Top drummers create global drum beat for peace

World famous drummers are lending their support, and their beats, to a new campaign calling on global leaders to take action to prevent all-out conflict returning to Sudan.

Drummers including Stewart Copeland, Radiohead´s Phil Selway, Pink Floyd´s Nick Mason and Jonny Quinn of Snow Patrol, Egyptian drummer Yehia Khalil and Ghanaian Mustapha Tettey Addy have come together to create a ‘global beat for peace´ in Sudan.

The drummers appear in a music video filmed across the world featuring a drum beat that starts in the Sudan and passed on, like a baton, between drummers in more than 15 countries including the UK, Brazil, Mexico, the US, France, Spain, South Africa, Senegal, Egypt, Ghana, UAE, Japan, Russian and Australia.

The film was the brainchild of Faithless drummer Jamie Catto, and has been launched today (9th January) on www.sudan365.org and also on the front page of YouTube. Supporters will be asked to upload pictures and videos of themselves joining the beat for peace.

According to Jamie, “It´s incredibly exciting. Thousands of drummers from some of the most famous in the world to community groups across five continents have come together to create a global beat for peace in Sudan.”

Phil Selway said, “I think music is such a powerful way of bringing people together. Of course I´m biased in thinking that what´s underpinning it all is always the beat! Hopefully this film will show that together people can make a huge noise and through this film people´s focus will be brought back to what is happening in Sudan.”

Sudan´s civil war killed at least two million people and displaced a further four million between 1983 and 2005. However, the fragile peace agreement threatens to collapse with the situation in the south of the country increasingly volatile, and campaigners fear that elections in 2010 and a referendum for Southern secession in 2011 could lead to more mass violence. The campaign aims to persuade the world´s leaders to take diplomatic action over the next 365 days to prevent further conflict.

More information can be found at www.sudan365.org.