Aviv Geffen: Making music for the masses

It is more than a decade since the moment that defined Aviv Geffen's life, and struck a fatal blow to his country's peace movement. Yet the Israeli singer will never be able to forget the fateful night of 4 November 1995.

Geffen had just walked off stage after performing in front of the biggest audience of his life: 250,000 people, mostly young Israelis, were crammed into Israel Kings' Square in Tel Aviv for a massive peace rally. At that moment, it must have seemed that after centuries of bloodshed peace between Israel and its neighbours was a real possibility. After singing a song called "I Cry For You", Geffen turned and embraced Yitzhak Rabin, the general-turned-politician who, as Israel's Prime Minister, had jointly won the Nobel Peace Prize for helping to negotiate the Oslo Accords - the second one having been signed just weeks earlier - and kissed him on each cheek.

Then, as he turned towards the car park, a shot rang out and Rabin, the architect of the peace process, fell to the ground, the victim of an assassin's bullet. "He didn't just kill a person," says Geffen. "He killed a dream." He stares into his cup of coffee, glumly. "I was the last guy to hug him and kiss him. I saw the gun and I saw him lying there in his own blood. And the guy who killed him had got backstage by saying he was my driver, so I felt a bit responsible in a way. For me, it was traumatic and I left Tel Aviv straight after. I felt I needed to run away."

Following the assassination, which plunged the peace process into fresh turmoil, "I Cry For You" became an anthem for the peace movement. Geffen was already Israel's best-known and most controversial pop star, as famous for his chart-topping songs as he was infamous for his outspoken anti-Zionist views. Now he became their figurehead. "We thought things would get better after the assassination, that it could be a turning point," he says. "But it didn't happen. The right wing was encouraged and became even stronger."

In the decade since then, more peace processes have stalled, wars have come and gone, and Geffen has continued to sell more records than Coldplay, U2 and Madonna: two million in a country of just six million. "I don't want to sound arrogant," he says. "But I am the spokesman for the young generation."

Geffen, now 33, has always made waves, even before Rabin's assassination, using his position to speak out for the rights of women, homosexuals and animals in conservative Israel. The son of an equally controversial poet and writer, Yonatan Geffen, and the nephew of the Israeli politician Moshe Dayan, Aviv famously refused to do his military service, threatening to commit suicide if he was drafted - although a bad back would have excused him anyway. His songs, until recently sung in Hebrew, have tackled taboo subjects such as incest ("Nowhere") and child abuse ("Daddy's and Mommy's Punching Bags"). One of his biggest hits, "Cloudy Now", shocked Israelis with its proclamation that "We are the fucked-up generation".

Away from the stage and the studio, he attracts attention with pronouncements such as, "The occupied territory is a cancer in Israel's body", and is currently demanding talks with Syria, saying, "Israel must shake any hand, even if it is not perfect." His songs and lyrics are now studied in liberal Israeli schools, and he is frequently asked to run for political office but has steadfastly refused, believing that he can do more good for his cause as a musician. "Music changes more hearts and minds than politics ever did," he insists, though he later concedes that he might like one day to run for the Labour Party and become education minister, saying, "I think I could change a lot".

Now, after years as a big fish in the little pond of Israeli music, and 10 successful albums in Hebrew, he is hoping to bring his music - and message - to a worldwide audience. Geffen's latest project is a second English-language collaboration with the British musician Steven Wilson (of The Porcupine Tree) under the name Blackfield. Inspired by the AOR end of progressive rock, they set startlingly bleak lyrics ("One thousand people yell, shouting my name, but I want to die") against an uplifting palette of soaring harmonies and anthemic choruses.

Geffen believes that the world can be saved by peace and love. "I was a hippie child," he says. "I grew up in a broken home: my father was addicted to alcohol for many years and my parents preferred to buy hash than toys." Yet he clearly has a great deal of fondness for his father, not least for speaking out against the army while he was in it. "My dad is a very brave person. He is the one who gave me the love of words and poetry: when I was four, he used to sit beside my bed and read me Bob Dylan, Tom Waits, Jack Kerouac, Raymond Carver, Leonard Cohen. He taught me the beauty of the words."

Geffen, who claims to have written his first song when he was eight, left school at 15 and began travelling the country with his guitar, singing self-penned songs against the government and the occupation, such as "The Hope Song" with its lyric, "Let's occupy the peace and not the territories". It's still his theme today, in philosophy, if no longer in song. "It seems to me that it's Israel, Britain and the USA against the rest of the world, but it's an economic issue: it's always about oil, always about money. I am sure things will change but we need to take the first step. We need to leave the occupied territories. Maybe I'm naive, but I trust the Palestinians."

He adds, carefully, "Don't get me wrong - I love Israel. I am the new Israeli. There are some great people there - people like me. Don't forget that we come from the Holocaust. We are a very young country, we are paranoid, we are brought up to believe that everyone hates us, which is true in some places. We are paranoid, but with good reason."

After Geffen appeared at Tel Aviv's annual Back To The Square rally on 4 November - at which he painted "Talk to Syria" on his shirt - he embarked on a lecture tour of Ivy League universities in America, spreading his message that Israel should talk to Syria. "A lot of Zionists came along and told me to shut up," he admits. "I told them to try to live in Israel for a week."

Soon after that, Geffen, who never goes out without his bodyguard, swapped his seaside home outside Tel Aviv for a week living with an Orthodox Jewish family inside a Jewish settlement on the West Bank. The experience was filmed for a fly-on-the-wall TV documentary. "I wanted to show the insanity of the settlements," he says, noting that his hosts had named their donkey Rabin. "Did they try to convert me? Yes, of course. But I came back stronger in my beliefs. In fact, I converted one of them - I persuaded him to leave the settlement and become an actor."

Never one to sell himself short, Geffen is equally confident about his next mission, to convert the world to Blackfield's music. "I think I am a gifted musician with a great story behind him, playing classic rock," he declares. "I think after the third album, Blackfield will be one of the best bands in the world."

The album Blackfield II is out now on Snapper Music

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