I wanted to go right back to the start with you guys. How did the idea for the Church of Stop Shopping and the choir first come about?
Rev Billy: The destruction of neighbourhoods. The destruction, in particular, of Times Square. The devastation of consumerism is obvious at some point, this system of neo-capitalism. Consumerism is the cultural enforcement arm of the growth economy, prosperity at all costs, and damage to the Earth as a systematic part of making a profit.
Savitri D: I think we're just responding to the monoculture. We're responding to the identical details appearing everywhere and the interruption of human interaction, which is resource exchange. But then corporations, advertising, marketing come between us and our relations and dominate every relationship that we have, including our relationship with ourselves and our own imagination.
And how did you guys hit upon the idea of using music and using a choir for your activism?
SD: Billy started preaching in Times Square, satirically. To be honest, people just started joining him, clapping and singing along. So it was quite organic in its inception. And now, after 20-something years of doing this work, you wouldn't want to do it any other way. The music is what makes it possible to keep doing it – it's like the food.
RB: We keep saying the Earth is communicating with us with these superstorms and these fires, and these heat waves. Communicating from nature is an old indigenous idea. The presence of music in our work, while I'm preaching in the foreground, gives us a feeling of transmission with the ineffable – with the mysteries of the natural world, which we don't understand at all.
SD: Music probably pre-dates talking. It’s like the original human technology and so it is very satisfying to engage with this really ancient technology.
More generally, how important is it to you guys that the arts is used as kind of a way to get these issues out there, communicating to the wider public how much trouble we're in?
RB: The arts have got to step up. You just can't have Extinction Rebellion people marching off to jail all the time. The arts have got to step up. Some people would say that throwing tomato soup on [Van Gogh’s Sunflowers] is a kind of performance art. Each category of art that you look at, you want them all to connect with the Earth and express the Earth right now. Get out of the abstract stuff, get out of the theoretical, get funky, and deliver. The arts are a doorway to the Earth and, once the Earth is in your body, you're courageous on another level, you're generous on another level, you're making communities on another level. Everything's different.
Savitri D performs as part of the Church of Stop Shopping Choir
(Credit: John Quilty)
Often, I think when we engage with issues around the climate and the emergency that we're in, it's easy to feel gloomy afterwards and a bit sad. But I came out of your performance feeling hopeful and uplifted. How significant is that in making action happen?
SD: Feelings matter, especially when they can connect to your values and then your actions. Feelings can be a bridge between your values and your actions, so I think music elicits feelings and helps people reaffirm or manifest that bridge between their deeply held beliefs and values and their actions. In that way, I think music is really useful. I don't want to let everyone off the hook and just let everyone feel good, but actually things are sort of desperate right now and feeling good matters – feeling the community of goodness, feeling connection to other people.
There's a hazard there because it’s just like Malcolm X always taught us. [He said] be careful about those marches because they let you blow off steam, and then you forget to get to work. There is a hazard there with the expressiveness of music and the feeling good. For us it's really important that people understand how critical the action part of it is. Beauty is not an antidote to pain. I think the arts have been guilty of that for a long time and, certainly in the contemporary moment, aesthetics replace action a lot. I struggle with this because I want people to feel full and alive and ready to go, but I also know that we have a tendency to have that feeling, and then that's it.
RB: That's a good question for us right now because we are dealing with a Brexit-level depression everywhere [after the US Election 2024]. Right now in the United States, all three branches of government are dominated right now by people who don't like Black people. They don't like people of colour.
I don't want you to talk it down. It's way worse than Brexit.
RB: It's awful, and people are just really depressed. All of a sudden, people are walking around like they're drunk.
SD: Like the bad kind of drunk.
RB: We have that recreational environmentalism that puts us in beautiful places. Right now, that feels so much the wrong direction. We have an Earth church here, although we put an X over the church to make it secular. We're encouraging people to have their own personal relationship to the Earth, to their favourite ecosystem, and use it to come back at the haters.
Rev Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir performed at the Midlands Arts Centre in Birmingham
One of the things I've been asking people who make art about the climate is that, to borrow a religious phrase, there's a risk of preaching to the converted. But you guys have a way of getting around that because you take your art to people, rather than waiting for them to come to it.
SD: Any time you have a doorway between you and the people you're talking to, each one of those doors filters people out. We try not to perform in spaces where there's more than one door between the street and the theatre. Public space is the most charged atmosphere. It's the most theatrical atmosphere. It's demanding and it's challenging.
It's a much different place to be than in the sanctity and safety of a theatre. I think for us, [public spaces] have always been the most important place we can perform. It's increasingly difficult to do. We're increasingly surveilled and policed and pushed around. We used to be able to go much further into retail space than we can now. Now we're lucky to be on the sidewalk for a while outside, you know, and we have the protection of the First Amendment [in the US], which you don't even have [in the UK]. I'm really excited to be on the street. We always surprise ourselves. It's the place where our skills and our material gets tested to its absolute limit.
This is a big question given recent news events, but do you think we're in a better place with the climate crisis than we were a decade ago?
RB: There's a couple of ways of looking at that. The first is to go to the Earth right away. The Earth has entered, I think, in the last 30 months, the first step of the sixth extinction – every month a heat record and just the scale of the Arctic and Antarctic ice melt. If you spin a globe and just put your finger somewhere and stop the globe, what's under your finger will be a tragedy. Ten years ago, there was still a chance to do something and now we're really in the rollercoaster ride.
SD: At this point, we are relieved of the lie of ethical shopping – the sort of puritanical idea of a perfect consumer. We're more honest, I think, and unfortunately people can look out of their window and see the totality of the disaster at this point, even in very protected places. We had a fire in our city park two nights ago. It's a little bit late in terms of correcting our approach, but at least the wolf is a wolf at this point. These apocalyptic realities have been felt in other places for a lot longer already. We have a reckoning that we have to do here in the so-called “first world”, but let's not pretend that there haven't been people suffering already for decades around this.
Given that landscape, is there any other art that inspires you and helps you think there might be a way forward to at least slow the decline that we're talking about?
RB: I have my favourites. Anohni [the musician and artist] and Bjork. There's some wonderful singer-songwriters like Neil Young, who really have lots of Earth in their work. I would like to see a lot more of that than we have right now. Oftentimes, you can have a climate change exhibit at a museum for six weeks and nobody really knows about it. In other words, the problem now is making a public event. Billie Eilish stops her shows for 20 minutes every show and just sits on the edge of the stage and has the whole audience in a conversation about climate change. You have to make the event.
SD: The way the media tells the story of art flattens its meaning. The way that commercial art gets presented and siloed and separated from life flattens its meaning. So of course there are hundreds, probably thousands, of artists working right now on this and making music about it and making material about it. But even if it does break through into the broader culture, it's so contained by the commercial production around it that it's almost like you can't feel it. There are lots of artists working right now and doing beautiful things and we have no idea where they are, or who they are, or how to hear them.
RB: The arts really have to come out of the buildings now. They have to come away from corporate money. Art has to be raw, it has to be volunteer, and it has to have enough of its own power that we naturally gather together and make an instant community.
What is the advice that you would give to other creatives who want to make art about this and want to get the message out there?
RB: You have to be willing to risk arrest now for your art because that's the big division between being on a stage inside a grant-financed or corporate-financed place. We don't want fossil money financing the arts. We've been arrested in the Tate Modern and the British Museum. We've been a part of that whole movement against fossil fuel financing the arts. We have to be careful about where the money is coming from. That's being political. That's being political. That's why I say if you're volunteering, and you're just out in public space, that is where the arts have to go.
SD: Don't do it alone. That goes against a whole model of work that we've been taught as artists in the 21st century, which is that it's an individual act to be an artist. But do it with other people. At the very least, you're building relationships right around you. That's the beginning of community and community is what's gonna get you through the hard parts – not just climate apocalypse, but the bad day you’re having. Bring people in. Push yourself to be with people who aren't exactly like you. Find the plurality and find ways to stretch yourself because we are quite separated and it’s really problematic.
Find out more about Rev Billy and the Church of Stop-Shopping on their official website and listen to their music via Bandcamp.
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