Leamington chart topper Luke Concannon of Nizlopi ‘JCB’ fame releases new song

In 2005, Luke Concannon was part of the folk duo Nizlopi.

In their UK and Ireland chart-topping song JCB, Luke recounts getting a childhood ride home from school on his father’s road digger, a JCB.

A young Ed Sheeran was Nizlopi’s guitar technician and he has named Luke as a major influence on his musical development.

Luke, who now lives with his partner and their newborn baby in Vermont in the US has now collaborated with musician Darius Christian to write and record Stick Together which he describes as an anthem for the community resilience and resistance movement.

He said: “I was sitting outside our yurt in the wild woods one March morning.

"There was a cold crisp light, fresh wind, dawn waking, and I was listening to the trees and heard this song coming through.

"I heard the riff then ‘we’ve got one hundred years and then fires’.

"My sense was that the trees were saying ‘would you humans please wake up and change course or we’re all screwed?’

"The verses are a kind of litany of grief for our warming and violent world, so cut off from the wholeness we hunger for.

" And then that presence in nature calling us to grow to the light, to go for the heights of our potential, and how we can do that if we stick together and stay together.

"It’s the embodiment of the Margaret Mead saying ‘never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has’.”

In 2009, Luke went on a pilgrimage to Palestine.

He says he returned feeling “so much passion, commitment, and idealism” that he wrote the album Give It All.

It was about the inspiration he felt hitchhiking around the region, doing service work on the West Bank and the possibilities for making a better world.

But he also admits that the intensity led to him feeling some burnout, followed by getting addicted to the internet “like most everyone he knows”.

He said: “The antidote is community and nature, healing ourselves and the world.”

To listen to Stick Together click here: https://tinyurl.com/2y5y3cc7