I was watching some old Live Aid footage, recently. Specifically, U2’s set from the Wembley leg of the jamboree. For the benefit of younger readers, Live Aid was a charity event put together by Bob Geldof. Its aim was to deliver aid and relief to the hordes of starving Ethiopians. Featuring just about everyone who was anyone in the ‘80s, the two sprawling concerts, one at Wembley and one in Philadelphia, were landmark events for my generation.
Right in the middle of the decade, Live Aid came a scant four months after the end of the miners’ strike. The biggest, most bitterly charged industrial dispute ever to take place in the UK. If you weren’t there you can’t even begin to imagine what it was like. Trade Unionism’s ground zero, perhaps, as Thatcher, with the full support of a supposedly neutral state, sought and succeeded in breaking not just the NUM, but effective trade unionism for decades.
The decade also gave us Cruise missiles and the Greenham Common protestors, the Wapping dispute, Artists Against Apartheid and, flying completely in the face of the prevailing political wind, the rise of Militant in Liverpool.
It was a time of great conflict and heightened class war as millions of us, only too aware of what Thatcherism triumphant would mean for the country, resisted and fought back with all we had.
But It was also a time of hope. Of optimism. Before the death of idealism, before the death of innocence. And although the writing was on the wall, the future had not yet then been written.
Then, though, on July 13th, 1985, tuning in and out to catch the specific acts of interest to me, my cynicism knew no bounds. My musical snobbery, combined with my lofty lefty principles, saw Live Aid as nothing more than a grubby PR opportunity for shallow and talentless pop stars. A sickening orgy of self-satisfaction and self-glorification as millionaire musicians pretended to give a shit about the fate of a dying wasteland, somewhere on the other side of the world.
Twenty six years later, watching Bono lead U2 through a moving twelve-minute rendition of Bad, from The Unforgettable Fire album, I was struck by how much things had changed. For me, for the world and certainly for U2.
Possibly it’s nostalgia. Maybe the distance that time and too many disappointments and betrayals bring, but Live Aid suddenly seemed like a beautiful and glorious feat of collective human endeavour.
From the vantage point of 2011, when the working people of the UK have never been so politically illiterate, atomised, alienated and isolated, when solidarity, collective action and, God forbid, a social conscience have all but been consigned to the Thatcherite dustbin of history, Live Aid seems almost sepia-toned and a curiously endearing phenomenon from centuries past. And while only twenty six years of real time has passed, politically and socially, it might as well have been three hundred years ago. So dramatically, so seismically has the British body politic changed.
Who would have thought then, on that beautiful summer’s day in 1985 that St Bono, the Celtic crusader, all charged passion, angry empathy and revolutionary zeal, would degenerate into Bono The Betrayer? Bono The Tax Dodger? Bono The Bloated Millionaire Tax Exile and Self-indulgent Narcissist? Not even my eighteen year-old self, puffed up with the arrogance and fiery idealism of youth, with my contempt for all things mainstream and the cynicism that informed my every view of plastic, commercialised pop tarts, could have countenanced the complete turn into his antitheses that Bono became.
We thought that rock ‘n’ roll could change the world. And maybe it did. Just a little. For a time. But it also changed Bono and U2.