JB: Here’s how completely consumed the U.K. was with the give-till-it-hurts spirit of Band Aid. The week before the release of “Do They Know It’s Christmas?,” the number-one record in the country was “I Should Have Known Better” by a little Glaswegian guy named Jim Diamond. He’d had a taste of success a couple of years earlier with the group Ph.D., but this was his first solo hit. He was already in his thirties; he didn’t fit the pop star mold in either looks or sound. It was obviously a big deal that he’d made it. When he performed his chart-topping hit on Top of the Pops, he did so wearing a “Feed the World” T-shirt and imploring the audience at home to put “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” in first place the following week. I was a cynical prick in those days, but even I—even I!—reacted in shock and disbelief whenever anyone dismissed Band Aid as a publicity stunt intended to revive Bob Geldof’s music career. First of all, it was obvious to anyone with or without ears that nothing was going to revive Geldof’s music career. Second, there was something about being part of a mass audience that was galvanized into a community through the power of pop music that was exhilarating, even to the more uncharitably inclined of us. Third, “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” is a pretty bleak seasonal charity record. “The clanging chimes of doom”? “A world of dread and fear”? “Tonight, thank God, it’s them instead of you”? If Band Aid did, as its last-chapter placing in this book would suggest, signal the end of the era, what better, what colder, what more overdramatic way for new wave to go out?
LM: The morning that “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” premiered on the radio, I snuck my Walkman into Mr. D’Angelo’s science class. All of my new wave heroes on one record? No way was I going to miss that. A few months later I found myself having arguments with my classmates over which was better, Band Aid or USA for Africa. They argued that America had the bigger stars—Bruce Springsteen, Michael Jackson, Bob Dylan, Cyndi Lauper. I argued that their song had no soul. Even worse, it turned charity into an excuse for patriotism: “Only we Americans are strong enough to save the world.” Today, if we are to compare the tracks purely as competing pop songs, the Brits are ultimately triumphant. Even though some of its stars are in need of a little charity themselves (whatever happened to Marilyn?), “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” reemerges as a radio favorite each and every December. When was the last time you heard “We Are the World”?
MIDGE URE: I was doing The Tube [the TV pop show co-presented by Paula Yates, then Bob Geldof’s girlfriend] up in Newcastle when I spoke to Bob and he said, “I’ve just seen [Buerk’s] report.” That was the start of it. Then Bob and I met up. He’d written something the Boomtown Rats had turned down—which shows you how good it was. He turned up with this half-baked song and played it at me, and every time he played it, it was different. He had the basic lyrics, except his original version was, “There won’t be snow in Ethiopia this Christmas,” which, even for him and his rubbish timing, doesn’t fit. You can’t make that scan.
I knocked together an arrangement of this basic idea, and I spent four days in my studio with my electronics, sampling and lifting. The drum sound at the beginning of that track is lifted from “The Hurting,” by Tears for Fears. I lifted it straight off their track and told them about it 10 years later. All the multitracked vocals at the beginning, it’s me sampling my voice and doing all the trickery and stuff that you do. Within the week, we had the song written. I played all the instruments of the record in my studio. We glued it all together, all these bizarre ideas, and we had the “Feed the World” bit at the end. Then, of course, we had one day for everyone to do the song. We had to turn it around stupidly quickly to get it to pressing plants, so that we would have it ready in time for Christmas release. We had 24 hours to record all the vocals, Phil Collins’s drum parts, mix the track, and get it next morning to the pressing plants, otherwise we’d miss the deadline.
When I finished the demo, I wasn’t convinced it was a good song. I’ve now got to go in and sell the biggest artists in the world on singing this thing. A couple of them had been over to my studio earlier: Le Bon* had heard it, Sting had heard it. They came and sang a couple of bits beforehand. So they had heard the track, but the majority of people who turned up that day hadn’t heard a thing. So they walked in expecting to sing on this dreadful piece of crap. Fortunately, it wasn’t that bad.
Because of my background—I’d already produced umpteen artists, production was in my blood; I’d dealt with Visage, for God’s sake!—I knew most of the singers. I knew the Duran** guys and the Spandau*** guys, and they were just as petrified as I was. They’re the ones who had to stand up in front of their contemporaries and sing this thing on a Sunday morning. That’s not so easy to do. Nobody was feeling the grandiosity of their existence.
* SIMON LE BON, Duran Duran: My favorite thing was Francis Rossi and Rick Parfitt from Status Quo, who weren’t really part of that whole new wave scene at all but were a popular rock band from the 1970s. They couldn’t stop giggling. They got fits and giggles on the microphone and really couldn’t sing their part. It started to piss off some of the people in the studio, but the rest of us were just falling around laughing.
“Bob wrote the line ‘Tonight thank God it’s them instead of you,’ and Bono had a problem with it: ‘Why would you sing that?’”
We worked blind to give everyone a line each, and Bob and I don’t even appear on it. We’re on the chorus somewhere. It was really just down to getting people to sing a couple of lines each and see what we had. Paul Young ended up with more lines than anybody because he was hugely popular at the time, and he’s just got such a great voice. Whereas with Bono, U2 were still an up-and-coming college band. Bob wrote the line “Tonight thank God it’s them instead of you,” and Bono had a problem with it: “Why would you sing that? Why would you say that?” Bob quite calmly explained, “It’s not them rather than you. It’s thank God, it’s not you. You don’t have to face that. We’ll be sitting on Christmas Day with our families and turkeys, and these people haven’t got any choice.”
Lots of people couldn’t make it on the day or didn’t get it. We were desperate to get Bowie, we’d have loved to get more females, we’d love to have gotten more black artists, and it just didn’t go that way. We only had the rest. It wasn’t a bad selection we had. Given time, we could have balanced it out a little more.
** NICK RHODES, Duran Duran: We were one of the first people to say yes, which I am proud of. Because I think it helped to say “I’ve already got Duran Duran” to get other people on board. It was such a bizarre mix to have us, Spandau and Status Quo. You had Boy George and Marilyn, and you had Paul Weller, who I seem to remember arrived on the bus. I remember Simon singing with Sting, and I loved how great their voices sounded together. I thought, Wow, that sounds great. We should work with him again. So we invited Sting to work with us on one song on the Arcadia album, on “The Promise.”
*** TONY HADLEY, Spandau Ballet: The night before we were in Germany on the piss with Duran, having a real good drink. By the morning, we were all pretty rough. We didn’t look great. I remember arriving back at Heathrow, and someone said, “God, there’s all the press, there’s cameras out there, there’s about 400 screaming fans.” We were like, “Oh, shit!” All of a sudden we’re all in the bathroom trying to make ourselves look presentable—you know, Nick Rhodes putting stacks of makeup on. I think we all put a bit of makeup on that day, actually. So we went to the studio [Sarm West in Notting Hill], and it was a very British affair. It was like, “Cup of tea and a biscuit?” We all crowded into the control room, all the singers, and Geldof said to me, “Go on in, Tony. You go and do the bit first.” I went, “What?!” then, “Okay, all right, fine.” So everyone’s watching me as I go down the stairs into the [recording] area. At one point I was going to sing a higher bit, but I hadn’t had much sleep and was a little fragile. Anyway, luckily, two takes and that was it: My bit was done.
The moment I heard Bob and Maxwell [Lord Robert Maxwell, owner of
the U.K. Daily Mirror tabloid] scream at each other down the phone at four o’clock in the morning about who was going to get the rights to the official Band Aid shot of the artists—I think the Mirror Group wanted to sell the poster for their AIDS campaign, and Bob was saying, “Not on your fucking life. We’ll take it to the Sun”—I knew something big was happening.
When we’d finished the record, it was eight o’clock in the morning. The master went off to the cutting rooms and then straight to the factory, and Bob went to Radio 1 with a cassette. He went on the Simon Bates show and played the cassette, and I heard it getting played over the air as I’m driving back to my little house in Chiswick. I thought, That’s something else. I’ve never seen anyone do that before. I went home and had a couple of hours sleep, and when I woke up, all hell had broken loose.
THAT WAS THEN
BUT THIS IS NOW
“Do They Know It’s Christmas?” was number one in the U.K. for five weeks. It sold more than 3 million copies. The following year, the Live Aid concerts in Britain and the United States were watched by an estimated 1.9 billion people across the globe, raising more than $283 million. Acts performing on the day included Adam Ant, Style Council, Ultravox, Bryan Ferry, David Bowie, Elvis Costello, U2, Spandau Ballet, Nik Kershaw, Howard Jones, Paul Young, Simple Minds, the Pretenders, the Power Station, the Thompson Twins, Duran Duran, and the Boomtown Rats. It still didn’t help Bob Geldof’s music career. But it did get him an honorary knighthood and a reputation as a man the very mention of whose name causes governments to quake in fear. His tireless endeavors in the field of activism have been a clear influence on Bono and countless other celebrity philanthropists.
URE: After Band Aid and Live Aid, there was a whole slew of Farm Aid and Ferry Aid that all came out.**** People suffered from charity fatigue. They just got tired of it. For Band Aid and Live Aid, there was something in the air that was tangible, that was real and honest. It wasn’t a cheesy “Aren’t we wonderful, hey let’s all get together and make the world a better place” song. It was actually quite a harsh, brutal thing. It was a very British thing to do, to come out with a song like that and punch above your weight.
It worked then, but if it’s repeated and it’s not an original idea, the gloss comes off it. You could see that a couple of years after Band Aid with the Nelson Mandela 70th birthday concert at Wembley. All the artists that we’d tried to get for Live Aid were all queuing up to get on the Mandela thing. It didn’t quite sit right. All the record company execs outside sitting in their limos were rubbing their hands because they thought it would sell a gazillion records the way U2 did after Live Aid.
**** NICK RHODES: I don’t wish to sound disingenuous, but I think the British one was very heartfelt and naive, and then suddenly America stormed in with “We Are the World.” The title alone says something to you. I wouldn’t want to belittle anybody’s effort. All I’m saying is that the Band Aid thing was put together very quickly. It’s got a charm to it. “We Are the World” was this big, lush production. And in many ways it does define the differences between American music and British music at that time.
Is it too cynical now? Is it too easy to put something like that together now? It wouldn’t be a couple of huge concerts. It would be a simulcast. It would be a pay-per-view performance. It would be on the Internet. It’s a very different world. I don’t know if the necessity of something like that would happen now. The necessity for doing something like that exists all the time, but whether there’d be a desire for it, I don’t know. People consume music in a very different way. It doesn’t seem to be as all-important as it used to be for us. Kids have got computer games and a million other things to keep themselves entertained. We had music and our imaginations, and that was it.
’m not sure if growing up with new wave was a blessing or a curse. It was a blessing, sure, in that, as a movement, it was new and interesting and relatively erudite and filled with amazing, endearing, and sonically novel music. It was a curse, though, in that it completely screwed up my idea of what men and musicians are supposed to do and be.
See, new wave was gentle. It was introspective and, almost always, fairly yielding and soft. I mean, the toughest that new wave ever really got was Echo and the Bunnymen’s “Do It Clean” live, which is still pretty gentle, all things considered. Great, but gentle.
New wave wonderfully and shamelessly (and gently, of course) borrowed (i.e., stole) from its idols and influences. Everyone, almost en masse, loved Kraftwerk and Bowie and Roxy Music. And everyone, almost en masse, shamelessly borrowed from Kraftwerk and Bowie and Roxy Music. Personally, I tried to have it both ways and straddle the early-eighties genre fence, as I was into hardcore punk at the same time I was into new wave. So I’d be listening to Black Flag and Bad Brains and then put on Spandau Ballet and Haircut 100. I loved hardcore, and I still have some facial scars from early-eighties Black Flag shows, but new wave was what spoke to me and my little postadolescent heart. I loved the idea of Circle Jerks’ “Wild in the Streets,” but Ultravox’s “Vienna” was what I listened to over and over again.
New wave was, for me, also about geographic escapism. I lived in the suburbs of Connecticut, and new wave represented Berlin and London and Manchester and Paris and parts of the world that seemed as glamorous and far away from Connecticut as one could possibly get while still remaining on the planet. I’d put OMD’s Architecture and Morality on my Walkman and drive around Connecticut at night pretending I was in Berlin or Manchester, wearing a black suit and talking about semiotics and synthesizers with anyone associated with Factory Records. Being a broke suburban new wave fan meant making do with whatever I could get my hands on. I couldn’t afford records, so I’d tape them from my friends. I couldn’t afford new clothes, so I’d try to make oversize suits from the thrift store look like something Midge Ure would wear while wandering around Prague. I couldn’t afford real equipment, so I’d play my cheap Casio keyboard, imagining I was Vince Clarke playing synths with Daniel Miller somewhere in London.
One thing new wave wasn’t was libidinous. The classic new wave romance songs not only didn’t mention sex, they didn’t even really allude to anything even remotely sexual. It was as if the new wavers decided that sex and dirty clothes were passé and that their halcyon future and present were going to be populated by sensitive androgynes wearing cool suits. This was confusing to me, as I’d try to date girls (and, later, women) and wonder why I wanted to have sex, when clearly my new wave idols only encouraged me to put on some black trousers, sit with my girlfriend, hold hands, and maybe cry a little while listening to “Charlotte Sometimes.”
See, new wave had some clear “pros,” like Kraftwerk, Bowie, Roxy, old suits, synthesizers, drum machines, sensitivity, gentle vocals, etc. And some clear “againsts,” like work boots, jeans, pub rock, long hair, denim vests, distortion pedals, guitar solos, etc. It took me a few years in the late eighties to realize that not all pub rock made by musicians with long hair was terrible (even though, to be fair, most of it was).
And beyond the eyeliner and nice old suits and gentle lyrics, there was the actual music. Which was, to a suburban Connecticut youth, revolutionary. It was nuanced and textured and sounded like nothing else. My schoolmates were listening to “Lola” by the Kinks, and I was listening to “Joan of Arc” by OMD. My schoolmates were listening to “Sugar Magnolia” by the Dead, and I was listening to “Original Sin” by Theatre of Hate. My schoolmates’ music sounded kind of old to me. Midtempo seventies rock music with no subtlety and nuance just couldn’t compete, sonically or emotionally, with what was being made by Brits and Europeans with drum machines and synthesizers and analog delays. And new wavers even had the decency to make guitars not really sound like guitars. It took me a few records to figure out that Gary Numan and Ultravox even had guitar players.
New wave was its own world, with its own influences, its own sonic landscape, its own codes, its own lyrical bailiwick(s), its own aesthetics. And to a teenager growing
up in sad and dry suburban Connecticut in the early eighties, new wave represented the most perfect and complete escape I could’ve ever hoped for. So to everyone in this book who made the records that made adolescence bearable: Thanks.
This book simply would not exist without the passion and support of the following: David Cashion, our Abrams editor and fellow new wave obsessive; Tina Wexler and Dan Kirschen, our ICM agents; Meg Handler, our trusty photo editor; Evan Gaffney, our designer; David Blatty, Maya Bradford, Melissa Esner, Claire Bamundo, Jeffrey Yamaguchi, and everyone at Abrams; and Paul Adams, Tracey Davenport, Shirley Halperin, Moby, Patty “Punk Masters” Palazzo, Nick Rhodes, and Rey Roldan.
Thanks also to Gina Achord, Kitty Amsbury, John Ares, Tom Brennan, Zena Burns, James Carrier, Charles Charas, Beatrice Colin, Terry Cooney, Katja Deiters, Amy Galleazzi, Brian Greenspan, Brian Hayes, Jeremy Helligar, Peter Hook, Matt Isom, Katy Krassner, James Masters, Dawn Miller, Thom Monahan, Ken Phillips, Cheryl Plambeck, Julie Pocock, Lisa Revelli, Record Runner, Christopher Sacco, John Taylor, Bryan Thomson-Di Palma, Len Vlahos, Mike Wehrmann, Amy Wolfcale, and Candice Yusim.
Lori would also like to thank: her husband, John, and Baxter and Little Boy; the Majewskis and Cliffords; Susan Vaughan, Rotem Bar, Christina Ferrari, Elizabeth Stone, and Anthony “Pete” Colasurdo; Duran Duran and all her Duranie buds, including the late Patti Neske (née Girvalo) and Greg Stanuszek; and her BFF and curmudgeonly co-writer (I say that with much love), Jonathan Bernstein.
Jonathan would also like to thank the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service.
Finally, thanks to all of our new wave idols (and their many weird and wonderful fans), who so generously gave us their time, their memories and, most of all, their music.
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