DJ and producer Howie B: Music can heal the scars of war

Howie B knows the power music has to bring together people divided by war.

In the late 1990s, the Scottish musician, producer and DJ travelled with U2 to perform in Sarajevo as the Bosnian city emerged from a brutal siege. In the ensuing years, musicians like Brian Eno, Massive Attack and Asian Dub Foundation – all friends and collaborators of Howie B’s – would head to the city.

An interfaith choir from the city, set up by Franciscan Monk Ivo Markovic started singing Serbian and Islamic songs together after the war. Music became a form of healing. “The only way for reconciliation without talking about politics is music,” Howie B told The National. “I’ve seen that happen. Music has been a brilliant way, after neighbours have killed each other, to heal.”

He then spent years working with local Bosnian musicians from its burgeoning electronic scene, having already established himself in London as a producer for artists including U2, Bjork and Soul II Soul.

But today, he is deeply disappointed by what he describes as a “silence” from his friends and colleagues in the music industry when it comes to Israel’s year-long military campaign in Gaza. Howie B – whose real name is Howard Bernstein – was born in Glasgow to a Jewish family and a year working on a Kibbutz in northern Israel in his youth. Music, he says, should be there to connect people, and he would like to see artists taking bold steps to build bridges and speak out against the war.

For the past year, he has been working with the Palestinian artist Bashar Murad, a singer-songwriter from East Jerusalem, and one of Palestine’s leading pop artists. The pair have been meeting in Paris, where Murad has an artist’s residency, to record an album of new songs. “I felt a real need to do something in the music world,” he said. “It was an opportunity to show solidarity, show intention and create music”.

One song, Kawkab, talks about loss, and wanting to escape from the “evil and hate”. “I never thought I’d miss living on planet earth. There are things I don’t think about, until I start crying for them,” Murad sings. “I never imagined, how big the world is, and how small its people are.” They plan to record five new songs in January.

The pair first met through the Icelandic band Hatari – the Eurovision contenders who used their platform to criticise Israel while the contest was being held in Tel Aviv in 2019. The band subsequently released a song with Murad, throwing him into the spotlight.

The current silence in the music world, made the pair “even more hungry” to collaborate. “It's for his voice to be heard, using my production, but it's his voice,” Howie B said. “Of course Bashar is incredibly active in the music scene, in his political voice, with his music. This is another suitcase of work.”

Israel-Palestine conflict

The Israel-Palestine conflict brings up many emotions for Howie B – ones that are immediately palpable as he speaks about it. Though his views on Israel have changed over time, it is clear that he cannot quite distance himself from what happens there, and the continuing questions about the Palestinian issue.

Both Howie B and Murad have been criticised by the communities to which they are closest for their work. Murad, he said, was conflicted about the relevance of making music, at a time of so much suffering and humanitarian need. “A lot of people in the Palestinian community are telling him you’re singing, you’re just singing,” Howie B says. “I say to him you’re doing what you can. He doesn’t realise how important his voice is.”

It is a dilemma which Howie B hopes Murad will address in the next songs. “He’s got that internal battle going on where he feels guilty,” he said.

Meanwhile, Howie B’s feelings are still raw from the backlash he has received from his Jewish friends and the music community. He had lost many friends, but some in the UK were coming back as the Jewish community outside of Israel was becoming more critical. “Its colours are being shown now,” he said. “The total disregard for the international court. Everything that is being said. It’s impossible to ignore.”

He hopes to work with an orchestra in the West Bank, but acknowledges it could be hard to get there.

Howie B is animated but also angered when we speak – about the collaboration, about the war, and his disappointment with the music industry. “The music community are in fear of losing work. I know I’ve lost work. But that’s not going to stop me,” he said.

“I always thought of the musical community as a dreamlike place. I should have that view, it’s joy, it’s an art form that connects us to our humanity,” he said. “When I find fellow musicians not maximising that, I find it disgusting.”

There had been outliers of which he was “proud”. Massive Attack invited Palestinian photographer Motaz Azaiza to take the stage at their concert this year in Bristol, where they also projected a stage-wide Palestinian flag. Primal Scream contributed to the design of a new Palestine football T-shirt.

Music in Bosnia

Questions around coexistence, and what music can do to promote it, are central to Howie B’s work. That is perhaps what has drawn him time and again to Sarajevo, a city famed for its centuries old cosmopolitanism, where Christians, Muslims and Jews lived together. It was also a hub of Jewish learning, home to the oldest known copy of the Haggadah, a Jewish text that sets out the order of the Passover feast.

That diversity was threatened when Bosnian Serb forces laid siege to the city for four years after the break-up of former Yugoslavia.

Howie B spent four days working as a DJ in Sarajevo two weeks after the ceasefire. After the war, he returned to the city to play a set with U2. In the following years, he collaborated regularly with musicians from the city, signed them on to his label, and helped bring electronic music bands from the UK.

“Electronic music brought people together,” he said. “Bands from the UK, France, Europe came to play. I started signing artists from Sarajevo such as Adi Lukovac on to my label.

“We were playing venues where you literally had a diesel generator, in a building bombed out with nothing in it. We were doing festivals but in quite a punk way,” he said, recalling one gig in a basketball stadium with no lights.

He was not the only one. The Pavarotti Music Centre was established in Bosnia in 1997 with support from Italian opera singer Luciano Pavarotti, English musician Brian Eno, and U2’s Bono, to use music as a form of healing.

Last year, he went back to Sarajevo again, to write the score for Kiss the Future, a documentary about the siege and U2s concert there.

It opens with a montage of sounds from a church, synagogue and mosque. It was heavily influenced by a day that Howie B spent with Markovic, the monk who set up the interfaith Pontanima choir.

Though Bosnia today is still plagued by separatism and rising nationalist rhetoric from Bosnian Serbs, Howie B is still enthralled by the city's diversity. “I’ve not seen such harmony anywhere else in the world,” he said.

He is initially reluctant to draw parallels with Jerusalem – an important home to all three religions. His visits to the Holy city in the 1980s and 1990s had been “coloured”, he claims, and he is more aware now of an underlying “apartheid”.

His words echoed those of Jerusalem's Latin Patriarch, who this month said that faith leaders in the city “barely understand each other” in the aftermath of the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel.

Relationship with Israel

Howie B has had a long, and changing relationship with Israel. His family was active in Glasgow's Jewish community, but the city's sectarian tension between Catholics and Protestants raised questions about his own identity.

“My father was staunchly anti-Zionist” he said. “I was like, OK, I want to find out what my Jewish identity is. I’m a Jewish guy from Glasgow, watching Catholics and Protestants fight each other because of bigotry. And I thought, where am I in all this?”

From the age of 11, reading about Zionism and Israel and its roots in socialism gave him hope, and he became part of a socialist Zionist youth movement in the UK. “I realised, oh, there’s Zionism, oh there’s a homeland. I was reading a lot about socialist Zionism, but also about Jewish socialists who were not Zionists,” he said. “I didn’t see the different roads. I didn’t see the underlying nationalism. I didn’t see it because of the way it was put to me.”

One of the writers he mentions is Aron David Gordon, who believed Jews had to build a state of Israel by emigrating there and raising it through agriculture and a labour movement. After leaving school, he moved to a Kibbutz north of Tiberias. “I never questioned it, does there need to a be a Jewish state? I was like, this is the land, you need to build it,” he said.

He returned to the UK, enrolled for three months at university in Manchester, dropped out, and went to London, where his musical career began.

His view of Israel ultimately changed in 1997, when he went to play a concert with Massive Attack in Tel Aviv. The way that he and the band were treated, he said, had changed his perceptions. “I was with a multicultural band and I was like, what is going on here. The way we were talked at,” he said. “It was at that gig when I said it was an apartheid state. I could not believe I’d missed it.”

He now describes himself as anti-Zionist and insisted his views won’t change again, even if Israel's politics do and a two-state solution is achieved. “I wouldn’t change my mind. I know what mindset is there in Tel Aviv. I had that mindset, not in that violent way. And I defended that mindset,” he said.

But once again, he softened. “There has to be some way in which two states are living side by side,” he conceded. “Mosques, by a synagogue, by a church. That’s how we should be living. I think it is possible.”