous, responsible and an essential part of our cultural institutions. This is simply not the case. While total sponsorship to the Southbank in 2009 was around £2.61 million, Shell gave roughly seventeen times that amount, approximately £44 million, to government security forces in Nigeria in the same year. We believe that once audience members know these facts, they will join us in asking for the relationship with Shell to end.’

Sunniva Taylor, a member of the Shell Out Sounds group, said:

‘The Southbank Centre say that, “Festivals also offer a safe environment in which to discuss issues that affect all our lives, from human rights to climate change.” We are simply bringing that discussion into the spotlight. I think the arts should be about life and the future, but Shell is part of a world we need to leave behind, based on exploitation of people and the earth. Sponsorship by Shell dirties the music it claims to support.’ [4]

Shell Out Sounds are planning further performances at the Southbank Centre this summer at the Yoko Ono-curated “Meltdown Festival”. Ono is a vocal critic of the ‘fracking’ method of extracting gas, in which Shell is heavily involved.

Past media coverage of Shell Out Sounds:

Susanna Rustin, ‘Shell targeted by musical protest at South Bank concert’, The Guardian, 1 March 2013

Zion Lights, ‘The Power of Voice: Protesting Oil Sponsorship of the Arts’, Huffington Post UK – The Blog, 4 March 2013

[1] The concert was discreetly removed from the ‘Shell Classic International’ page of the website and re-classified as being part of the ‘Classical Season 12/13’. The Southbank Centre announced the concert as part of the ‘Shell Classic International’ season in this press release.

[2] Liberate Tate, a group of artists and activists, have been performing interventions at BP-sponsored Tate Modern and Britain since 2010, including the installation of a 16.5 metre, one and a half tonne wind turbine blade in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in a guerrilla performance by over 100 members of the art collective in July last year.

[3] Mark Rylance, one of the UK’s leading actors, publicly expressed his concerns about BP sponsorship in a letter to the Guardian (also signed by other members of the theatre world).

RSC Playwright in Residence Mark Ravenhill revealed during a talk at the Latitude Festival that there was a huge debate going on within the RSC about BP. Artists and writers including Suzanne Lacy (recent exhibition at Tate), Paul Noble (2012 Turner Prize finalist) and Hans Haacke signed consecutive letters in the Guardian calling on Tate to drop BP sponsorship.

[4] Quotation taken from the Southbank Centre’s Festival Wing development exhibition at the Royal Festival Hall.

If you ask people to envisage the early Greenpeace voyages back in the early 1970s, bearded men, inflatable rafts and whaling ships will probably come to mind. But on one of those early voyages was Will Jackson, later to become one of the co-founders of Greenpeace International. Jackson was a musician involved in performing experimental electronic music using newly developed synthesizers and was particularly interested in the qualities of whale song. When they came alongside a Russian Whaling ship in the Pacific, Jackson set up his gear on the deck and started playing – not everyone was a fan of what they heard! His performances on that early voyage may not have had a tangible impact but even in those early days of Greenpeace, they were creating a space for music as an intrinsic part of action.

Some years earlier, the British composer Cornelius Cardew set up an ensemble called ‘The Scratch Orchestra’. Formed of musicians and non-musicians, professionals and amateurs, music was the means of demonstrating alternative models. Hierarchy and elitism was replaced by horizontality and inclusivity. Also, conventional music with notes on staves was often replaced by text instructions, games and improvisations – music was about the process, the experience of performing and the values that underpinned it.

This ethos, in different forms, found its way into the music of other composers. For example, the Dutch composer Louis Andriessen composed a piece called Workers Union where the musicians play loud clusters almost completely together for the whole 20-minute piece. The instruction for the piece reads ‘only in the case that every player plays with such an intention that his part is an essential one, the work will succeed; just as in the political one’.

Like Cardew, Andriessen understood the act of writing music as being inherently political:

‘Many composers view the act of composing as, somehow, above social conditioning. I contest that. How you arrange your musical material, the techniques you use and the instruments you score for, are largely determined by your own social circumstances and listening experience…’

These are perhaps a few select examples of where music is very clearly active, engaging and consciousness shifting, not simply holding up a mirror to society. However, the subtlety of Benjamin Britten’s Sinfonia da Requiem, and the richness of Richard Strauss’s Metamorphosen have the same power and potential to shift thinking about militarism, conflict and injustice. There are, of course, many issues relating to classical music, access and privilege but a concert does set aside a space for a composer’s work to provoke thought and be absorbed at a deeper level. Britten’s work opened the Shell Classic International season by praising peace and Strauss’s will conclude the season, contemplating the destruction of culture caused by World War II. Meanwhile Shell, who sponsor the concerts, exacerbate conflict in Nigeria and erode Indigenous cultures in Canada and elsewhere through environmental destruction. The music programmed and the circumstances of its performance stand in sharp relief to one another.

Shell Out Sounds, musical protest groups and engaged musicians have a crucial role to play in bringing about a necessary cultural shift but not just in the words they choose to sing or where they perform. The music itself and the relationships between the performers and audience members are a crucial part too. We sometimes forget too quickly that musical performances aren’t just good to listen to. To borrow Nicole Garneau’s term, they have the potential to be ‘public demonstrations of a revolutionary practice’ and perhaps that revolution needs to start with the sponsors…

New works in oil @ The National Gallery (courtesy of Greenpeace)

‘Out, damned logo!’ @ British Museum (courtesy of the Reclaim Shakespeare Company)

The respected author and broadcaster, Norman Lebrecht, has written a brief piece on his blog ‘Slipped Disc’ criticising Shell Out Sounds’ performance on Friday night. It is unclear whether Lebrecht was at the concert himself but he suggests that the concert was ‘disrupted by a small group of geo-activists’. The Guardian piece, to which he refers, uses our performance as a basis for considering the broader issue of oil sponsorship of the arts and offers a balanced view with the purpose of furthering debate. We would like to make several comments in response to Mr. Lebrecht’s blog.

Firstly, the performance took place during the concert’s interval in order to show solidarity with the concert’s performers and audience. Respect was shown to staff and audience members. The two performances by Shell Out Sounds were both met with supportive applause from those nearby, although may not have been heard by everyone present due to the size of the foyer space. Also, a number of composers, including Matthew Herbert, Steve Martland and Jem Finer, have already indicated their support for the issues we raised, in addition to music academics and concertgoers. Many have expressed their concern through an open letter to the Southbank’s Executive Director, Alan Bishop, and we invite those who are supportive to add their name.

Secondly, the term ‘geo-activists’ which he uses to describe the performers is misrepresentative. The concerns of Shell Out Sounds include human rights issues. For example, Shell’s activities in the Niger Delta have been investigated extensively by Amnesty International. A United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) report heavily criticises Shell and states that ‘The environmental restoration of Ogoniland could prove to be the world’s most wide-ranging and long term oil clean-up exercise ever undertaken.’ The concerns of Shell Out Sounds also include the encroachment upon the land of Indigenous peoples in Canada and disregard for their land rights. One such community – the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation – is currently suing Shell over these issues. Lebrecht’s own website describes his blog as ‘campaigning against human abuse and acts of injustice in the cultural industries’. We hope to perhaps find solidarity from Mr. Lebrecht in this aspect of our campaign.

Thirdly, he describes Shell as a ‘generous patron’. However, only 5% of the Southbank Centre’s funding came from corporate sponsorship in 2010/2011 (£2.16 million) and Shell is one of seventeen corporate sponsors and supporters. Meanwhile, Shell has spent in excess of $65 million supporting Nigeria’s military task force and nearly $5 billion on failed attempts to drill in the Arctic. Also, Shell may donate money seemingly with ‘no strings attached’ but this sponsorship does not exist in an ethical vacuum. Shell commissions on-going research into its public perception. While Shell is perceived as being socially responsible it is able to continue with its activities, acquiring what is referred to as a ‘social license to operate’. Shell undertakes strategic sponsorship of cultural institutions in order to create and maintain this perception. This is distinct from philanthropy, which is purely concerned with generosity.

This response has not yet addressed the question of climate change but even without it there is an overwhelming case for bringing Shell’s sponsorship to an end. To try and assess Shell’s contribution to climate change would be a mammoth task. However, we would like to clarify two points in regard to Mr. Lebrecht’s closing comment that ‘I understand that some climate campaigners have a gripe against the oil industry. They should set an example to the rest of us by turning out all lights at home.’ Firstly, members of Shell Out Sounds travelled to the performance by bike and public transport (thus minimising the use of oil – turning off the lights wouldn’t make any difference there as electricity doesn’t tend to come from oil). But much more importantly, dealing effectively with the issue of climate change necessarily involves actions beyond individual lifestyle choices. Members of Shell Out Sounds are particularly concerned with climate justice – the direct human cost of climate change, which extends from issues of fuel poverty in the UK to the exacerbation of hunger in the developing world. We do intend to set an example, by speaking out on the problems with unaccountable corporate power, inappropriate arts sponsorship and global oil industry destruction, in the hopes of furthering the transition to fossil-free cultural institutions in a fossil-free world. We hope this will encourage more people within the arts world to do the same.

Shell Out Sounds members are all lovers of the arts and supporters of the Southbank Centre. However, drawing upon a quotation from the conductor Claudio Abbado, ‘Our line is very clear. We are for freedom. Everything that is not for freedom, we protest.’