Resistance is often framed in the form of protest, civil disobedience, and direct action. Less reported is the role of music in challenging the status quo and mobilising for social change. Music can be less confrontational, allowing it to reach wider audiences. It can also be transportive, enabling it to embody a struggle more fully. Music as resistance is solidarity, and compassion, but most of all music as resistance is light in darkness.
Oh, I wanna scream and I wanna shout
But I’m stuck in this dream
I can’t figure it out
Well, it’s more of a nightmare if I’m telling the truth
On Friday singer, song writer and musician, Dan Knight, released his latest single, Beagle Eyes.
I first heard the track a few days earlier. It’s haunting – a slow melody, stripped-back cords and falsetto vocals. The lyrics sting.
It’s afternoon, and outside is a patchwork of grey. Needle-like rain, dirty clouds, a scuffed sky. It’s all distinctly English. Inside, Dan and I speak. With a busy weekend ahead, he seems welcoming of the break.
“I was into music at an early age” he says, continuing “I’ve always loved music. At school I was the first one in the music room during lunch break. There was a group of us that always went to the music room. And I’d be the first to get up at assemblies to sing.”
Music remained a big part of Dan’s life while growing up, but it wasn’t his chosen profession, yet. Instead, Dan signed up with the British army and began basic training, a gruelling thirteen-week programme that puts recruits through a series of physical challenges. During the eleventh week, a re-occurring ankle injury meant Dan was unable to complete the course. His army career was over before it began, and Dan spent the next six months in rehabilitation and physiotherapy. Recovery was intense, and Dan struggled with his mental health.
Imagine never seeing the sky,
Just four walls where nobody smiles,
And they think that you’re soulless,
Cause you’re not like them*
It was during this challenging period Dan turned to music.
“That’s when I first picked up a guitar because they [the hospital] had a guitar tucked away in a cupboard. That’s when I started playing, and I played the guitar in there, and when I got out, I just kept playing.”
“So, are you self-taught?” I ask.
“Yeah, I’m completely self-taught, I’ve never had a lesson. I play piano, I play guitar and I sing. I have friends that like music and they taught me chords and what to do, and I’ve just been learning it myself ever since.”
By 2013 Dan had enough material to produce his first album, a self-funded endeavour. More releases followed including his single, Alive, which reached number fifteen in the iTunes chart in 2015, and Breakthrough in 2018. Nine albums later, Dan’s live performances are now a regular feature in towns and cities across the UK.
Oh, I hear them coming
And the sound of freedom
Inside of me gnawing
Dreaming that I’m running
Far away now I’m soaring
But the truth is I’m falling*
During August 2024, Dan booked a session at Upland Rock Rooms, a rehearsal studio in Huntingdon. Four miles away, northeast of the market town in Cambridgeshire is Camp Beagle, Europe’s longest running animal rights protest camp. The collection of tents that make up the camp are located at the entrance of MBR Acres, a facility that breeds beagles for supply to so-called testing and research laboratories. The transferability of test results from non-humans to humans is hotly contested, with data showing up to ninety percent failure rates. Despite the questionable science and horrific procedures involved, 100,000 million animals world-wide, including three million in the UK, are abused and die each year in the name of so-called science. Dan had been following Camp Beagle’s social feeds and was aware of their work.
“I went past there one day, and I thought I’d go and visit them,” said Dan.
Resistance is a spectrum, wide and varied, and that is its strength. The spectrum’s purpose is to influence attitudes and beliefs through interruption, which can take many forms. Music as resistance is special because it reframes the unquestioned by being emotionally transportive. Lyrics can penetrate where speeches and slogans fail. Dan spent several hours at Camp Beagle, talking to its guardians, and walking the perimeter of the MBR Acres puppy factory. He heard the dogs’ cries and saw first-hand the conditions the animals are kept in – caged in windowless tin sheds, fed by automated feed chutes.
Reaching for pen and paper, Dan began to write. Lyrics appeared, notes and chords arranged. He was, through song, protesting the pain and suffering being experienced just a few metres from him – the other side of the mesh fence and the flimsy tin wall.
“I started writing Beagle Eyes at the camp on that day, the first day that I went there, I started writing it, and I had it pretty much, I’d say ninety percent, done in that one sitting. I performed it live at the camp that day.”
Beagle Eyes was released on Friday to coincide with the recent petition to stop all animal testing in the UK, starting with an immediate ban on testing on dogs.
“My main mission with the song is to just get as many signatures on the petition as possible, so we can end what is going on, because it needs to stop. And I think music is a way of connecting with people who can help.”
Can you help me
Out of here
No more tears
Take me somewhere
Free*
In January 2025 Rolling Stone chronicled the one hundred best protest songs of all time. Popular themes included anti-war, anti-poverty, anti-police, anti-racism, and anti-capitalism, while some offered hope, such as Sam Cooke’s A Change is Gonna Come. None of the one hundred songs were anti-speciesism or pro-animal rights despite the fact humans kill eighty billion land animals each year, including 2,000 beagles from MBR Acres.
*Lyrics – Beagle Eyes by Dan Knight.
©2025 Sul Nowroz – Real Media staff writer
