I used to be in a band. It was the greatest fun it is possible to have and the friends I played with are still among my closest, 30 years later.

There’s nothing quite like live music, making it or hearing it. Recently, I saw Wara – a London based band whose members are all migrants, mostly from Latin America. Their music reflects on the Hispanic experience in the UK and more broadly on the dislocations of leaving home. It is also impossibly uplifting and danceable.

Music is a unique art form. In playing it, friendships are forged; in hearing it, emotion, ambition and intellectual curiosity are sparked; and in writing it, shared experiences can be articulated and communicated.

If we want to say something from our deepest soul, we sing and play. It’s little wonder, then, that the bible is full of songs. When the Israelites were taken into slavery in Babylon, their captors demanded they sing songs, knowing that music would reveal something of their captives’ hearts.

The horror of being forced to make music as a kind of torture was, of course, recorded in a song, Psalm 137, By the Rivers of Babylon. In fact, the Psalms collectively are an astonishing catalogue of emotions – love, joy, fear, desperation, hope, anger, sadness, wonder and faith; an album of all our shared adventures.

Everything we feel can somehow be expressed musically, and that power is known to people of all faiths and none.  That music makes friends, challenges the mind and helps us unpick and understand our lives is no surprise, then. It is a kind of universal library – a repository of what it means to be human.

The image above, since I couldnt find a good picture of Wara, is of one of my favourite bands, the mighty Lee Baines III and the Glory Fires, at Greenbelt in 2018.