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Perth Now
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Perth Now
Bob Geldof was left 'mortified' when he read the script for the Live Aid musical
Bob Geldof was left "mortified" when he read the script for the Live Aid musical. The 78-year-old musician teamed up with Midge Ure to organise the the benefit concert and raised funds for relief of the 1983–1985 famine in Ethiopia with a major concert starring the likes of late Queen star Freddie Mercury, pop legend Sir Elton John and rock band Status Quo amongst a host of others but just days before the story behind it launches as jukebox musical titled 'Just For One Day' in London's West End, he admitted he felt uncomfortable reading about himself. Speaking at Wembley Stadium on Thursday (01.05.25) as he announced the release of the 'Just For One Day' cast recording, he said: "It's extraordinary, the musical is extraordinary. I'm not familiar with this sort of thing, I'm more of a Rodgers and Hammerstein guy, and when they approached me I was mortified by the script because, you know, you're reading a version of the self. "My main thing was that it has to be politically pertinent. It has to be about what it was always supposed to be about, the charity, which everyone 40 years ago had understood. These days it's about Freddie [Mercury] – genius and all that – but what the musical does for us is put it in the contemporary perspective. "What happened 40 years ago at Wembley was to lay that idea to rest that there is such a thing as society, it proved that human beings do care about each other." 'Just for One Day' will be celebrating the 40th anniversary of Live Aid with a very special performance at the Shaftesbury Theatre in London on 13 July, and the Boomtown Rats star - who co-wrote 'Do They Know It's Christmas?' in the months before the legendary concert took place - admitted that he had no idea all those years ago that the issue would be as "vital" today. He said: 'We couldn't possibly have known that 40 years down the track, the issue would be as vital or the interest as great. Millions of children today are being forced to starve as an instrument of war, and millions of lives are in peril due to AIDS and because of cuts to international aid. "This musical is extraordinary, and it brings Live Aid to a new generation - the possibility of what individuals can do together. It refutes Thatcher's dictum that there's no such thing as society. There is and it roared its existence on that day 40 years ago in Wembley Stadium. Human beings do care about each other - they rise above contemporary politics. "Just For One Day puts Live Aid into perspective. It's a phenomenal piece of work. I read somewhere that it's a 'jukebox musical' - dude, it's the original musical jukebox! That's what we called it back then - 'Live Aid - the Global Jukebox'! That's what Live Aid was, arguably the greatest collection of songs of the rock era, and so this musical is hit after hit after hit, stunningly arranged for this generation! Its achievement is to conjure that vivid sense of 40 years ago, and to make it relevant to now." 'Just For One Day - The Live Aid Musical' (Original Cast Recording) will be available from 11th .
The Guardian
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘We created a monster': Midge Ure reflects on Live Aid as musical heads to West End
Sitting in the royal box at London's Wembley Stadium, just shy of the 40th anniversary of the Live Aid concert that he helped make happen here, Midge Ure ponders its legacy. 'We created a monster,' he says. 'And it had to happen.' The two Live Aid shows in London and Philadelphia on 13 July 1985, featuring performances by U2, Queen, David Bowie and more, form the core of the stage musical Just for One Day. Today, it was announced that it will transfer to London's West End in May, after short runs at London's Old Vic in 2024 and Toronto earlier this year. But Ure argues that the day-long Live Aid could never happen today, because of the seductive pull of social media feeds. 'Have [audiences] got the attention span? I'm not sure,' he says. Live Aid was held to raise money for famine relief in Ethiopia, and Ure says that he and the team behind it were powered by a cocktail of naivety and rock-star arrogance – logistical hurdles were deemed immaterial. 'We hadn't figured out just what a task this was going to be,' he says. 'Just get the show done. Sparkle, guys!' They had had major success with Band Aid's Do They Know It's Christmas? single in December 1984, written by Ultravox frontman Ure alongside Bob Geldof, but it had ended up exposing bottlenecks that were stopping the money getting to where it was most needed. A concert was conceived to swiftly raise the funds to eradicate those problems. 'There was a trucking cartel in situ in Ethiopia that all the aid agencies were using and had to pay for,' says Ure. 'We wanted to break the cartel by buying a fleet of trucks, but we didn't have the money to do it. So Live Aid was born.' George Harrison's 1971 Concert for Bangladesh charity show and album were used to show how good intentions can be dashed by mismanagement: millions of dollars raised by the concert were trapped in IRS tax escrow accounts for years. 'The first advice we were given was from George,' says Ure of the early planning stages for Live Aid. 'He said to Bob, 'Don't do what we did. Don't spend any of the money. No overheads.'' Frugality became the Band Aid Charitable Trust's mantra – it has never had an office and all trustees still work for free, with expenses forbidden. Money continues to come in from licensing, streams (of the Band Aid single at Christmas and YouTube footage of Live Aid) and donations, and 10% of proceeds from Just for One Day will support it. Total funds raised in the trust's lifetime have reached £150m. 'We have people leaving money to us in their wills,' says Ure. 'Our job as trustees is to generate as much money as we possibly can for the cause.' The 71-year-old Ure accepts that the social context of Live Aid in 1985 can be knotty to explain in 2025. The Band Aid lyrics – such as Bono's line 'tonight thank God it's them instead of you' – have prompted accusations of white saviourhood, and African artists such as Fuse ODG have argued it created a patronising and flattened view of a whole continent. 'We wrote it in an afternoon as a simple pop song and it's not there to be analysed,' counters Ure. 'It was there to do something. Was it done with good intent? Yes, it was. Did it make a difference? Yes, it did.' He feels, in retrospect, Live Aid marked the end of the old world, where music was the epicentre of culture, and the start of something less monolithic. Having a whole day of TV programming devoted to a concert raising money for a single cause could not work in today's oversaturated and media-fragmented world, he feels. Speaking at the musical's launch event on Thursday, Geldof made a similar point. 'The problem is, do people have the bandwidth?' he said. 'They're so exhausted with the horror of Gaza and the terror of Ukraine and the American political situation that it's hard to draw attention to those who through no fault of their own are dying right now.' For Ure, what was a unifying media spectacle then would not cohere now. 'I think Charlie Brooker will be writing the next Black Mirror [about this],' he jokes. 'Fans in the audience would be filming it and then they'd swipe their screens and the artists would disappear after 30 seconds. It's a different world.' Just for One Day: The Live Aid Musical will open at London's Shaftesbury theatre on 15 May, with an album version to be released on 11 July.
Telegraph
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Paul Simon: anti-Apartheid hero or arrogant white colonialist? The jury's out
'I have 40 years' experience of trying to change the world through singing. It doesn't work,' said Billy Bragg on Paul Simon's Political Storm (Radio 4, Tuesday). Apart from making me wonder why Bragg didn't jack in the day job a long time before now, this statement struck me as peculiarly defeatist. A little over 40 years ago, Band Aid certainly tilted the world ever so slightly with its cloth-eared anthem Do They Know It's Christmas? (Feed the World), and the debate still rages whether the hit single helped or harmed Africa. A little under 40 years ago, in the summer of 1986, Paul Simon released his enduring album Graceland, and Lynsey Chutel's thought-provoking documentary invited us to consider its chequered legacy. Is Simon an anti-Apartheid hero, smashing down barriers and elevating black South African musicians onto a world stage? Or is he an arrogant white colonialist, breaking the cultural boycott to pilfer black South Africa of its musical heritage? Many of the contributors to the programme saw the issue in these terms, but Chutel herself – a South African who works for the New York Times in London – brought far more nuance. Simon recorded the album in 1985, coming off the back of a failed marriage (to Carrie Fisher) and an album (Hearts and Bones) so indifferently received that his record label assumed he would retire. In a funk, he listened to a bootleg cassette of the Boyoyo Boys, a township jive band from Soweto, and decided that making music with them would be 'a lot of fun'. You could hear the incredulity in Chutel's voice: 'Can you imagine landing in South Africa in 1985 and thinking, 'I'm here because the vibes are cool'?' Simon's first sin, it seems, was breaking the cultural boycott so flippantly. Simon got a kicking here, not just from Bragg (the only non-African contributor to the programme) but from South African anti-Apartheid campaigner Dali Tambo, who likened Simon's actions to recording music with Jewish musicians in Warsaw during the Second World War. Tambo, son of the former ANC leader Oliver Tambo, was unequivocal: 'For me there was no difference in a person coming to exploit us for our diamonds and gold, or for our musical abilities.' Chutel pointed out the irony of naming the album after Elvis Presley's home – another artist who cheerfully mined black music to enormous success. Yet Chutel also gently picked at the moral simplicity of Bragg and his ilk, who protested outside the Royal Albert Hall when Simon and his South African collaborators played there. Bakithi Kumalo, who played bass so memorably on Graceland, was an electrician in Soweto struggling to feed his family when Simon came calling. He reminded Chutel that black South Africans under apartheid still had music and joy in their lives, 'not just oppression and misery'. When Simon's offer came, Kumalo 'saw the gate of freedom and I walked straight to it'. And what did he make of the protestors outside the Royal Albert Hall? 'Those people did not talk to me when I was desperate and hungry,' he said. Sonti Mndebele, who sang on the Graceland tour, claimed that Simon's actions made black South African culture 'respected', a statement that sticks in the craw for those who find breaking the cultural boycott unfathomable. The beauty of BBC Sounds is that, while searching for this programme on the app, I stumbled across a 1987 World Service report from Network Africa. In it, a journalist spoke to those outside the Royal Albert Hall, including British anti-Apartheid campaigner David Kenvyn. Simon was doing this for selfish ends, said Kenvyn, before asking the reporter and the wider world if they knew the names of any of the South African artists who played with Simon. Considering some of those included Ladysmith Black Mambazo, it's a statement that hasn't aged well. Mndebele stated that the album changed the hearts and minds of many white South Africans at the time, exposing them to a culture they had previously not known. Ultimately, Chutel's reasonable summary was one of mild embarrassment – Graceland is a little like Band Aid, a well-meaning relic that undeniably did an enormous amount of good, even if its origins are hard to stomach. 'It's not the kind of cultural artefact passed down by black South Africans,' said music writer Setumo-Thebe Mohlomi, with some understatement, while Chutel's uncle, Stanley de Clerk, likened it to Uncle Tom's Cabin – the black experience, but made palatable for white audiences. The success of Chutel's programme can be seen in the fact that I changed my mind on the subject a dozen times while listening to it. The emphasis on localism (and journalism) meant that the documentary came across as an extended episode of From Our Own Correspondent (and I can think of no greater praise). It was a far cry from the usual 'well-known BBC Radio voice explores their favourite artist' template. 'This is not going to be a standard rock doc,' said Chutel at the outset. It wasn't, and thank goodness for that.
Times
24-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Roy Thomas Baker obituary: record producer on Bohemian Rhapsody
If something is worth doing, Roy Thomas Baker once said, then it's worth overdoing. Nowhere was this philosophy of excess deployed more effectively than in his gloriously over-the-top production on Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody. Baker created the record, which at the time was said to be the most expensive ever produced, by layering almost 200 tracks on top of each other to create an aural masterpiece of bombastic brilliance. 'Bohemian Rhapsody was totally insane, but we enjoyed every minute of it. It was basically a joke, but a successful joke,' Baker recalled in 1999, after the song had become one of the biggest-selling British singles of all time, alongside Elton John's Candle in the Wind and Band Aid's Do They Know It's Christmas? Baker produced
Irish Daily Star
21-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Daily Star
Music fans are just learning what Midge Ure's stage name means after 56 years
Scottish singer-songwriter and record producer Midge Ure, whose career has spanned several decades, is a testament to enduring musical talent. He found fame in the 70s and 80s with bands like Slik, Thin Lizzy, Rich Kids, Visage and most notably as Ultravox's frontman after John Foxx left. Under his leadership, Ultravox soared in the charts for six years until he chose to dissolve the band. In addition, he co-wrote and produced the 1984 charity hit "Do They Know It's Christmas?", and played a pivotal role in putting together the legendary Band Aid ensemble, marking him as a major figure in music history. Despite his long-standing presence in the spotlight, not everyone knows how he came by his stage name. A recent Reddit discussion brought this to light, much to the fascination of fans. A user posted: "James 'Midge' Ure OBE (born 10 October 1953) is a British musician, singer-songwriter and record producer. "His stage name, Midge, is a phonetic reversal of Jim, the diminutive form of his actual name. "In 1984, he co-wrote and produced the charity single 'Do They Know It's Christmas?' Interestingly, Midge Ure's stage name is a phonetic reversal of his birth name, Jim." The backstory is that to avoid mix-ups with Salvation bandmate Jim McGinlay, they flipped James' nickname "Jim" to "Midge" thus creating the unique moniker. Midge Ure, now 71, has had a colourful career in the music industry, starting from his early days with the band Salvation to becoming a significant figure in the music world. When Kevin McGinlay left Salvation, Midge Ure took over as the lead vocalist. The band was then renamed Slik and scored a UK number one single in 1976 with "Forever and Ever", thanks to the songwriting talents of Bill Martin and Phil Coulter. Bob Geldof and Midge Ure pictured during the recording of the Band Aid single "Do They Know It's Christmas?" (Image: Getty Images) Interestingly, about a year before this success, Midge Ure declined an offer to join the Sex Pistols, believing that music mogul Malcolm McLaren, who worked with the band, had "his priorities completely wrong". Despite his initial doubts about the punk scene, Midge's musical direction changed as Slik evolved into PVC2 in an attempt to align with the punk aesthetic. He later formed Rich Kids with ex-Sex Pistol and Blondie touring member Glen Matlock, before joining Visage in 1978 and Ultravox a year later, contributing to some of the most iconic songs of the era. Today, the singer is still very active in the music industry. He tours extensively and continues to work on new music. The star's electronic duo with Charlie Round Turner are heading back to the USA to play a few shows in May. He's also set to tour Australia later this year too.
