Freedom To Glide have premiered their video for A Better Way via Prog – and they hope it makes a stark statement about the treatment of shellshock victims during the First World War.
It’s taken from their EP Sick To Death, available now, which follows well-received debut album Rain. It continues Pete Riley and Andy Nixon’s exploration of the lives of infantrymen in the 1914-18 conflict.
Nixon tells Prog: “Making of the EP and the video have both been incredibly moving. We knew what we wanted to say and we knew what we wanted to see – but we weren’t prepared for what we’d feel when we edited the film.”
The song was inspired during a visit to the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire, where the pair found themselves speechless as they visited the monument to troops who were shot at dawn for cowardice instead of receiving treatment for the psychological results of warfare.
Riley says: “A lot of those who were executed were seasoned frontline seasoned men who just couldn’t go on anymore. They’d given everything they had. They weren’t cowards; they were suffering from shell shock, or post-traumatic stress disorder, as we now know it to be.
“There was little or no legal representation, or even medical examination, for the accused. Shellshock was a poorly understood phenomenon and dealt with in the most extreme way. So many young men and boys were ‘made an example of’ – lest we forget.”
The Sick To Death EP, a precursor to Freedom To Glide’s second album, can be purchased via their Bandcamp page.
Tracklist
A Better Way
Dear Mum
No White Stone
Shell Shocked
