Nina Simone's sound captured the warrior energy that was present in the people, the fighting people."Nina Simone's "I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free" is on the compilation, `Stand Up and Be Counted; Soul, Funk and Jazz from a Revolutionary Era', just released by Harmless Recordings. WE MAY surround ourselves with stylish coffee-table books and fashion glossies, but rarely, if ever, do we get a chance to buy those iconic images and hang them proudly on our walls? Fancy a David Bailey? How about a Mario Testino? Or a Steven Meisel anyone? "Fashion Exposures", a sale and exhibition of contemporary photography, with framed and signed images donated by a stellar spectrum of star snappers, is the place to find such treasures. The exhibition, now in its 11th year, works in conjunction with the charity Fashion Acts, the British fashion industry's initiative that aims to raise both funds and awareness for people affected by HIV and Aids.This year, as well as helping the public to get their hands on the work of top photographers, the organisers also sent a bunch of celebrities an Olympus I-Zoom camera each, with which to record their own memorable moments.Here's your chance to see what Noel Gallagher, Mick Jagger, Ruby Wax and Jude Law came up with, not to mention Alexander McQueen and Vivienne Westwood. Bernice Johnson Reagon, a member of the Freedom Singers and Sweet Honey in the Rock, confirms the integral part Simone's music played in the civil rights movement: "Nina Simone helped people survive. George Jackson, a field marshall in the Black Panthers, was murdered by a guard in San Quentin prison in August 1971, and at his funeral, Simone's "I Wish I Knew How it Would Feel to Be Free" was played.

In 1970, on their debut album, The Last Poets declared: "I am the wish that makes Nina Simone wish she knew how it felt to be free." And in the same year, students in Mississippi played her music before incinerating a Confederate flag. The plain truth was we were in retreat."Her bitterness exploded during a concert in Newark in March 1970. In front of a totally black audience, she savaged the failings of black and white politicians and, later, noted: "That was the beginning of my withdrawal from political performance." She soon began a long period of self-imposed exile in Barbados, Liberia and, finally, Europe.But her music continued to inspire. Many black Americans now depended on more aggressive factions such as the Black Panthers and the radically altered SNCC, led by Stokely Carmichael.It was during these years that she disclosed, "news came through every day of friends being arrested, beaten and intimidated", and the FBI was also monitoring her.By the turn of the decade, her heroic impetus had stalled: "Every black political organisation of importance had been infiltrated by the FBI, police terrorised our communities.

And she flung herself into supporting civil rights marches and performed many benefit concerts, some within the ugly racial atmosphere of Mississippi and Alabama.She also attended Malcolm X's rallies. His assassination in 1965 only aggravated the rising sense of disillusionment affecting black Americans, which plunged to their nadir in the wake of Martin Luther King's murder. She describes the brutal premeditated murder of Medgar Evers, a secretary for the NAACP, in June 1963, as "the match that lit the fuse". But it was the bombing of a church in Alabama three months later, which killed four black girls and was the subject of Spike Lee's recent documentary, that finally provoked her into dedicating herself unflinchingly to "the struggle for black justice, freedom and equality".On hearing the tragic news, she admitted: "I had it in my mind to go out and kill someone." But she decided to channel her vitriol into the song "Mississippi Goddam", which she composed that very day, with inflammatory lyrics such as: "Oh, this whole country's full of lies, You're all going to die and die like flies, I don't trust you any more." The song was the first to unearth the sense of impatient indignation infiltrating the civil rights movement.In the following few years, she recorded many more songs with uncompromising political statements like "Old Jim Crow"; "Four Women"; "Backlash Blues"; "I Wish I Knew How it Would Feel to Be Free" and "To Be Young, Gifted and Black". I knew prejudice existed, but I never thought it could have such a direct effect on my future".By the end of the 1950s, combining jazz and blues with classical inflections, she lived in New York and had befriended members of the black intelligentsia such as James Baldwin and Langston Hughes.But she credits Lorraine Hansberry, who wrote the play, Raisin in the Sun, with initiating her deeper political education: "Through her, I started thinking about myself as a black person in a country run by white people and a woman in a world run by men." In 1962, she was also introduced to and inspired by Stokely Carmichael, who later coined the phrase "Black Power", and she was now making political comments on stage herself, but not in song. But it was at a recital in front of her sponsors that she witnessed the prejudice simmering behind the town's benign facade.