Ecopella – You’re Needed Now

You’re Needed Now is Dallas de Brabander’s call to come and join us in the streets and swell the numbers demanding action against coal-fired climate change. No lame excuses please! Besides, it can be fun to celebrate the planet and look to a cleaner future for it. That’s why Ecopella observes Earth Day on a year-long rather than a yearly basis.

Celebrating our victories is a rare pleasure, so I wasn’t disappointed at having to rewrite AGL when the determined citizens of Gloucester, NSW defeated that company’s planned gasfield in 2016. Now, as we help the Knitting Nanas resist the Santos Narrabri Coal Seam Gas Project, we enjoy Paul Spencer’s rewording of an old traditional melody: When Coal Seam Gas Was New.

Paul has given us a great many excellent songs over the decades, and while He’s Gotta Go is now somewhat dated, we include it here because it was so much fun to sing! We reckon ‘though that Take Me There will be relevant as long as there are idiot commentators on the Right complaining of a political influence that the Green movement can only wish we had in reality.

Ecopella rocks! Even without electric guitars or my drum kit our a cappella version of John Ross’s Councillor Chambers has much of the energy that the Born Again Pagans put into it during the 1990s. That band was led by Peter Hicks, whose satire Let’s Pretend has also waltzed its way into a choral arrangement.

And while we’re dancing, how about a couple of tangos? We love it when our friends, the Men With Day Jobs, join us at rallies to sing their Denial Tango, and it’s always a popular item on our setlists. If Canada were accessible by bike, rather than jet plane, I’d love to ask Marie-Lynn Hammond for a Two Wheel Tango.

Our second sexiest song is more local. With some help from the pop culture of the noughties, and an atlas, Clark Gormley has given his Murray Darling a sense of humour in the face of dire crisis.

The small habits recommended in My Kyoto aren’t offered as substitutes for more active political campaigning but are simply some environmentally benign things to do in daily life. Since we last recorded it, two albums ago, it has acquired a verse about a stronger action we can all take. Divest came from some words of Annie Close. We aren’t licensed to give financial advice, but there it is.

I first heard Unity by John Tams at a folk session, and recorded the singer on The People Have Songs compilation. Our later choral version’s rousing anthemic style has made it popular among the activist groups we sing for, as well as a number of other choirs. We’re grateful for the voices of the Solidarity Choir who joined us on this recording.

When we realised, a decade ago, that we needed a noisy song to take out on exuberant street marches, Cathy Rytmeister gave us illuminating words for an Energy March lauding the immense power of wind, wave and sun… and of ourselves!