Giving all to 'the movement'; unfortunately it's a bowel movement...

March 2nd – Can I tell you two stories? Good. Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin…

In 1986 a band I was in, called Missing Link…(stop it; stop that thought right now)…a band I was in, called Missing Link, together with three of the most precious friends I'm ever likely to have the good fortune to make, had the opportunity to play at the Royal Albert Hall (RAH, the real one, not the one behind the Royal Albert pub in Newport). It was a concert done for a national education charity that featured a choir of 2 or 3 hundred, a classical orchestra and…us…the token rock band. I think Princess Alexandria attended on behalf of the charity…well; they've got nothing else to do have they?

Now, just as an aside, we were heavy, I mean like lead, and the sell-out crowd were of…what shall we say…of a certain age and background. Suffice to say that the conductor got it right when he said;’

“I’d like to introduce the band, Missing Link, and suggest you accept it all as part of your education.”

Spot on. Anyhow, that’s not what I’m writing about; it just gives you some background and me a chance to brag… 

So, we wrote and rehearsed the set we were going to give in mid-Wales (well, that volume? Best done out in the sticks…even then there was a downside; lot of early-born lambs that year) and then tumbled off to Lunnun with three days to go before the gig. We did final rehearsals at Goldsmith’s College (I remember we travelled down with the gear in a ‘Target Van Hire’ van and someone asked if that was the name of the band…bless) and we stayed on campus, at LSU I think, in some of those flats they let out when the students are away on summer break…well, you gotta do what you can. It was very warm (there’s a change) as it was July or August and on the first night there we were sitting in the campus grounds with a number of beers gone and few others competing to follow them, it was just on dusk/dark when from one of the open windows of a still-inhabited flat floated the opening to track 1 of U2’s ‘Joshua Tree’…

In 1988, on this day, U2 won a Grammy for that album and, if the rest of the album had been as good as that opening and had Mr. Bono managed to convey that spirit in his general dealings with ‘life’ he would have been a figure of reverence. Certainly I was impressed with the sound picture conjured up by that opening. Not having heard anything by them before I figured this could be a band I get to like…

In Birmingham in 2000…what? Oh, come on, keep up…in Birmingham in 2000 I was one of the many who stood in defiant demonstration in and around the city centre when the G7 conference was being held there. I've always been happy to demonstrate against the stupidity of governments of any colour and creed (with the incumbent’s levels of idiocy reaching it’s present peaks there’s not enough days in the week) and the global hypocrisy world leaders were showing back then was tantamount to passive genocide (‘What’s new?’ you may ask) so the ‘Make a Change’ movement formed and I joined up and along I went to add my mouse-like voice to the cacophony of outraged folk who were there to tell the world leaders, who were meeting in the ICC in Brum, to ‘pull their noses out of the caviar trough, stop shittin’ in the water-hole and earn their fuckin’ salaries’…and I believe that was exactly what I shouted out at Bill Clinton as he disembarked from his limo. I also remember that, at one point, the whole community of protesters formed a chain around the building by holding hands (fat lot of good that did…REALLY changed things, didn't it?) and the ‘T’ shirt I brought had the logo ‘Make a Chainge’ on it… Snappy, huh? Really made such a difference to world poverty did that…well, you gotta do what you can. 

Anyway, about two/three years later we cut to a televised, swanky, five-star, ten course meal, £1,000 a ticket media event where the great and the good mixed with the slebs and pop-stars of the day, and who should be there but our mate Mr. Bono. Also at the event was Mr. Cassius Clay, aka Mohammed Ali who was looking the worse for wear (‘punch-drunk’ as opposed to ‘just drunk’). So, at a point in this truffle-fest, our boy Mr. Bono, stands up to receive some award for the ‘Make a Change’ global movement against poverty and I remember thinking;

“What’s he got to do with it?’

I mean, OK, he had given over some of his precious time, time dedicated a  lot of well-paid posing and the shuffling round of various bank accounts, to sing a couple of lines on the 'Do They Know It's Christmas?' single, and because of his sleb position had been able to hold meetings with various political leaders, but that was separate from the ‘Make a Change’ movement; this was a grass-roots, back-street movement for change organised by people who had no other claim to being heard other than their beliefs and their energy. I’d never heard of Mr. Bono's connection with a protest wave solely organised and arranged by 'the people' ‘til now so how come he's getting this award? For what? (and he certainly wasn't in Brum...or if he was, he was conspicuous by his invisibility…oh, and remind me to tell you the tale from that same day, about when Pierre Trudeau’s wife went shopping on New Street; gives an idea of just how far apart we really are) And then, fully-televised and without a note of shame or embarrassment, Mr. Bono takes the award and says something along the lines of;

“I’d like to dedicate this award to the greatest man on the planet, Mohammed Ali”…!

I can still remember my astonished, mouth-open thought-reaction; something along the lines of 'Mr. Bono may well have a dubious claim to involvement but...?...Cassius-fuckin'-Clay is even further removed!' which was swiftly followed by my howl of outrage as I shouted at the TV;

“You fucker! It’s NOT yours to dispose of like that! This is a movement of the people, you tosser! You've sold it down the river…can’t you see? Look around you…look at them! You've reduced it to a fuckin' mantelpiece trophy…oh, for fuck’s sake!”

I saw the looks of the assembled politicians and great ones on the nearby tables and all I saw was the ‘dodged a bullet there’ look of relief on their faces; Mr. Bono was too busy hugging Mr. Ali to notice it.

Sure enough, the ‘Make a Change’ movement stalled…and stalled after that and it took years to recover and it’s struggled to reclaim that initial ground ever since. The legitimacy and power gained over that previous three or four years was reduced down to a share out of trophy-glory amongst the stars; Mr. Bono wanting to schmooze with Mr. Clay was one of the prime movers in that decay…you could say he felled the Joshua Tree with one swipe of his carefully honed ego.