by Andy McSmith
September and October were normally Ethiopia’s rainiest months, but in 1984, the rain did not fall. In a country whose economy was based on agriculture and was already suffering the effects of misrule, civil war and international isolation, it was inevitable that mass starvation would follow. As the first reports of the terrible consequence of the drought reached Britain, the Thatcher government came under political pressure to do something about it. If the crisis had been less serious, the government would have happily had nothing to do with Ethiopia at all. The pro-Western Ethiopian emperor, Haile Selassie, whose government had survived an Italian invasion ordered by Mussolini in the 1930s, had been overthrown in a military coup in the 1970s. His successor was Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam, who professed to be a Marxist, and relied on Soviet and Cuban military assistance. Haile Selassie had claimed sovereignty over Eritrea, a former Italian colony to the north, though its Muslim population resisted being ruled by the Ethiopians. The United Nations had brokered a deal under which Ethiopia was supposedly a federation, within which Eritrea was entitled to a large degree of self-rule, but the central government had never honoured the agreement and the Eritrean rebels wanted nothing less than full independence. The UK government had been prepared to back Haile Selassie against the rebels, but when the continuing war was fought with increased brutality by his Soviet-backed successor, all British aid to the country was severed. An internal Foreign Office memo, written as starvation was spreading, emphasized that the UK’s principle interest in the country was to see it wrested from Soviet interest, implying that it would rather see the Mengistu regime overthrown than supply it with aid. There was no need for the government to be involved, the Foreign Office minister, Malcolm Rifk ind, assured the Commons on 22 October 1984, when charities such as Oxfam and Save the Children were on the scene.
Two days later, the BBC broadcast a report from a camera crew fronted by Michael Buerk, who had been to the areas worst hit by famine and had recorded images of bloated, starving children and wailing mothers, in what Buerk graphically described as a famine of ‘biblical’2 proportions. Suddenly, the political atmosphere changed. Sir Geoffrey Howe, the foreign secretary, during a routine report to the Commons, unexpectedly announced that the government had decided to contribute £5m in emergency aid. The government also announced that two RAF Hercules aircraft would be deployed for a month, airlift ing supplies to the stricken regions, and that an officer with specialist knowledge of flying over difficult terrain would be sent out immediately to survey the route. However, when an Ethiopian official was invited to the Foreign Office to be told the good news, he retorted that sending aircraft for just a month was derisory, when it was unlikely to rain until March, and that the RAF officers would be refused visas.3 On 29 October, Mrs Thatcher summoned an informal ministerial meeting and agreed to send in the two aircraft for three months, though it would cost £2m in addition to the £5m already promised, and ordered that when the decision was announced, ‘the uncooperative and surly attitude of the Ethiopian government should not be concealed’.4
It was Michael Buerk’s report, with its pictures of ‘people who were so shrunken by starvation that they looked like beings from another planet’, which had a life-changing effect on Bob Geldof. In his words: ‘The freefall I slipped into upon leaving school in an endless round of useless jobs and self-abuse finally closed.’5 In the morning, he gave up the soul-destroying task of ringing around trying to find a region where his single was selling well enough to make it worth promoting, and told his PR people that he wanted to make a record to raise money for Ethiopia. But after his recent experiences, he had lost confidence in his ability to write a hit song or that his name would make it sell. He rang his wife in Newcastle. She was in her dressing room talking to Midge Ure, who was due to appear on The Tube with his band Ultravox, whose single ‘Vienna’ had spent four weeks at No. 2 in January 1981. She passed the phone across and Ure agreed to meet Geldof back in London. When they met, Geldof talked incessantly about his plan to write a song similar to John Lennon’s ‘So This is Christmas’, and enlist Sting to perform it. Ure, who paid for the meal because Geldof was broke, suggested that he get on with it. Ure wrote later, ‘What I didn’t realize was that Bob’s confidence was way down. His career was in the sewers and the Rats were broke. It’s impossible to imagine now, but he was too embarrassed to call up Sting . . . Of course, I didn’t know any of this for years. Artists don’t confess weakness.’6
Thus encouraged, Geldof started inveigling other stars, including Gary Kemp and Simon Le Bon, to be involved and was pleasantly surprised by the response. He organized a meeting of four senior executives at Phonogram for advice on how to bring out a record in a hurry. They told him that the slowest part of the process was usually the design of the record cover, so he coldcalled Peter Blake, who had designed the cover of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Blake returned the call and took the commission, for no fee. Soon Geldof was ringing around hard-nosed managers of major retail outlets, such as Woolworths, WH Smiths and HMV, to persuade them through a mix of bluff and bluster that they should waive their mark up. He also rang Robert Maxwell, the new proprietor of the Daily Mirror. Though Maxwell was a notorious capitalist, and would be remembered as one of the worst thieves in history, he liked flamboyant charitable gestures. He agreed that if the Mirror was allowed exclusive pictures of the recording session that Geldof was organizing, they would appear on the front page.
A studio was booked for Sunday, 25 November 1984, just twelve days after Michael Buerk’s broadcast, by which time Geldof and Ure had written a song to be produced by Ure and performed by whoever turned up on the day. In those few frantic days, Geldof had created such a buzz that performers were tumbling over one another to off er their services for no fee, some travelling huge distances to be there. Boy George had been woken at 5 a.m. in New York by a telephone call from Geldof insisting that he must return to London at once, and he did, arriving at Heathrow ‘looking like a battered housewife, with three stuff ed poodles under [his] arm,’ only to learn that he was expected to do a solo line, unrehearsed. He recalled, ‘I didn’t dare throw a pop-star tantrum. The Band Aid event was one of the few times I’ve felt comfortable around other pop stars. It was as if everybody had deflated their egos for the evening.’7
Spandau Ballet were on tour in Germany when their manager broke the news to them that they all had to be aboard a jet plane chartered by Duran Duran, leaving at 7.30 a.m. On arrival in London, the band’s saxophone player, Steve Norman, was asked by a television crew if he had anything to say to the people of Ethiopia; he solemnly apologized for the band’s failure to go on tour there, promising to make good the omission next year. Martin Kemp confessed: ‘That was us. I have to be honest, at this point it was more a case of us not wanting to left out of what was obviously going to be a giant record, than about making money for the African famine victims. I for one didn’t have a clue where Ethiopia was.’8 Nigel Planer also turned up, stumbling about in the role of Neil from The Young Ones, allowing Midge Ure a few minutes’ relief from the tension in the control room:
It was great for the TV cameras, and for me as well because it meant that I switched off for 15 minutes, laughing as I watched this guy doing stupid silly stuff . That single moment, when an actor turned up pretending to be a hippy musician, was the spark that led towards Comic Relief.9
The other unexpected event of the evening was Robert Maxwell coming on the telephone wanting exclusive rights to use the Band Aid photograph as a publicity poster. He finally agreed to split the proceeds fifty–fift y after Geldof had treated him to some choice language and had threatened to a deal with the Sun instead.
It was one of the most memorable days in rock history, as a studio bursting with well-known faces echoed to the sound of a frankly average song with the title ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’, which jumped straight into the charts at No. 1 and became the biggest-selling single in chart history. (It was outsold, nearly thirteen ye
ars later, by the version of ‘Candle in the Wind’ that Elton John sang at the funeral of Princess Diana.) It left Geldof bemused by what he had started. He mused, ‘Maybe things had been shabby and cynical and selfish for too long. Maybe people in bands wanted to do something, become involved and active again.’10
Actually, though it had evidently escaped Geldof’s attention, many ‘people in bands’ were already involved. One of the unintended consequences of Thatcherism was that there was more politics in British popular music, and more political activism by performers, in the first half of the 1980s than at any other time before or since. As the 1983 general election came to a crescendo, stars and sporting heroes turned out at the Wembley Conference Centre to fly the flag for the Conservatives. They included the comedians Bob Monkhouse and Jimmy Tarbuck, the world snooker champion Steve Davis, and the former Yorkshire and England bowler Fred Trueman. The songwriter Lynsey de Paul performed a number entitled ‘Tory, Tory, Tory’, but the artist who stole the show was Kenny Everett, who strode on stage wearing gigantic hands to say ‘Let’s bomb Russia’, and ‘Let’s kick Michael Foot’s stick away’. Not everyone laughed. The Daily Mirror commented, ‘Mr Everett may be the foolish face of Toryism, but his audience was the ugly one. The kind of mind which enjoys right wing extremist support is the kind of mind that laughs at Mr Everett.’11
There were plenty of other performers who did not want to be the entertainment wing of the Conservative Party. There was Paul Weller, lead singer of The Jam, a scaffolder’s son from Woking in Surrey, whose ambitious father nurtured his obsession with rock music and was his manager for thirty years. Weller was aged tweenty-one in 1979, when he saw television pictures of Eton schoolboys jeering at ‘Right to Work’ marchers. He retaliated with the song ‘Eton Rifles’, which reached No. 3. David Cameron and Boris Johnson, aged twelve and fifteen, were at Eton that year, and long afterwards Cameron appeared on a BBC programme called ‘The Jam Generation’ to claim that ‘Eton Rifles’ was his favourite song of all time, provoking a grumpy response from Weller – ‘Which part of it didn’t he get? It wasn’t intended as a fucking jolly drinking song for the cadet corps.’12
Another product of the times was the eight-member reggae band from Birmingham who thought it appropriate to call themselves UB40, after the form Unemployment Benefit 40, with which too many of their fans were familiar. Their debut album was Signing Off, the success of which enabled them all to do. Recorded in a Birmingham bedsit in September 1980, it went quickly into the charts, reaching No. 2, and stayed for seventy-two weeks. The Beat, also from Birmingham, had a hugely successful debut album in 1980 entitled I Just Can’t Stop It, including the track ‘Mirror in the Bathroom’. Another track, which gained in popularity as the decade proceeded, was entitled ‘Whine and Grine/Stand Down Margaret’, which included the lines – ‘I said I see no joy/I see only sorry/I see no chance of your bright new tomorrow/So stand down Margaret/Stand down please’, which is still the only popular song in British music history to call upon the prime minister of the day to resign. At around the time when David Cameron was trying to demonstrate how cool he was by claiming to have been a fan of The Jam, another Conservative MP, Ed Vaizey, who was twelve in 1980, claimed to have combined a worship of Margaret Thatcher, which he assumed was shared by all, with an uncomprehending love of The Beat. ‘I couldn’t work out what they had against Princess Margaret,’13 he said.
A song that was misunderstood even by teenagers who were not at public school was ‘Sunday, Bloody Sunday’, written by Bono, front man for the perennial Irish group U2, and performed for the first time in Belfast in October 1982. Because it referred to the killing of Catholics by British troops, it was widely thought to have a pro-IRA message. Actually, three members of U2 were practising Christians, and Bono, in particular, as the Protestant child of a Catholic father and Protestant mother, loathed any creed that might exacerbate Ireland’s religious divide. In March 1982, the group had pulled out of a gig in New York when they learnt that it was in honour of Bobby Sands, a member of the IRA who died on hunger strike while in prison. Gerry Adams’ reaction was to call Bono a ‘little shit’. Bono reflected: ‘It’s not helpful when the leader of an armed struggle who has support in every working-class neighbourhood, and a lot of maniacs on his side, calls you a “little shit”. It doesn’t make your life easier.’14
In December 1983, the charts were dominated by an unusual record called ‘Only You’, which took the coveted Christmas No. 1 slot and remained there for five consecutive weeks. It was unusual because it consisted of six male voices singing in the a cappella style – it was the first record without instrumental accompaniment to reach the charts for more than a decade. Margaret Thatcher was said to have liked it, a report that caused great amusement on the political left because all the performers were veterans of fringe left-wing theatre groups, and the name they had given themselves, ‘The Flying Pickets’, was a tribute to a form of trade union activity that Thatcherite legislation had made illegal. Just over a year later, there was an equally unusual occupant of the top slot when a songwriter named Paul Hardcastle shot to fame by creating a dance record called ‘19’, in which snippets of information about the Vietnam war, including the fact that the average age of an American soldier was nineteen, were dealt out against a backing track that made extensive use of a synthesizer.
One of the most remarkable and underrated figures in popular music was Jerry Dammers, founder and lead songwriter of The Specials. Born in Tamil Nadu in south India and raised in Coventry, Dammers formed a reggae band while he was at Manchester Polytechnic, which in its eventual line-up included a Barbadian drummer and a Jamaican guitarist. In 1978, they were performing as a warm-up for The Clash in Bracknell when neo-Nazi skinheads started trouble in the hall. In the late 1970s, the far-right National Front declared that part of its mission was to stop white youths from being corrupted by listening to ‘negro rhythms’ and instead to have them listening to home-grown working-class music, such as Oi! – so named by the Sun journalist Garry Bushell in 1980 – which was notoriously popular with the far Right. Dammers was determined to take music in the opposite direction. He developed a style that combined rock with ska and formed his own record label, 2 Tone Records. Soon there was a musical genre known as 2 Tone, associated with bands such as Madness, which combined punk with Caribbean rhythms.
After some early success, life became serious for Dammers and his fellow musicians in The Specials. Their music was so experimental that neither the critics nor the punters really knew what to make of it. Of their second album, More Specials, one critic wrote: ‘The second side is curious, disorientating and quite unclassifiable . . . brave and perverse’.15 On tour, arguments erupted between members of the group, fuelled by drug abuse, and their gigs threatened to degenerate into violence because of their rash practice of encouraging fans to storm the stage. In Cambridge, fights broke out between fans and security guards, after which Dammers and the group’s vocalist, Terry Hall, were arrested for incitement and fined £400 each. The constant tension, the chaos and the scenes of urban decay that they witnessed on tour evidently put Dammers in a grim frame of mind, and spurred him to produce a song full of desolation and impending doom called ‘Ghost Town’, which topped the charts in July 1981. Twenty-one years after its release, a writer in the Guardian asserted that it ‘remains the most remarkable number one in British chart history’.16
Jerry Dammers had assumed that success would put an end to the nearhomicidal in-fighting among the members of the band, and that the others would acknowledge him for the extraordinary artist that he undoubtedly was. On the contrary, after a triumphant appearance on Top of the Pops, three of The Specials abruptly announced that they were leaving to reinvent themselves as Fun Boy Three. The music they made was, indeed, fun, and commercially successful, and tame; their most lasting achievement was to give lift-off to the long career of the girl group Bananarama, by joining with them to make the hit single ‘It Ain’t What You Do’, a s
ong originally recorded in 1939 by Ella Fitzgerald. None of this put Dammers off the idea of rock music with a serious message. In 1982, he assembled a new line-up of five musicians under the name Special AKA. The lead vocalist was a twenty-twoyear-old from Brixton named Rhoda Dakar. The band’s first single was ‘The Boiler’, a grim account of a date rape, whose victim attracted no sympathy because she was not pretty. It was considered too strong to be played on BBC daytime radio, but was pushed by John Peel and reached No. 35 in the charts.
Then in September 1982, the television screens were filled with scenes from the Middle East after Israel had invaded Lebanon to attack the Palestine Liberation Organization bases there, and Christian Phalangist gunmen had been on a three-day rampage in the refugee camps of Sabra and Chatila, slaughtering whole families, and even dragging patients and staffout of hospitals to be killed. The death toll may have been as high as 2,000. During a later Israeli Commission of Enquiry, Menachem Begin, the Israeli prime minister, and Ariel Sharon, the defence minister, denied all foreknowledge of the massacre. ‘No-one foresaw – nor could have foreseen – the atrocities committed in the neighbourhood of Sabra and Chatila,’ said General Sharon.17 However, a wide seam of western opinion – Jerry Dammers included – thought otherwise. He persuaded Special AKA to bring out a single entitled ‘War Crimes (The Crime is Still the Same)’, provocatively comparing the slaughter of the Palestinians to the holocaust: ‘From the graves of Belsen . . . to the genocide in Beirut, Israel was nothing learned?’