Salut! Live

Andrew Curry writes: It is the seventh anniversary today of the Grenfell Tower fire, which killed 72 people in Kensington in west London in 2017. Ever since the fire, Martin Simpson has included Leon Rosselson’s song Palaces of Gold in every set he performs in support of the Grenfell families’ campaign for justice.

(Photo: Andrew Curry. CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

He says he will continue to do this until the bereaved families, survivors, evacuated residents and the wider local community do get justice. The last time I saw him play, he introduced the song by saying, “I wish I didn’t still have to play this.” Because the wheels of justice turn very slowly for the poor and marginalised.

Palaces of Gold was written by Leon Rosselson, who was our Artist of the Week at the Salut! Live Facebook Group last week, and also mentioned here in a post by Colin.

Rosselson, who turns 90 this year, wrote Palaces of Gold in response to the Aberfan tragedy in Wales in October 1966, when a mining spoil tip slid down the mountain and engulfed the local school and a row of houses. 116 children and 28 adults were killed.

The song is not specifically about Aberfan. Instead Rosselson focuses on the difference between the lives of the privileged and those of the marginalised. If the children of judges and company directors had to go to school in a slum school,

Buttons would be pressed/ Rules would be broken.

Strings would be pulled/ And magic words spoken.

Invisible fingers would mould/ Palaces of gold.

Simpson first recorded the song in 2013, and it was in his repertoire from time to time before the Grenfell Fire. But as he said at a gig early this year, if he plays it until the Grenfell families get justice, he’ll probably still be playing it when he is 135.

At Aberfan, the community had been warning the National Coal Board, the NCB, that the spoil tip was dangerous for some years, and they were treated dismissively. The NCB disregarded the risks from the tip. The Aberfan Tribunal found that “the Aberfan disaster could and should have been prevented”, as it blamed the National Coal Board for the tragedy.

Similarly, at Grenfell—social housing that was managed on behalf of Kensington and Chelsea Council—residents who raised concerns about the cladding and the fire safety arrangements at Grenfell were ignored, or targeted. The housing journalist Peter Apps wrote in his must read piece after the inquiry closed that not one organisation, in the public or the private sector, did what it should have done by the residents of Grenfell, at any stage in the process:

In the private sector there was a callous indifference to anything – morality, honesty, life safety – that was not related to the bottom line of the business. In the public sector there was an aversion to anything that disrupted the status quo, a weary cynicism and an insular desire to protect the reputation of organisations by refusing to admit or actively concealing flaws.

The Inquiry’s Stage 2 report is due in September, and after that the police will need to review all of the inquiry evidence to work out what it adds to their already large-scale investigation. If people are charged as a result, it won’t be until late in 2026.

But the Met are under some pressure here. As Apps says in his article,

if the Metropolitan Police is to have any hope of a relationship of trust with the working class communities of London, it must show that it is willing and able to prosecute the people responsible for the deaths of a community like them in Grenfell Tower.

In the meantime, Martin Simpson will be singing Palaces of Gold every time he goes onstage for a while to come.

(Photo: Andrew Curry. CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)