Tears for Peshawar keep rolling down

Australian musician Peter Flierl to perform live tribute to those massacred in the APS attack.

ISLAMABAD:

Bassist for Australian band PlanB, Peter Flierl, who has collaborated with Pakistani  Indie musicians in the past, is set to perform a live tribute to the victims of the Peshawar school massacre on Wednesday.  He wrote the song Tears for Peshawar, on the request of a Pakistani radio jockey, as a means to commemorate the recent atrocities and to offer hope to the people of Pakistan through these turbulent times.

“I was pretty humbled to have even been approached but, at the same time, challenged and eager to try and create something that would convey the myriad of emotions that the nation was going through in the aftermath of this tragic incident,” Flierl told The Express Tribune. He said he enlisted the lyrical skills of PlanB’s keyboard player Adrian Miller to put together words that would adequately convey the anger and grief associated with the harrowing attack. At the same time, they also strove to highlight the solidarity and resolve of the nation to overcome the adversity and work together for a better future for the children.



He said it was both interesting and surprising to experience how the song came together. “I came up with a melody and chord pattern, which have a PlanB signature to it,” he stated. “But what will take this song in a different dimension is the result of the input from the various musicians in Khaas Collaboration, (which was Flierl’s joint initiative with a few local underground musicians, who performed unplugged, local interpretations of PlanB songs),” he added.

Flierl shared PlanB would like to take their interpretation of the song Tears for Peshawar on tour to China and Mongolia next July. He has also been in talks with producer-songwriter Sarmad Ghafoor about recording the song in his studio. “Ghafoor has been supportive in agreeing to give his time, enabling the song to be recorded and, hopefully, released in some form and, in some small way, assist in raising funds for the families that were affected by this tragic incident,” he commented.



It was the summer of 2006 when Flierl first came to Pakistan for three months to work at the Australian High Commission. “It was this deployment that gave me my first opportunity to mix with an array of mainly Pakistani, but also Canadian and American musicians who were in Islamabad.” His time in Pakistan has exposed him to music from this part of the world and he said he became a fan of the fusion of local music with western musical influences.

“Having the opportunity to mix with contemporary Pakistani artistes such as Natasha Humera Ejaz and Bakshi Brothers has opened my eyes to the talent that is being produced by this country,” he said. “Well-known artistes like Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, who is probably one of, if not the, most revered exponents of qawwalis, as well as one of Pakistan’s greatest tabla players, Mohammad Ajmal Khan, are certainly musicians who I draw inspiration from,” he shared.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 28^th, 2015.

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