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18 July 2005
Make Wealth History

After the Live 8 fiasco and the annual Glastonbury tripe-fest I felt compelled to put something on the site about it all. I'd got halfway through writing what follows when the London bombing happened. I didn't want to carry on, it didn't seem appropriate at the time. I'm very sad and sorry about what's happened.
But we have to carry on and the bombings haven't changed the way I feel about Live 8 and all the rest of it. It might make me hugely unpopular but here it is:

Cold Play might be a good starting point. Who the hell likes them? Personally I can't stand them and I don't know anybody else who likes them either. They must be the most self-important group that ever was. I could forgive Chris Martin for his horrible haircut, his naff trainers, his poncey clipped Oxford graduate accent, for the way he prances around holding a microphone like a closet gay handling a cock for the first time wailing into it with faux-passion, for his stupid dancing, and even for that un-shaved chic which makes him look, from a distance, as though he's been dipped in egg white and had Rice Crispies tipped over him.
I could forgive the rest of them for being tubby, nondescript and badly dressed. And as to the music - if I was going to be reasonable I'd just say it isn't my cup of tea so I don't go out of my way to listen to it - but I'm not so how about boring, grim, pretentious and contrived.
I'm even prepared to tolerate the sight of Chris Martin's big square arse - a feature he shares with Tony Blair and, come to think of it, Elvis Costello. None of them can help their big square arses but it's not the kind of feature you want to see in a pop star. I suppose they all got it from sitting down a lot - writing songs, passing exams, becoming all-powerful, and generally working out how to make a lot of money and appear disgustingly clever.
But Chris Martin's pomposity I find unforgivable. At Glastonbury he went through a whole routine during the obligatory acoustic part of the set explaining that, if they messed up the number they were going to play, everyone should ask Michael Eavis for a fifty pence refund on their ticket, but if they liked it they should donate fifty pence to Live 8. Cute. He went on to say that Cold Play supported Live 8, which is fair enough, but then he said: '...and anyone who doesn't is, in our opinion, a knobhead.'
Well, maybe I'm a knobhead, but Chris Martin is, in my opinion, a silly cunt.
And the resemblance between Chris Martin and Tony Blair is alarming - he's like a young Tony clone. Perhaps, as a result of some Jekyll and Jekyll (or should that be Hyde and Hyde) stunt, he actually is Tony Blair. It makes perfect sense to me.

Watching Glastonbury on the TV gave me the bloody pip. I'm sick and tired of Glastonbury. It may be a fun-drenched, beautiful, caring, sharing, holistic experience for the people who go there (though what's so beautiful and fun-drenched about sleeping in a damp igloo tent and queuing up to shit through a hole into a sewage tank I cannot fathom), but for the rest of us it's just a fucking bore. Band after mundane band interspersed with dreary post-match reports from the gang in the BBC tent - Jo Whiley and the ubiquitous Phill Jupitus who I'm not going to insult because I think he's a very nice man - I just wish he'd put on some long trousers and stop doing Glastonbury.
There was a distinct lack of individuality. This year a lot of the bands wore ties and most of them were dressed in black - it was as though they'd had a meeting and decided on a dress code. I started to question whether it was me - too old to understand - no longer hip to the jive. Maybe, but the jive isn't hip - I've seen it all before. It's the same as if I'd gone onstage in 1977 intent on emulating the sound of Kenny Ball's Jazz Men, or The Joe Loss Orchestra.
Thinking about it I suppose it's only a matter of time before they wheel out The Joe Loss Orchestra at Glastonbury - they've already had Tony Bennet, Rod Stewart and Paul McCartney so why not? Joe Loss is dead, that's why not. Which is just as well because Elvis Costello's dad was the featured vocalist, and the smugness of two generations of that doing Glastonbury together is too appalling to contemplate.
Glastonbury, Glastonbury, Glastonbury... Next time, the year after next, I'm going to send out Happy Glastonbury cards - Wishing you and yours all the best for a joyous Glastonbury - A Happy And Prosperous Glastonbury To All the Family - Wishing You All You'd Wish For Yourself This Glastontide... It might as well replace Christmas, then we could have it on all the TV channels at once and the run up could start in November.

But this year's Glastonbury seemed to be just part of the build up to Live 8. Days before Glastonbury the BBC screened a documentary about the Live Aid concert of 1985. What a fiasco that was - they said it changed music forever. Yes, it certainly did that - finally lopped its balls clean off and sucked what was left of it into to the corpulent body of the establishment. But what did it really achieve?
It put Status Quo back on the map. They'd done it to death, run clean out of riffs and given us Margarita Time, but thanks to Live Aid they stayed with it and came up with In The Army Now. It revitalised Queen who were apparently on the verge of splitting up - they must have sold a lot of records on the back of that. It turned U2 into the stadium act they are now. A girl who was about to get crushed on the barrier was lifted to safety by Bono who in so doing secured himself a position as one of the world's leading humanitarians, even though his haircut was a minor crime against humanity in its own right.
A more cynical person than myself might wonder what would have become of Bob Geldof without Live Aid - I Don't Like Mondays might have been a number one but it was a ghastly record and time hasn't done it many favours - it still sounds like shit. So where would Bob's career be now? I bet he wouldn't be doing Africa for the BBC, selling albums, filling concert halls... Back in 1985 the Boomtown Rats were a spent force. Bob, or Saint Bob or Sir Bob was pretty well finished. So he didn't do too badly out of it. Not that I'm doubting the sincerity of his efforts - I'm sure he was, and is, utterly sincere, but that doesn't make him any less of a pain in the arse than Chris Martin.
Live Aid raised millions of pounds and dollars. But whenever Live Aid gets talked about, as in the recent TV documentary, that's as far as the story goes - money was raised. But nobody ever mentions where the money went or what good it did. And I'm left thinking that if it had done any good these self-aggrandising arseholes would be the first to shout about it. Are the general public really stupid enough to assume that a lot of impassioned play acting is going to solve the problems of this world? It would seem so. I cannot put it any better than The Guardian's Simon Hoggart:
Actually, watching much of Live 8 on Saturday I felt that the singers had more in common with politicians than they might wish to admit.
Like politicians, almost everything they said was designed to enhance their public image while appearing extempore and sincere. Like modern politicians they deal in appealing soundbites, not all of which tolerate close scrutiny. Like ministers, they like to imply that mobilising the masses, either in Hyde Park or at an election, will in itself create the solutions.
And like politicians they have a tremendous sense of their own importance, being whisked around by limo and by helicopter, treated with awed respect, surrounded by murmuring flunkies whose jobs depend on doing what they want, when they want it.
Simon Hoggart, The Guardian, July 5 2005

The only bit of Live 8 that made any sense to me was the Who's performance. They played Who Are You? with the faces of world leaders flashing up behind them and followed it with Won't Get Fooled Again - one of the best records ever made - meet the new boss, same as the old boss - right every time. And they didn't say anything in between. Everybody else made speeches - the idiotic boy Barbie Doll singer in Razorlight came out with the amazingly erudite: 'we're here to make poverty history, right?' which got him a lot of applause and made him look really good even though, if this was real life, he wouldn't make it fronting a Stooges tribute band.
Saint Bob bought on an Ethiopian woman, a survivor of the famine of 1985, and made a speech. He introduced Madonna who came on dressed in white, the same as the band and choir which I read as a sort of show-biz code for we're all equal, and dragged the unfortunate woman all over the stage like a human prop.
Jo Whiley (who openly professed to NOT being a Who fan) interviewed people on the front row -
'Are you enjoying the music?'
'Yeah, great'
'And what about the cause, you know, Make Poverty History?'
'Eh? Oh yeah, that too. Yeah, great.'

The cause is a worthy one but the intention to 'Make Poverty History' is utterly naive. It's about as realistic a possibility as smashing capitalism. Capitalism is at the root of third world poverty. Poverty is a necessary side effect of capitalism - the accumulation of wealth and the creation of an underclass. Without poverty there can be no wealth.
A leading botanist recently claimed that if every nation on earth lived as well as America and Great Britain it would take three planets to sustain us. So there's the answer, and try telling this to Chris Martin, Bono, Sting, Madonna and co - let's Make Wealth History.