Suzanne Harrington: I volunteered backstage at Together For Palestine — here's my experience

Nicola Coughlan was among the speakers at the historic Together For Palestine fundraiser in London’s Wembley Arena

“I’m going to use this moment to say there are many artists I love, and that I know you love, that have hundreds of millions of followers. And they’re saying nothing in this moment.”

That’s our own Nicola Coughlan, speaking her undimmable truth to 12,500 people at the historic Together For Palestine fundraiser in London’s Wembley Arena. Musician Brian Eno, 77, has spent the past year putting this event together. Everyone is here —artists, musicians, superstars from the Arab world, Hollywood royalty, UN speakers, heroic journalists and medics from Palestine who have seen so many of their colleagues murdered, the 88-year-old Holocaust survivor Stephen Kapos, and — ooh ah — Eric Cantona.

There are four hours to get 150 people on and off the stage, and the timings are calculated to the nearest second. In terms of logistics, it’s a slippery Jenga tower of moving parts that manages to come together perfectly — like an effortlessly gliding swan, propelled behind the scenes by mad paddling.

Even the seasoned professionals who put on gigantic live shows for a living are impressed.

My job — I’m volunteering backstage — is part of the team collecting people from the industrial entrance around the back of the arena, funnelling them through airport-level security, and bringing them into the vast concrete concourse that has been hastily converted into a series of holding lounges before they go onstage.

It’s a long, hectic day of sound checks and running around and trying not to get Jamie XX mixed up with James Blake, or scream “Oh my God, it’s Felicia!” into Guy Pearce’s face.

People used to glamour, luxury and privacy mill about together in a vast concrete hangar, popping into pop-up changing rooms and pop-up hair and make-up pods, having dinner from a local Palestinian restaurant delivered in paper bags. Gaza Cola instead of Coca Cola. Nobody is getting paid — there are no fancy riders, no champagne, no special treatment, no egos, no demands. 

Everyone — black, white and brown — is wearing the green and red of Palestine.

Keffiyehs are the must-have accessory of the evening — Paloma Faith wears several of them fashioned into a frock. Katherine Hamnett and Bella Freud have done the merch.

I’m not used to being in a concrete hangar full of celebs, with an earpiece and walkie-talkie — my usual workplace is a garden shed with wifi. But because there are so many famous faces all together, they kind of cancel each other out, like stars absorbing each other’s light; after 10 straight hours of running around, I have developed a kind of celeb-blindness, like snow-blindness, except for faces.

Last week I was at the cinema watching Benedict Cumberbatch in The Roses — now I’m pointing him to the portaloo, before finding a plug socket for UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, or a sofa for the gorgeous Ruth Negga just off a flight from Los Angeles.

Musical heroes like Paul Weller affably wander about. Palestinian dancers performing with Damon Albarn do an impromptu rehearsal by the bins.

And that’s why everyone is here — to see Palestinians dance and sing. Doesn’t everyone deserve to dance and sing, without fear of being starved and murdered? 

That’s what this is all about, and even in genocide-complicit states like the UK, the cultural tide is turning. Politics follows culture, and this fundraiser for Palestine is part of that shift away from being gaslit, misled, and lied to by the Kafkaesque propaganda of genocide. 

As journalist Mehdi Hasan tells the audience in his powerful speech, “You can’t bomb the truth away.”