Sixty Liverpudlians joined Reverend Billy and The Stop Shopping Choir yesterday inside Tate Liverpool, where the group sang and wept their response to the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster in Beatles hits.

Five years ago the Deepwater Horizon spill had just begun, but the damage is still being felt by communities living along the Gulf coast.

Just two weeks ago, Derrick Evans addressed the BP board at the company’s AGM with concerns around health impacts for people living in the regions affected by the spill.

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Reverend Billy

Performance protest

Yesterday’s performance protest involved a projected image of the BP oil spill at the seabed that many people saw repeatedly on television screens during 2010, and a series of mournful versions of Beatles’ songs: ‘8 days a week’, ‘You really got a hold on me’ and ‘You’ve got to hide your love away’.

Reverend Billy and The Church of Stop Shopping have criticised the BP-Tate relationship before, with an ‘Exorcism of BP’ at Tate Modern in 2011.

‘This place is supported by a criminal. It is five years and eight days since the Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico. Lots of us have that disaster in our bodies now – the question is, how do we get it into our consciousness? ‘We’re carrying the poisons in us, our kids, the plants and animals, the biosphere of the Gulf of Mexico. We’re carrying the cost of BP, but we have failed to be scared. Failed to know this emergency. Failed to take it seriously. We’re still hypnotised by the aesthetics of hip art and high culture.’ Reverend Billy at Tate Liverpool, 2015

The wild anti-consumerist gospel shouters and Earth-loving urban activists have worked with communities all over the world defending community, life and imagination.