Declan Welsh and The Decadent West - CRAZY TOUR STORIES

In this Crazy Tour Stories segment, the alternative rock artist, Declan Welsh and The Decadent West, shares one of his stories from being on the road. You can check out the story below:

So I guess crazy is a word open to interpretation, but I think the craziest thing that’s ever happened to me through playing music is that I got to go to the West Bank in Palestine to play a festival in Bethlehem. Many of the craziest parts of this tour had nothing to do with music itself. It’s a beautiful place full of people and sights and experiences that will leave you changed in a very dramatic way. I wasn’t the same person when I came back and have remained changed by it to this day. That’s true as both a person and an artist. So let me tell you about the moment that made me feel the way only art can.

I was playing on a stage in Bethlehem that faced the Church of the Nativity. I was raised Catholic, and so it was a truly surreal moment to be in the little town of Bethlehem looking on to where Jesus was born. The line I’ve said before is that I went an atheist and came back agnostic. Palestine restores your faith in some way. Or it did mine. That’s the very strange thing—you’d think it would be hopeless, but it somehow isn’t. Even amidst all the obviously hopeless conditions, you see this enthusiasm for living and being alive that gives you this gift of faith. Whether it’s dedication to religion, politics, art, humanity, food, football; whatever it is, you will find yourself believing again after spending time in Palestine.

I stood on stage, a much younger version of myself, and I remember feeling very uncertain that I would be worthy of the attention of these remarkable human beings. I wrote music (and to some extent still do) that is meant to be sung. You engage with the words, they mean something to you, and you come to a show and we all sing them together and it’s a lovely time. Putting aside the obvious difficulty of my Scottish accent, my bigger worry was – what do my stories about growing up in suburban Lanarkshire and going out in Glasgow have to offer this crowd? What could they possibly? But they were all the songs I had, so I decided to play them anyway and hope for the best.

I remember singing a song I had written about growing up in East Kilbride, maybe the furthest place from Bethlehem you could imagine, and wanting to get out of a small town. It was called “I’ll Never Leave This Place.” I can remember looking out into the crowd of mostly young Palestinians and singing lines about the existential feeling of being trapped somewhere and beginning to form what is probably the basis of my stance on art that has remained to this day.

My embarrassment and anxiety over whether something is a serious enough subject or relevant to people are useless emotions when it comes to sharing art. Art doesn’t need to be about anything in particular to justify its existence. And moreover, people are very capable of understanding the emotional throughlines of art no matter the material context. To put it simply: we all experience the same range of emotions but for different reasons. And that range of emotions is something we have in common. It’s where art builds from. It’s why you can relate to aliens and werewolves and vampires if they are written well enough. And it’s why you can travel the world singing songs about your very specific existence, and people everywhere (and I mean everywhere) will relate to it.

Palestinian teenagers in the West Bank have material reasons to feel the same emotions that Scottish teenagers feel for different reasons. They all dream of leaving their small town to somewhere brighter but feel a sense of loyalty toward it, or fear of what will happen if they try and fail. And it’s all experienced through these emotions that are simply more or less intense, but not fundamentally different. Hope, sorrow, grief, anxiety, passion, anger, resentment, love—we all have this in common, and it’s why art transcends all borders. It’s not enough, it can’t save the world on its own, but as a tool to demonstrate that we are all capable of understanding each other and that we are all human beings, it can be effective.

And the sad but unignorable reason that is important is that we are invited every day to imagine that Palestinian children don’t feel the same pain as our children would when they are shot in the head or ripped apart by bombs. That Palestinian mothers don’t grieve their children in the same way as ours do. That Palestinians do not react in the same way we would to occupation, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid. That Palestinian hunger isn’t as bad as ours. We all feel the same way when these things happen to us. Very few will say out loud, “Palestinians don’t count.” But many will accept that they are people to whom these things just happen. You wouldn’t accept it happening here, so if you accept it there—you are operating an apartheid of the mind, where you categorize the world into people to whom genocide is allowed to happen and people for whom genocide must never be allowed to happen.

So my craziest tour story is simply the realization of a fact that would be straightforward if the world weren’t the way it was:

When I played songs about growing up in East Kilbride to people in Bethlehem, I truly understood for the first time that art is a tool for us to understand truths about the world that are harder to communicate in just words. When you understand someone’s joy or pain or fear or anxiety—you understand that they are human. And it’s been a long time since the majority of people have been invited to view humanity as one team, pulling in one direction. So, artists, your only role in the inevitable revolution is simple: keep reminding everyone of the humanity of those we are asked to view as subhuman.

Keep up with Declan Welsh and The Decadent West on Instagram and TikTok.