The Soundtrack of War

April 12, 2026

It all feels a bit on edge at the moment, doesn’t it?

I am not going to go full doom-and-gloom, but there is something in the air that’s impossible to ignore. It’s on the news, it’s on socials, and it’s a bit all-pervading. Even if you try to ignore it, it tends to get in anyway. And I have tried to look away to an extent, but the current world situation weighs heavily and is more than a bit concerning. War! It seems to be all the rage at the moment.

Did you know that there is that thing, the Doomsday Clock? It always sounds a bit like a gimmick until you actually look at it properly. We are closer to midnight now than we have ever been. That is not me trying to be dramatic; that is just where it is set. And if you don’t know what this clock is, it’s a symbolic measure created by scientists to show how close humanity is to global catastrophe, with midnight representing the point of no return. As of the latest update, the Doomsday Clock is set to 90 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been. That can’t be a positive thing!

When I was a late teenager, I came across a book that stopped me in my tracks and shaped the way I still think. War Against War! by Ernst Friedrich, and I genuinely think it should be compulsory reading in schools. It is not an easy book to take in, and it’s not meant to be. It does not soften anything or try to sugarcoat the horrors of war. It just shows you what war actually does to people – in graphic detail. The damage, the reality, the bits that are usually kept well out of public view. The truth lay bare in all its gory detail. I remember looking at that book and thinking, “Why is this not what we are shown all the time?” Because once you have seen that book, it is very hard to go back to the more sanitised version of things. It has stayed with me ever since.

War is not glamorous. It never has been. However, the propaganda machines on all sides of any conflict might suggest otherwise. And yet, the powers that be keep trying to make it look like something it is not. In how it is presented, how it is remembered, and how it filters through culture. War is the precise antithesis of glamour, but we (or, rather, “they“) seem reluctant to spin it that way.

Music sits right in the middle of all that, both from the anti-war sentiment and from the perspective of glamourising or celebrating war.

If you were to jump in a time machine and go back to the late sixties, you would land in the middle of something that feels all but impossible now. A moment in time when music, politics, youth culture, and protest all seemed part of the same conversation. The hippie period. Woodstock gets talked about a lot, sometimes to the point where it feels like mythology, but strip that away, and you are left with something very real, and I think very important. A gathering of people at a time when the Vietnam War was impossible to ignore. You had Jimi Hendrix standing on stage (on a Monday morning to a bedraggled audience), taking “The Star-Spangled Banner” and twisting it into something that sounded horrific, uneasy, almost like it was breaking apart. Like a sonic version of War Against War! You had the recently deceased Country Joe McDonald leading a crowd in something that was funny on the surface with his “Gimme an F…” but had a very sinister edge to it underneath – “be the first one on your block, to have your boy come home in a box”. You also had people like Joan Baez singing with a kind of weight that felt very different to everything else going on.

Around that same period, songs like Fortunate Son and War were cutting straight through everything with no ambiguity at all. “It ain’t nothing but a heart-breaker (War) Friend only to The Undertaker”.

Then (later) you get Give Peace a Chance, which feels like the other side of the same coin. Less anger, more unity. People singing together, not because they all agree on everything, but because they agree on that one thing: war is a bad thing.

Profit in Peace by Ocean Colour Scene hit the nail on the head. And looking at the wars that are raging at the moment, I can’t help but listen to the words of this song and think that, amongst the carnage, someone is profiting out of all this.

The whole Peace Punk movement of the 80s had its ideologies firmly rooted in anti-war and pacifist traditions, but the music had a mostly harder edge. Crass’ Sheep Farming in the Falklands, Gotcha, or Yes Sir, I Will have that more aggressive feel, and then The Mob’s No Doves Fly Here is more gentle, but equally menacing.

And then you get to now, and it becomes harder to pin down any kind of protest.

That might just be me. It might be that I am not looking in the right places, or that everything is more fragmented now. Perhaps I’m too old and not getting exposed to the ‘scene”. But it doesn’t feel like there is a single voice, or even a group of voices, cutting through in the same way musically. Perhaps it’s because there isn’t a huge and popular anti-war movement. Perhaps it’s because war feels at a distance. Perhaps it’s the dronification of war. However, the lack of protest seems odd to me, given where we seem to be and where the hands on that clock are pointing. Maybe it’s just that everything is more individual now. Playlists instead of movements and algorithms instead of shared experience. I don’t know, it just feels different.

Then there is the other side of all this, which is a bit harder to get your head around. Or harder to get my head around, though I understand the war-mongers’ logic. There have been times when music has been used as a weapon. Not metaphorically speaking, but literally. Loud, relentless, and impossible to escape. The CIA have used it in interrogations. There was that situation with Manuel Noriega during the United States invasion of Panama, where music was blasted at him continuously. I seem to remember some You Shook Me All Night Long and I Fought the Law being in there, though my memory might be hazy on this! It’s an odd one, for sure! Something that can mean so much to us, something that can move us, comfort us, transport us, has been turned into something oppressive. Stripped of context, stripped of choice, just sound used to wear someone down.

And then, at the other end of the scale, you have something that is just as strange in its own way. There was a composer called Luigi Russolo, part of the Futurist movement, who decided that traditional instruments were no longer enough. This was the early twentieth century, a world that was becoming louder, more industrial, more aggressive. He built machines to make noise. Not music in the way we would normally think of it. Noise. Not recorded music as we would think of it now, but machines designed to recreate the sounds of explosions, engines, and mechanical chaos. The sounds of engines, machinery, the mechanical world. And tied up in that was the sound of conflict. The idea that explosions, chaos, and the noise of war could be part of a new kind of music. I remember driving home one night about 16 years ago and hearing a track on one of the classical stations. I forget the composer, but the whole of the “orchestra” was made up of the sound of bombs and artillery fire. I assumed it was one of the Futurists, but I’ve never been able to track the recording down – if you know it, do get in touch The Futurists were an odd lot (I explored them after some of the instruments mentioned above were used on an album cover, I’m stuffed if I can recall which one, though I think it might have been on the On-U-Sound label) and they famously described war as “the world’s only hygiene”, which tells you a lot about their mindset, though Malthus had similar opinions much earlier. The Futurists became closely associated with Mussolini and Italian fascism – a propensity for war and fascism, who would have thought?

And then, almost as a counterpoint to all that, you have something far more human. People use music to cope. Soldiers listening to songs that remind them of home. Of normal life. Of something outside of where they are and what they are doing. Putting on headphones and trying to create a small space that feels familiar and comforting. There is something very simple and very powerful about that. In earlier times, that experience would have been shared. People singing together, whether to lift spirits or just to feel connected to each other. Now it feels more individual. Everyone in their own world, their own soundtrack playing through headphones. Maybe that says something about how we experience everything now, not just war.

Even in classical music, war has always been there, but again, it is not a single story of war being either good or bad.

You have Britten’s War Requiem, which is clearly anti-war. Britten takes the traditional Latin Requiem Mass and combines it with poems by Wilfred Owen, who wrote from his experience in the First World War. It doesn’t glorify anything; it reflects loss, grief, and the human cost. Then you have 1812 Overture, which feels very different to me. Big, dramatic, and often used to celebrate. And then Holst’s Mars, the Bringer of War, which, if I’m being honest, just sounds like dread. Relentless, heavy, almost mechanical – like the Futurists, I guess. Same subject but completely different perspectives. Glorification, reflection, and outright warning.

Which probably tells you more about us as a species than it does about war itself. Though I read in the paper yesterday that chimps have ‘evolved’ to “embrace” civil war behaviour.

Then there is the visual side of music. Album covers that use war imagery. Sometimes it feels justified, tied to the themes of the music inside. Sometimes it feels like shorthand, a way of suggesting weight or seriousness without really engaging with what it actually means. Sometimes it’s just The Smiths.

And that brings it back to that gap again. The gap between what war actually is and how it is presented. That book I read all those years ago doesn’t allow for that gap. It removes it completely. There is no space on the pages to romanticise anything. And why should there be? Don’t we deserve to be aware of what war is actually like? Or is it more convenient to sanitise and glorify war? And if it is more convenient, who is it convenient for? Answers on a postcard, please, though I think I know.

We are, according to that clock, closer than ever to midnight. And yet it doesn’t feel like there is a soundtrack that matches that sense of urgency. We seem to be happy to bop along to K-Pop or whatever the flavour of the month is currently. Maybe there are current anti-war songs, and I have just not found them. Or maybe we just do not experience music in the same way anymore. More on our own, less together. More fragmented.

I don’t know.

What I do know is that music has always been tied up with conflict in one way or another. Sometimes against it and sometimes reflecting on it. Sometimes, just helping people get through it. Sometimes celebrating it. And sometimes becoming part of the act of war itself.

But at its best, it reminds us of the reality of things. And if it does that, then it is doing something important.

Because war is many things.

But glamorous is not one of them.