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The sheer scale of it was boggling. A total of 69 artists, speakers and activists were to appear at Ovo Arena Wembley.
There were stars of music: Damon Albarn, Bastille, PinkPantheress, Hot Chip and a festival’s worth of others. There were stars of stage and screen: Benedict Cumberbatch, Florence Pugh, Guy Pearce, Ramy Youssef and a huge supporting cast. There were the firebrands, the podcasters, the people you’re sure are important but you have no idea why. And there were the people who, well, you don’t really know what they’re bringing: the former footballer Eric Cantona, the Love Island host Laura Whitmore, the Chicken Shop Dates YouTuber Amelia Dimoldenberg.
To one of the evening’s artists, Paul Weller, it might have all seemed very familiar: the combination of righteousness and music was reminiscent of the big events of the Thatcher years – the GLC Jobs for a Change festival in Battersea Park in July 1985, or the Artists Against Apartheid’s Festival for Freedom on Clapham Common the following summer. (Weller played with the Style Council at the latter, which offered a similarly eclectic experience: Archbishop Trevor Huddleston reminiscing about giving Gary Kemp his first guitar, before Spandau Ballet premiered Through the Barricades.)
In other respects, though, it was very modern. There was no need for wandering through the crowd shaking buckets – as well as the £500,000 or so raised by ticket sales (they all sold in two hours), Together for Palestine solicits online donations, and, like any good arena event, offered a vast array of merch designed by Ayham Hassan, Bella Freud, Katherine Hamnett, Priya Ahluwalia and other fashion stars, from the quotidian T-shirts to the inevitable keffiyehs. Given that arena rock shows expect to add up to 50% in merch sales to ticket revenue, and that these designs, too, are available online, it shaped up to be an efficient fundraising exercise.
It was not an exercise in white saviourism. Though Brian Eno had assembled the bill, the artistic director was the exiled Palestinian artist Malak Mattar, who had left Gaza on 6 October 2023 to begin studying at Central St Martin’s. The oud player Adnan Joubran, the rapper El Far3i and the singer Nai Barghouti were on the bill, representing different strands of Palestinian musical identity.
Before the event began, as crowds filed in – bamboozled by a lack of signage – a dozen or so protesters clutching Israeli flags tried to make their presence known to a snake of people waving Palestinian flags and chanting and drumming their way around the plaza outside the arena. But few ticket holders stopped for more than a moment and it took no more than a few police to keep them apart.
Inside, the mood was far from insurrectionary. The nearest thing to dissent came when Louis Theroux referred to Israeli violence and was heckled: “It’s genocide!” One of the oddities of events like this is that they are the only gatherings at which mentions of genocide are cheered.
One participant appeared to feel the need to exercise caution: Benedict Cumberbatch shared the reading of a poem by Mahmoud Darwish with the playwright Amer Hlehel and, while the teleprompter spoke of the dead of Gaza ascending to heaven “with a smile”, he paused and left that bit out.
Richard Gere went wildly off-piste, ditching his scripted speech about Gaza’s doctors to instead talk about his “caravan of love and compassion and dancing”. The teleprompter operator scrolled up and scrolled down and eventually gave up.
Palestinian speakers and musicians made a huge impression. The journalist Yara Eid spoke fiercely about the 270 journalists killed in Gaza, to huge cheers. The pianist Faraj Suleiman will never play again to 12,500 people at Wembley but here he did, backed thrillingly by a jazz-prog power trio. Bargouti, too, enthralled the crowd. No cheer was louder, though, than the one that greeted Neneh Cherry, who joined Greentea Peng on stage to perform her hit Seven Seconds.
After four hours – during which time few left the auditorium; Wembley’s beer sales will not have broken any records – some of the audience were losing focus and sloping off, ignoring Albarn, Omar Souleyman and Gorillaz. The organisers probably didn’t mind, for so many left wearing Together for Palestine T-shirts and clutching tote bags. By 10pm, Jameela Jamil announced, the show had already raised £1.5m. Job done.
