No Such Thing As Society

by Andy McSmith

  Dammers also devoted three years to putting together another Special AKA album, In The Studio, issued in 1984, which was a commercial failure, though one track has enduring fame. This was ‘Free Nelson Mandela’, a rare example of a popular song that called for the release of a political prisoner. The venture left the record company with heavy debts. Dammers stopped making records and diverted his energies into Artists Against Apartheid. He was the main organizer of a concert held in Wembley Stadium in 1988 to mark Mandela’s seventieth birthday. Mandela spent his birthday in prison, with no release date, which Spitting Image noted by making a spoof version of the Dammers song in which, instead of singing ‘Free Nelson Mandela’, latex puppets with Afrikaans accents sang ‘still basically locked up Nelson Mandela’.

  Elvis Costello, who had produced The Specials’ debut album, also had a huge hit in 1979 with an anti-militarist song called ‘Oliver’s Army’, and in 1983 he had a hit under the pseudonym ‘The Imposter’ with the track ‘Pills and Soap’, which was aimed at putting voters off re-electing Thatcher. The news that the government, during the Falklands War, suddenly reopened the shipyards that they had been ruthlessly running down – in order to build warships to replace those lost in the South Atlantic – inspired Costello to write a sarcastic number entitled ‘Shipbuilding’, with the lines: ‘It’s just a rumour spread around town by the women and children that soon we’ll be shipbuilding’. The song was recorded by Robert Wyatt, the former drummer from Soft Machine and a member of the Communist Party, who was confined to a wheelchair after falling, drunk, from a window. It reached No. 36. Alan Hull, former lead singer of Lindisfarne, went a step further, bringing out a single called ‘Malvinas Melody’, which, as its title implied, supported the Argentine claim to the islands.

  Billy Bragg was another deeply serious troubadour hovering on the edge of the big time. He never had a major hit, but his popularity outlasted most of those who did. He wrote the song, ‘A New England’, before he bought himself out of the army in 1981, aged twenty-one; Kirsty MacColl took it into the Top 10 in January 1985. The lyrics said that ex-Private Bragg wasn’t trying ‘to change the world . . . just looking for another girl’, as if sexual satisfaction were the limit of his ambition; in reality, changing the world became his lifelong preoccupation. Everything about Bragg was a conscious departure from the norm of the commercial rock scene. He performed live – without gimmicks or accompanying videos – songs about everyday experience; he deliberately eschewed the flash, self-indulgent, conspicuously rich lifestyle associated with rock stars to instead live and behave like an ordinary human; he had a small, independent management and an independent record company. ‘By side-stepping both the available technology and the fast-track corporate infrastructure, Billy Bragg became an instant cause, a pocket revolutionary,’18 his biographer observed. He was aided by a disguised piece of good luck when, soon after the appearance of his first album Life’s A Riot in July 1983, its producer Peter Jenner was sacked when the label was taken over by Richard Branson. Jenner was a 1960s hippy who shared Bragg’s take on politics and on the music industry. He set up a firm called Sincere Management, with Bragg as his main client, and signed up to an independent label called Go! Records. For a time, Sincere had an unpaid employee in Andy Kershaw, on his way to becoming one of the nation’s favourite and most self-destructive DJs.

  In February 1985, Billy Bragg, Peter Jenner and Andy Kershaw called in to see Neil Kinnock. The meeting went well, despite Jenner’s insistence on putting the case for legalizing cannabis. Labour was embarking on a ‘Jobs and Industry Campaign’, fronted by the future leader John Smith, and wanted to publicize youth unemployment. Bragg agreed to front concerts to support the campaign, and once Smith had consulted his teenage daughters to find out who Bragg was, he was duly impressed and paid tribute to him at that autumn’s Labour Party conference as the man who ‘pioneered concerts from one end of the country to the other’.19 At that same time, Bragg appeared on Tops of the Pops performing what briefly promised to be an unusual entrant into the charts. The front cover of the EP ‘Between the Wars’ had a subversive message to ‘pay no more than one pound twenty-five pence’ for it – in an attempt to discourage record shops from bumping up the price, while on the back there was an announcement that ‘this record is dedicated to the work of the Miners’ Wives Support Groups’.

  Bragg’s next step was Red Wedge, an artists’ organization formed to help Labour win the 1987 general election. It began with a meeting in the boardroom at Labour Party headquarters in Walworth Road, which pulled in a mixed collection of musicians including Bragg, Paul Weller, managers, roadies, rock journalists, party officials and other interested parties. The meeting could easily have collapsed in mutual incomprehension, but out of it came a concert tour, featuring Bragg, Weller and Mick Talbot of The Style Council, Jimmy Somerville and Richard Coles of The Communards (Coles was a future Church of England vicar), Junior Giscombe, Tom Robinson and other regulars. Morrissey made an unscheduled appearance at a Red Wedge gig in Newcastle upon Tyne, a few months after he had off ended public taste by expressing regret that the bomb that went off during the Conservative Party conference at Brighton had not killed Thatcher. Suggs, of Madness, appeared at another Red Wedge event, in London, soon after being denounced on the front page of the Sun. The tour also drew in a number of comics including Robbie Coltrane, Tony Robinson, Lenny Henry, Billy Connolly, Harry Enfield and Ben Elton, and others from television, film and fashion, such as Katharine Hamnett. There were occasional problems. Red Wedge engaged Lynne Franks, the head of a PR agency, who was to achieve fame as the person on whom Jennifer Saunders modelled her character in Absolutely Fabulous, and this produced publicity that sent Peter Mandelson into a fury. The Daily Express reported:

  Buddhist mother of two, high priestess of fashion Lynne Franks . . . has a Buddhist altar in the front room and now prays there twice a day. This former kosher cutie is now a member of the Nichiren Shoshu sect . . . Buddha, however, had nothing to do with persuading the Labour Party leader to attend the Absolute Beginners opening night showbiz razzle, where he stood out like a Savile Row suit in an Arab bazaar.20

  If a relatively small movement like Red Wedge attracted people whose first priority was to promote themselves, the problem of self-seeking was inevitably much greater in the vast phenomenon that Geldof had set in motion, which Billy Bragg liked to call ‘Egos for Ethiopia’. By Christmas 1984, Band Aid had £5m in a bank account, the proceeds from just one record, and were now confronted with the responsibility of making sure the money was properly spent. Geldof had started out assuming that his involvement would end at Christmas and he would go back to his old life. However, he was besieged by charities who wanted a share of the money or the publicity generated by Band Aid, or both, and from media organizations wanting to keep the story going. In January 1985, he set off on a plane packed with journalists for Ethiopia and the Sudan, on a trip paid for by the Daily Star, Daily Express and TV-am. He was duly denounced by Sir Nicholas Fairbairn, the former solicitor general for Scotland, who accused him of getting ‘glory out of other people’s misery’.21 The impression that this was all a giant ego trip was reinforced when Robert Maxwell also arrived in Ethiopia to persuade its government to allow an RAF Hercules to bring in relief. Given Maxwell’s record for self-advertisement, it is no surprise that one correspondent scathingly described him ‘distributing loaves and fishes to the starving’,22 though the Mirror Group could claim that its contribution to famine relief was ‘greater than the rest of the press combined’.23

  The first food shipment donated by Band Aid arrived in March 1985, accompanied this time by Midge Ure, who posed for the cameras and fled back to his homeland after just fourteen hours, so horrified by the suffering that he had witnessed that he never returned. He wrote nearly twenty years later: ‘I wish I could have had the courage to go there and confront it all again, but I couldn’t. I’d rather hide my head in the sand than confront the horror, or my fear of the
unknown. I’m very surprised that I ever got involved in Band Aid.’24

  Band Aid spawned a series of other events, including an American answer to ‘Do they Know It’s Christmas?’ called ‘We Are The World’, written by Lionel Richie and Michael Jackson after Harry Belafonte had publicly expressed his dismay at seeing ‘a bunch of white English kids doing what black Americans ought to have been doing’.25 The recording session attracted a galaxy of famous names, but did not reproduce the makeshift spirit of Band Aid. Geldof, who was so broke that he had to beg for the plane fare so he cound be at the session, noted that: ‘The tables were loaded with smoked salmon, meats and canapés of every description. Drink was stacked in limitless quantities. The room was full of Hollywood fat cats and their wives eating and drinking effortlessly and talking smoothly about how wonderful it all was, this contribution to famine relief.’26 After USA for Africa, there was Northern Lights for Canada, Austria fur Afrika, Chanteurs Sans Frontières and about twenty more. Back in the UK, Comic Relief was launched on Christmas Day 1985, during Noel Edmonds’ Late Breakfast Show, from a refugee camp in Sudan. It featured a biannual telethon, every other March, alternating with Red Nose Day. By the end of the century, the charity had dispersed £174m in grants among forty-three African countries and in every county of the UK.

  After the triumph of Band Aid, Bob Geldof was talking about following up the record with a live concert, without being entirely sure that it was achievable. The breakthrough came when he received an unsolicited off er to use Wembley Stadium, free of charge. The off er fell through, but by the time it did, the concert was well on the way to being organized, with promises from Paul Young, Paul Weller, Spandau Ballet and, more importantly, from the country’s leading rock promoter, Harvey Goldsmith. A second promoter, Maurice Jones, was also enlisted. By the time Geldof met them in April 1985, he had a long list of bands ready to perform and had conceived the wild idea of a simultaneous satellite link-up: a rolling concert would begin at noon in the UK, go on until 5 p.m., then restart in the USA from 10 p.m. British time, with fifty bands performing. He wanted the American concert to be held in New York, but it proved impossible to book a venue in time, so it was held in the JFK Stadium in Philadelphia. He proposed that it be organized in just fourteen weeks so that the concert would coincide with Independence Day weekend in the USA. Later, he put it back a week, to 13 July, because the earlier date did not suit Bruce Springsteen, then the biggest name in American rock. Despite much hassling, Geldof did not manage to persuade Springsteen to participate.

  Having overcome a mountain of logistical problems and steered around competing egos, Geldof finally stood up to open the Live Aid concert in front of a crowd of 80,000 people in Wembley, with television link-ups around the world that enabled an estimated 1bn to watch part or all of the day’s entertainment. As Geldof entered the royal box alongside Prince Charles, Princess Diana and Paula Yates, a Guards’ regiment blared out a few bars of the national anthem, which was soon drowned by the sound of Status Quo playing ‘Rocking All Over the World’. Phil Collins managed the unique feat of performing live in Wembley, then taking a helicopter to Heathrow, walking directly from the helicopter on to Concorde and flying to Philadelphia in time for a second live appearance. Once the link-up with Philadelphia was achieved, Jack Nicholson walked on stage there to introduce the next act, U2, who were performing in London. Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, Tina Turner, David Bowie, Elton John, Dire Straits, Paul Weller, Elvis Costello and many more were on the bill. Paul McCartney performed live for the first time in eight years. His gig, by sheer ill-fortune, was preceded by the day’s only rainfall; water seeped into the electrics and his microphone did not work. Freddie Mercury, appearing with Queen, was widely reckoned to have stolen the show.

  There was not another phenomenon quite like Live Aid in the whole of the twentieth century. It was remarkable not only for the number of artists involved and the sum it raised, but for the cooperation and goodwill it inspired in the less visible and more hard-nosed sections of the entertainment industry: the producers and promoters, the television companies and corporate sponsors. People gave with amazing generosity. As the concert progressed, hundreds of telephone lines were open for people to make donations, spurred by Geldof’s breathless exhortations. Credit cards were still relatively rare, so there was a scheme that allowed people to pledge money by telephone then go into the Post Office on Monday to pay by giro. The Sheikh of Kuwait rang to pledge £1m. In all, around £30m was raised in a day. And it was a phenomenon made in Britain, fuelled by waves of enthusiasm coming from the American concert across the Atlantic. There were a number of incidental factors that helped to make it possible at that particular time, such as the fact that British groups like Duran Duran and Culture Club had broken into the American charts, and that Geldof needed a new career. However, the biggest contributing factor, one that is seldom acknowledged, was the miners’ strike, which had so politicized and divided British society, and had given the rock industry, in particular, the feeling that there were great events in which they should get involved. Where the strike was divisive, Band Aid united; everybody, whether they were for or against the miners, or undecided, could be against letting African children starve.

  After Live Aid, there was less overtly political rock music, as if the industry had done its bit and could go back to singing about love, sex, despair and the other staples. Many of the best bands to emerge in Britain in the decade were not invited to perform at Live Aid, either because it was before their time or, in the case of the Eurythmics, because they seemed to have passed Geldof by. Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart had used a bank loan to set up a small eight-track studio in Chalk Farm, north London, in 1982. After a few flops, they issued ‘Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)’ as a single in May 1983, along with a video that helped to propel it to No. 2 in the UK charts, and then to no.1 in the USA. They repeated this success by re-releasing ‘Love is a Stranger’, which became a major hit after having bombed the first time around. The Smiths, formed by Steven Morrissey in 1982, released their first major hit ‘Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now’ in June 1984. Then, in December 1987, a single of extraordinary originality suddenly smashed its way into the charts. This was ‘Fairytale of New York’ by Kirsty MacColl and the Pogues, which is routinely though inaccurately voted the greatest Christmas No. 1 of all time. Actually, it was released so late in the year that in most charts it did not make the top slot until after Christmas. The song told a serious story about a woman struggling to maintain a relationship with an attractive drunkard, a role for which The Pogues’ lead singer, Shane MacGowan, was singularly well cast. The Pogues also sang about Irish emigration and about living rough in London, and produced one of the finest anti-war songs in the history of British music, ‘The Band Played Waltzing Matilda’, about the Australian experience in Gallipoli.

  A lesson commonly drawn from the experiences of Live Aid and Red Wedge is that rock and politics do not mix, and that if bands want to be effective they should confine themselves to uncontroversial issues such as famine relief. On the face of it, the argument is a no-brainer. Red Wedge’s purpose was to secure a Labour victory in the general election of 1987. Before that election, there were 209 Labour MPs and the Conservatives had an overall majority of 144; afterwards, there were 229 Labour MPs, and the Conservative majority was 102. By contrast, Live Aid and its off shoots persist every year in raising millions for charity. However, there are a couple of caveats to be registered here. Firstly, Red Wedge was not the outright failure that the bald figures imply. At the 1983 general election, Labour’s support fell to 33 per cent among 18–24 years olds, the only part of the electorate ever likely to be influenced by Red Wedge. In 1987, it moved back up to 40 per cent. Among all voters, Labour’s support crept up from 27.6 to 30.8 per cent. Labour would still have lost even if they had achieved the same swing in all age groups as they did with first-time voters, but they would have knocked a far bigger hole in Margaret Thatcher’s majority, and might have be
en able to stop some of her more contentious proposals, such as the poll tax, from reaching the statute books.

  A larger point is that Band Aid also set itself too big an ambition, and also failed. Starvation persists, especially in Africa, because it is not a problem that can be solved by charitable donations, even on the scale generated by the Live Aid concert. Bob Geldof realized very early in his campaign that it was never going to be enough. By his figures, the £8m generated by the initial Band Aid record was enough to feed Africa’s 22m starving people for eight days.27 In the coming years, Geldof would spend a great deal of time in the company of politicians, lobbying them about aid budgets, trade rules, writing off Third World debt, and much else – often accompanied by Bono, who was twenty-five when he performed at the Live Aid concert, and who followed it up by making an unpublicized visit to Ethiopia in September, and spent a month working in a feeding station.28

  This explains Margaret Thatcher’s attitude to the phenomenon. Less than two years before Band Aid, the prime minister paid a lyrical tribute to the Victorian ideal of charitable relief work when ‘as people prospered themselves so they gave great voluntary things . . . schools . . . hospitals . . . even some of the prisons, the Town Halls’,29 yet she wanted no part in Band Aid or Live Aid. When people bought ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’, each penny of the cover price went to Africa, but the VAThwent to the government, who refused to waive it despite the pleas of a delegation of MPs, led by Labour’s recently appointed shadow trade minister Tony Blair, who went to the Treasury in December 1984. Thatcher was invited to give a video address to the Live Aid concert, but decided not to, though she wrote a supporting letter. When she met Bob Geldof at an awards ceremony a few days later, Thatcher told him: ‘We all, you know, have our own charities.’30