You’ve read about the multi-talented, surf-crazed human rights lawyer Patrick Burgess on Swellnet before, but what you don’t know is that he has now created a new genre of music – let’s call it surf-based human rights rock!

Patrick, who becomes just “Pat” (like his late and fabled war correspondent dad) when he takes his lawyer hat off and puts his muso hat on, will launch his new album Ground Zero at the Old Manly Boatshed on Saturday, July 23, but we’ll get to the music in a moment. First, a recap.

Since I wrote about him in this space early in the year, Patrick’s ground-breaking human rights soap opera, The Sun, the Moon and the Truth, has become the most watched television show in Myanmar, and the Timorese version about to go into production is expected to do the same. He and his wife Galuh have been working with various aid and government agencies to reunite Timor’s “stolen children” with their families, while he’s also spent weeks in Vietnam, working with the Politburo on upgrading their legal aid laws. On top of this, at home in Indo the surf has been pumping all season! Unsurprisingly, Patrick managed to squeeze in a June G-Land run for an unmissable swell.

This past week we’ve managed to fit a couple of longboard sessions on Noosa’s points into the program while filming for a documentary on his remarkable career, but his real reason for being in Australia is to relaunch a musical career that got stalled about the same time he saw the Rwandan Genocide on TV and it changed his life.

A lot of bloody water has passed under the bridge since then, but Pat’s passion for playing music is undiminished, only now his original material is as likely to be about refugees or war crimes as it is about surfing. Ground Zero manages to combine both themes in a rollicking set of bluesy ballads and sweet riffs. I loved the energy of the title track and the hipster piss-take of Coffee Coffee, but the raw poetry of Baghdad Sky is what moved me:  

Oh, there’s a fire in the sky again
The sound of mortars breaks up my sleep
In the darkness I hear my children breathing
Feel the pulse of my baby’s heartbeat

I am a peaceful man
I don’t believe in the rule of the gun
But when they come, knocking down my door
I’m gonna do what needs to be done 

Without going over the top, sometimes there’s a touch of The Boss in Pat’s delivery, and if you like that kind of lyric-driven rock, you’re going to love Ground Zero. //PHIL JARRATT

Pat Burgess launches Ground Zero at the Old Manly Boatshed, 40 The Corso, from 7.30pm, Saturday, July 23.