Abstract
Ed Vulliamy is best known for his astute, brilliant and emotional reporting of war. But music – all kinds, classical, rock, blues – was always his true motivation, his North Star of inspiration. While he was reporting the war in Bosnia for The Guardian, Vulliamy carried a book of Great War poets, citing in particular Wilfred Owen's Anthem for Doomed Youth, which he would read out to bemused colleagues.
His taste for war zones and conflict was honed as a teenager, visiting Northern Ireland during the Troubles. I met him in 1992, reporting on mafia murders in Sicily. A few weeks later we met again when Mount Etna erupted. I talked to farmers who set up tables near the lava's edge, with a bottle of wine to “welcome the volcano”, but Vulliamy was thrilled to accompany the Italian military to the top to hover above the hot and dangerous molten liquid.
He was one of the first reporters to discover the horror of the Omarska concentration camps in the north of Bosnia and he reported on the devastating siege of Sarajevo. In his down time, it was Bob Dylan and the Beatles that fascinated, Bach that sustained him, and the “Austro Germanic tradition of music” – as well as Verdi and the music of the Renaissance – that floored him. Most of all, he loved Jimi Hendrix.
His love of music started when he was a teenager roaming Notting Hill in the early 1970s – and what an array of music to choose from. Hendrix had died in the house with the purple door on Lansdowne Crescent, W11; the giants were that close to his doorstep. Vulliamy loved Joni Mitchell, Velvet Underground and Joan Baez (who later showed up in Sarajevo to give a performance in the besieged city), but he had a classically-trained ear and eventually took off to live in Vienna to go to as many classical concerts as he could. From there, he never stopped his quest to link music to its role in the world.
In the UK in the 1970s, glitter rock had just emerged with Bowie and T Rex. There were Mott the Hoople and Jethro Tull and Led Zeppelin, mellowed by softer rock like the Californian Crosby, Stills Nash and Young, Jackson Browne and the Eagles. Then there was punk. By the time Vulliamy headed to the Balkans, the explosion of Seattle grunge with Pearl Jam and Kurt Cobain was under way. Vulliamy's wars were muted by his music.
When Words Fail is Vulliamy's real love song, his testament to beauty and art above war and destruction, to “flowing, shimmering progressions” instead of snipers and shelling. It is an ode to Dvorak whilst Vulliamy is working in the midwest of America, to Robert Plant singing Kashmir in Iraq. There are trips to the borders of Mexico, President Donald Trump's gateway to “rapist” immigrants, while musing on Freud and Wagner's The Ring.
In the Occupied Territories of Palestine, he falls under the spell of Daniel Barenboim, who partnered with the epic Edward Said to form an orchestra for Palestinians and Israelis: another sign of how music slices through political discord. “It's one thing to side with the Palestinians, quite another to work with an acclaimed Israeli genius who transgresses against the division and subjugation,” he writes.
Though he has been a brilliant frontline reporter, and an observer of human nature, here is Vulliamy's real labour of love, the book he has always wanted to write. Chapters are devoted to Shostakovich and Strauss, together with thoughts on Radiohead and Rage Against the Machine. He misses no one, I think, except perhaps for Drake and Lady Gaga.
It is a book about the nature of music, but it is also a book about how music heals, unites. In the same way that the United Nations uses sport in post-conflict society (the wonders of the Sierra Leone soccer team… the Syrian refugee who went to the Rio Olympics…) music is a unifying healer.
Vulliamy succumbs to bouts of madness, a breakdown and a leap from a wall that leaves his body broken and his spirit tarnished. When he is drained from surgery and medication, it is music – John Cale, Bach and Verdi – that gets through the scars of 10 operations. “What a funny life I've led, unable to separate journalistic privilege from curiosity killed the cat,” he notes. Indeed, we think.
One of his final scenes is a cup of tea with Graham Nash. Yes, Graham Nash, he of the angelic voice, the writer of Teach Your Children and Our House, about his life with Joni Mitchell in Laurel Canyon during the hippy days.
Nash asks him in what period Vulliamy would have liked to live. 1890s Paris, he replies. Nash does not hesitate, choosing the premiere of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in 1824 Vienna. They spend hours talking about what music does – the connection, the ecstasy, the escape.
“When I see a conductor moving an orchestra with body language, getting the sound right, I'm watching a miraculous event,” he writes. “I'm touching an energy that comes through you and must surely go somewhere. The music is saying something. It's saying: ‘Wow, this world is so fucked up and so fantastic.'”
This is Vulliamy's offering: a book that at once is fucked up and fantastic; an unwinding of life, love, war, music, madness and serenity. It is touching and honest and real.