Norwich’s sixth Gaza Gig was an exercise in anti-abstraction and love
8pm. 26th March, 2026. 68a London Street, Norwich. The sixth Gaza Gig is in full swing. You could hear a pin drop, if your attention had somehow been rent from the soulful, sighing tones of Maya Law, that is. Unsipped pints sweat over gig-goers’ hands as they remain transfixed to the stage, Law’s strums ripple over them. We know the drill by now: show up, turn out, vibe with Norwich’s finest. We’d done this five times before, but nothing about that evening fell into stasis.
‘You play the same songs every day, no wonder that you never change,’ Law sang.
The significance of this being Norwich’s sixth Gaza Gig was not lost on us, and Law’s frustration with her tuneful subject maps onto a shared contention: what has changed?1 It’s hard to feel as though international diplomatic policy is changing when much of what we see in relation to Gaza features atrocity, destruction and heartbreak.
But Law speaks to the art of habit-breaking, of change through interruption. The Gaza Gig represents a break from our normal media consumption of ai contentslop and memes spliced with Gazan families begging for resources embedded into a late-capitalist doomscroll. When we do show up and turn out for events like this, that run on a pulse of optimism, the status quo of imposed helplessness begins to show its internal mechanics.
Hector, sushi-chef, put it as such: ‘War* is also a series of conflicts of attention.’ Our focus is drawn everywhere, towards atrocities committed across all corners of the world. While at the same time, a condescending narrative of protecting your own peace emerges as a cultural palette cleanser. When the Vietnam War became the first Television War – it galvanised horrified viewers at home to take to the streets en masse. Here we have a genocide broadcast to us from the other side of a capacitive screen that we hold in our hand, not just in technicolour but in HD too, yet it can feel as though the mainstream conversation about Gaza has died down. Perhaps it got too overwhelming. Perhaps we can’t imagine conflict when it isn’t televised. Alexander Carson, whose set followed Law’s, told me that ‘It’s very easy to become apathetic in this 24hr news cycle world we live in and I’m proud that the community within Norwich aren’t letting that apathy seep in.’ Conflicts in the East are usually posited in Anglo-American newsfeeds as something happening on the ‘other side’ – and this sense of distance is leveraged against the victims of genocide. Distance is – as both a noun and a verb – weaponised, used to hinder organisation, community; whether it’s us from the fruits of our labour, between our individualised identities, or between ourselves in Norwich and those in the West Bank. Western world powers are hyper-aware of the threat of distance, it is ‘intrinsically tied to Israel’s project to be a Western outpost in the Middle East’. It is in their interests to reduce the geo-political gaps in their power, while maintaining our sense of distance from these matters.
At the last Gaza gig, that the government’s interests do not align with our own was a point much reiterated and Carson expressed this skepticism towards Westminster yet again: “I don’t have much faith in the current UK government to listen to anything I have to say sadly. The only thing I would say is history is being written right now and they have a choice which side they want to be on. Which is why the UK needs to halt all arms trade to Israel immediately.”
What is clear, however, is that Carson places their hope closer to home: Norwich. It was all very intimate. Tongue in cheek, even. They told the crowd they were in a cult, before sliding into their fourth song: drums a sultry heartbeat, a gentle hi-hat simmer roving through the basement floor, gently incarnadine – there’s something honest in Carson’s sound. In spite of the distance between Norwich and the West Bank, Alexander said that they were struck by the number “of people in one room in one small part of a different country who believe in justice and freedom and safety for a people we’re likely to never meet.” Norwich comes together in spite of that distance. We find ways to celebrate life that don’t play into the hands of those looking to make us apathetic; Carson themself is choosing to boycott music-streaming giant Spotify for the release of their new single, ‘VHS’, which came out on the 7th April.
Music has of course been the soul of this evening’s Gaza Gig (and all the gigs before it), so it makes perfect sense that a compilation album of the events’ alumni is out now. Ell Johnson, writer, musician and co-organiser, is particularly proud of this one and it can be found here. Further fundraising opportunities were highlighted in the speeches, including Norwich’s Pedro Danger’s charity excursion to walk the three peaks and the merch stall at the back of the venue, dutifully manned by co-organiser Sonny McCarter. The merch table alone raised £750 for Nesma Hamto, a Palestinian journalist and mother struggling to support her family in the Gaza Strip. Her fundraiser aims to support five families, altogether 35 people including children and pregnant women. At the core of the evening are, as usual, the speeches. This is the single part of the evening when there is no music. Organisers Ell and Ella Selbie speak on the conflict and of the importance of keeping pro-Palestinian momentum going amid the ever-expanding scope of violence in the Middle East. Yet alongside the evening’s sombre undertones beats a pulse of optimism. This evening’s chosen charity was Gaza Soup Kitchen, an initiative set up by two brothers, Hani and Mahmoud Almadhoun, the latter of whom was killed by an Israeli drone strike. Gaza Soup Kitchen operates across 10 kitchen sites to serve hot meals to over 70,000 people daily, including 2,000 families who are served by their water trucks. They also provide food parcels and run clinics for over 450 of their neighbours and community: this is an initiative run by Gazans, for Gazans. Mahmoud’s final word “Mostamreen” (مستمرين) – which means “we will continue,” – is the Soup Kitchen’s guiding principle and feels particularly poignant tonight.2
I spoke to Lily, a local poet, about continuity in community action. She immediately cited the speeches as key to stoking the charitable spirit; being placed at the centre of the evening. She found the “quiet moment” of reflection to be a “clarifying” force in “honing the focus” of the event. Ifrah, who also runs @Norwich4Palestine, added that it’s “important to be among the hubbub of it all.” Physical events like the Gaza Gig are fundamental to that sense of immersion, it’s hard to deny the palpable togetherness of being in a room, shoulder to shoulder, heads, knees, toes, everything bumping to the same rhythm – some kind of acoustic mimesis of a shared concern. “Charity often feels like an abstraction, but to have an event where we are constantly bringing attention back to the cause,” Ifrah advised. “Embedding speeches into the heart of the event, means that the cause is never far from people’s minds, you are immersed in the communal act of giving.” It’s apparent that the language we use to discuss how we hold political cause in our minds plays upon the phenomenological collapse of attention and distance – what is abstract requires grounding, that is, to be situated in a proxy physicality, in tonight’s case, the heady soundbath of neo-classical, post-punk jazz and metal. Also key is “making [sic] a point to be seen,”3 in other words, proving a perceptual concreteness to remedy the abstract distance of “charity”. To be seen, to show up, to turn out, is to play a part in rewiring our post-ironic perception of helplessness to hope, to a demonstrable community. In this vein, it’s no wonder that pro-Palestinian rally turnouts are consistently underreported.4
Tony, musician and gig-goer, reiterated this importance from a musician’s perspective: “it’s intimidating being on stage.” Turning out is a means of showing your gratitude to these artists who are giving their all. Watching bands like Magnolia – sweat pouring off their brows, strings snapping mid-song, the crowd falling into an impromptu mosh pit, the air is hot with exertion, saturated with sound (fortunately, Voodoo’s offers foam ear plugs gratis) – it’s clear a huge, huge amount of energy is put into every second of this evening. That the people of Gaza deserve our all is implicit. It’s our “responsibility to give [Gazans] our time – to be involved… to be part of that community” is integral to keeping the momentum going, Magnolia’s frontman George stated, between breaths. There is something Black Country, New Road-ish about Magnolia, but their frenetic energy, the creativity with noise (my housemate was enraptured by their saxophonist and how they utilised the instrument’s sound, taking it beyond conventional melody) sets them apart. On stage, the band members all faced each other, leaning in, leaning out, it felt as though they were performing as one single organ, fuelled by some kind of cacophonic, symbiotic harmony.
One commonality between most people I spoke to, and everyone we heard, was that when people discussed community, their metaphors often had a carnal element to it. That is, we have come to speak of community as a living thing, as opposed to an incorporeal concept. A 2018 paper on language production maintains that “abstract words allow us to convey important human ideas like scientific (e.g. theory, calculus) and social (e.g. justice) concepts, and extend our capacity to convey ideas beyond the physical reality of the here and now.” The threat of distance as a conceptual inhibitor of a political movement has been established, but there was no sense of distance tonight. And yes, like any living thing, its nurturing is not always easy. But it would mean much less, and achieve much less, if community was not something that we made happen in spite of our tiredness, or our lack of time and money. In order for a community to feel integrated into the “hubbub” of your everyday life (and for you to feel integrated into the “hubbub” of community) you have to give a little portion of that life for it to find space.
Kulk, a duo specialising in “doom for the people”, were the final performers of the night.5 Thom and Jade’s sound is dense, every corner of the basement filled, the crowd thronging towards the stage, it ended the evening on a high. Community, to Kulk, “is the backbone of a meaningful life” – again, they invoke the corporeality of a tangible community. The stuff of life, of its cycle, how that cycle resonates with us on an emotional level, is all tied into the Kulk ethos. Their latest release, Ache, is an exploration of grief and a testament to art’s inherence to navigating fraught emotion. The later sound of this evening was much heavier than before, perhaps this is why the atmosphere felt more immediate and bodily. “It [be]comes more and more apparent that the people around you hold everything together,” Kulk later explained. Community is its people, it relies on our living to live itself, we are its component tissue. This evening, for three hours, Norwich once again bore an ecosystem working in polyphony, albeit a torrid, noise-pilled polyphony.
Ell was keen to draw upon the uniqueness of Norwich’s music scene. “Norwich has a big heart,” she told me outside Voodoo’s, as a man smokes a cigarette from his nostril behind us. It’s hard not to feel a tenderness towards the Norwich beat, including its many local characters, who, for better or for worse, make up the more colourful aspects of its landscape. “[Norwich’s] music scene has a big heart.” Charity is built into the biology of the Norwich music scene, Ell tells me about several other concurrent gigs for Gaza that have been organised in this way.The event raised £2067 overall, with £1317 going to Gaza Soup Kitchen and over £70 of that taken in donations on the night. In a region that saw a 760% increase in starvation deaths during 2025 alone, Gaza needs us and others to continue this support for even the most basic nutrition.6
Even at the end of the night, the gig-goers streaming from Voodoo’s doors towards Bank Plain were energised, something within them reinvigorated. Like a muscle, community here is exercised, growing stronger with each act of self-sacrifice, with each penny spent, with each clamourous disavowal of the government’s spineless bending towards Israeli apartheid. It is a big heart that will – as long as we have love, a beat and an anti-imperialist lifeblood – keep pumping.
مستمرين
(mostamreen: we will continue)
You can continue to donate to the Gaza soup kitchen here: https://gazasoupkitchen.org/
Also, be sure to keep your eyes peeled for further Gaza gigs through their instagram here: https://www.instagram.com/thegazagig/
SOURCES
Zdrazilova, Lenka; Sidhu, David M. ; Pexman, Penny M. 5 August 2018. “Communicating abstract meaning: concepts revealed in words and gestures.” Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci; 373 (1752): 20170138. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2017.0138
*which he clarified is not how he refer to this specific genocide, but perhaps better articulates the structures of representation that shape how we conceptualise violence unto colonised peoples – the status quo cannot bear to admit its reliance on imbalanced power.
- Ell Johnson, writer, musician and co-organiser of tonight’s event, refers to last year’s ‘ceasefire’ as a ‘joke’ during the night’s speeches. ↩︎
- via https://gazasoupkitchen.org. ↩︎
- George of Magnolia ↩︎
- https://norfolkpsc.org.uk/ofcom-complaint-about-representation-of-numbers-at-the-nakba-march-on-may-17th/ ↩︎
- Via The Wondering Wizard, issue one. ↩︎
- via https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2026/2/5/starvation-by-design-how-israel-turned-food-into-a-weapon-of-war-in-ga ↩︎