EMPATHY is better than sympathy. A couple of months ago the Commission for Africa, on which Bob Geldof served, published a small book about how to change the continent. It informed readers, among other things, that 42 per cent of Africans don’t have access to safe water, and 60 per cent don’t have access to basic sanitation. To replicate the same conditions here in Britain, we go to all-day rock concerts where water costs two quid a bottle and the queue for the ladies’ means an hour’s wait. It’s like a refugee camp with Pimm’s, and nowhere to sit. At midnight on Saturday it was reckoned that up to 20,000 concert-goers were stranded by the event’s overrun.
“Our job,” said the organisers, “is basically to make sure that these people are safe and warm and well fed, and not thirsty or hungry.” Maybe a flight with food and blankets was on its way from RAF Lineham.
Ten hours earlier, we all arrived in the “Golden Circle”, closest to the stage. The average age was around 35, there was the obligatory aged punk wearing platform shoes and a vermilion girlfriend, and also a chap with a large Mexican flag. Macho men put their snake-armed girl-friends on their shoulders, and we all waved to the camera on the boom as it swept over us. “What a trip!” yelled Bono at the beginning of the concert. “Long walk to justice!” Jonathan Ross cut in to the sound system early on. We were not alone, there were concerts in Berlin, in Moscow, at the “Palace of Versailles in Pawis”, and in the “Circus Maximus in Wome”.
This was a strange and wonderful day. We have become able, in Britain, to use irony ironically. How else can you explain Sir Elton John giving backing to wild child Pete Doherty on Marc Bolan’s Children of the Revolution? Oh, you can’t fool the children of the revolution! Doherty was unusual in that he looked like an old-fashioned, off-his-face, doomed rock star. Nowadays, judging by the bands on the bill, hardly anyone is drinking themselves to death. But I suppose that one proof of getting old is when even the rock stars look healthy. Dido made the girl next door seem like Myra Hindley, Keane’s lead singer had the face of a film hobbit and the voice of an archangel, and Snow Patrol, the Stereophonics and the Killers had all scrubbed up for the occasion and, time running short, obediently went on and off stage in 25 min utes flat. Whereas in Rome they seemed to have Duran Duran for an eternity.
Old-fashioned revolutions are not addressed by men like Bill Gates. The stormers of the Bastille might have been shown the head of Gates, but they are unlikely to have applauded the mouth telling them that the billionaire businesssman has learnt that “success depends on knowing what works, and bringing resources to the problem”. When Gates acclaimed “the leadership from men like Tony Blair and Gordon Brown” there was little cheering, but there was no booing either.
Two sets of people will have hated all this. Your real revolutionaries, with their zeal, pleasurable anger and contempt for ordinary folk, and your cynics, who habitually hide behind complexity to excuse their inactivity and lack of compassion.
There was plenty for the latter to hate. Will Smith, on stage in Philadelphia with the Declaration of Independence, pronounced a new “Declaration of Interdependence”, a phrase that Tony Blair will be borrowing by the end of the week. And then he told us that “every three seconds, somebody’s son, somebody’s daughter, somebody’s future is gone. Dead.” We all clicked our fingers once every three seconds to mark this rounded-off statistic.
Simplistic? Of course. Manipulative? Maybe, along with the film of a tear coursing down the face of an Aids victim. Occasionally weird, as in pointing out that the 50,000 dying needlessly every 24 hours in Africa amounted to “one Glastonbury every three days” — a few people might feel quite ambivalent about that. Sometimes silly, as when Chris Martin called the event “the greatest thing that’s ever been organised in the history of the world”.
Which puts D-Day in its place.
But that’s just rock hyperbole. “Are you ready to start a revolution?” demanded Madonna. “Are you ready to change history? I said, are you f****** ready?” Meaning, shall we have a bloody great singalong and think a bit about Africa. “Music makes the people come together. Music makes the bourgeosie and the rabble ...” But the rabble had stayed away.
Of course, this jolly-hockeysticks rebellion can be annoying. The fabulously talented but artistically pointless teenager Joss Stone (who might be a more interesting performer if she did take some drugs) patronised everyone by telling them that she was “so proud of you all for coming out here tonight!” The man behind me told her, quite loudly, what he thought of that.
And here, I suppose, was the question that was lying beneath all the acts and the slogans. Was all this anything more than a rich nation’s spasm of easy activism? Did it, would it, amount to anything? What unconscious motive, after all, moved The Who to perform their most brilliant and cynical song from 1971, the arse-end of the 1960s? “There’s nothing in the streets looks any different to me/ And the slogans are replaced, by-the-bye.”
Or, most extraordinary and wonderful of all, the reformed Pink Floyd — looking like the reunion of a secondary head teacher, the owner of a dry-cleaning company and the Deputy Permanent Secretary at the Department of Transport — who ended their performance with the words: “The child is grown, the dream is gone.”
I have become comfortably numb. Was this a warning or a prediction? Would this 200,000 in the park, the pledgers back at home, the marchers on Gleneagles, the pop stars and the politicians, look back in 30 years and wonder why it all failed?
Not if Geldof has anything to do with it. His concert was bloody fantastic. It raised all sorts of issues, such as what would they make of Scissor Sisters in Benin City? But the main one was, did they really care? I think so. This is a strange age, in which extreme self-consciousness struggles with a real desire to do good, selfregard with the need for contact. A strange age, but not a bad one, as epitomised in Philadelphia by Will Smith. “We hold this truth to be self-evident,” he told the world audience, “that we are all in this together!” Was it just finger-clicking do-gooding? Did they really believe that that they were virtuous merely for having turned up to a rock concert?
I very much doubt it. Today’s pragmatic youth are far more realistic than that. Even so, let’s acknowledge the accomplishment. Seven years ago this issue was nowhere. First Jubilee 2000, then Geldof, Blair and Brown, have put it on Middle Britain’s map, and stuff is happening. Oh, you can’t fool the children of the sensible and strategic reform.
Click here to join Pete Paphides looking back on a beautiful and radical event
