IN THE FOREST, WE ARE HIDING
Todos somos Marcos.

Your reporter's always wanted to go to indie alterno-festival All Tomorrow's Parties. In many ways it represents everything I love the most - a brutalist 1960s British holiday resort straight out of Hi-De-Hi, playing host to a strange musical blend of playful tweeness, the wilfully avant-garde, and uncompromising Puritanism, and filled with a hedonistic crowd of young people who don't see why, just because they see the world of Ibiza Uncovered as a hell on Earth, they shouldn't be allowed to go wild in the country sometimes too.

Unfortunately, for logistical reasons (largely but not solely related to not having the required three like-minded friends to share a chalet with) it's never come to pass, and during the most recent event in 2005, your correspondent was stuck at home as usual watching the telly. Which turned out to be just as well, as otherwise he'd have missed one of the most powerful things shown on British TV all year, less than five minutes of broadcasting which somehow managed to précis both the central message of the most important book ever written in human history, and the core philosophy of the political movement which represents the last hope for progressive civilisation in the face of a future that grows more terrifying every day.

It's mostly people going "Ooh ooh-ooh-ooh ooh ooh ooh".

Audience applaud imminent bold attempt to link catchy pop tune to Zapatista rebels.

Channel 4, having nowadays given its peak-time programming over almost entirely to the sick and hideous black joke at humanity's expense that is Big Brother, still quietly sticks a few interesting things on, unhyped and unadvertised, in the hours after midnight. By sheer chance, your reporter happened to catch one of them during the ATP weekend, in the form of a broadcast of a concert in Paris by much-lauded Canadian band The Arcade Fire. Having previously had mixed and mostly lukewarm feelings towards what little I'd heard of their work, I decided to watch it anyway for want of anything better to do, and to see if I could figure out what everyone else was getting so excited about. It turned out to be a great show, full of brilliant tunes played with verve and passion, and I ended up much more convinced than I'd been before. But one track in particular stood out a mile from the others.

Even by the eclectic standards of the rest of the band's output, "Haiti" is an odd little song. With lyrics that are a random whatever-rhymes-best jumble of French and English, it's about the civil-war-torn Central American island fragment of the same name, ruled for generations by the autocratic tyrants of the Duvalier family and which (according to the CIA World Factbook) is the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere. But it doesn't take a lot of effort to interpret the song a lot more broadly, and the live performance captured in the show added a whole new dimension to that interpretation too. If you'll indulge your reporter, he'll try to use it now to demonstrate, second by second, just why he believes that music is, above all others, the most powerful artform and communicative force in the world.