FERRY AID – "Let It Be"

I’ve had a massive mental block on this song until today – I’ve only ever seen it written down in lists of #1s and somehow my brain interpreted it either as something to do with Bryan Ferry or a cover of Ferry Cross The Mersey (which obv wouldn’t have gone down well in Liverpool if the Sun had had anything to do with it, er). I definitely had no idea Nick Berry or Curiosity Killed The Cat were involved.

Do you know, I hadn’t heard this for 23 years until today. It is remarkable how many of the things that are bad about it passed me by at the time… the production, the random deployment of vocalists, the hideous sensation of self-congratulation over the last backing free minute, the unending length of the thing.

I always really hated the solos at the time, though.

In terms of casting, its an odd half way house between Band Aid and The Crowd – neither quite a representative superhero line-up of all the biggest stars of the day, nor an interesting collection of anyone from any showbiz background.

I don’t think that being sung by a collective could ever do the song any favours, really, even under happier circumstances. What’s good about it is a sense of McCartney’s humility and the personal meaning that Mother Mary holds for him – especially in the Anthology version where you hear him play it to John Lennon for the first time.

Sun journalists certainly thought so; I knew a few back in the day from university etc. and the attitude at the paper was we don’t really give a toss about the disaster but it makes great headlines, it’s a Good Story and we can make minimal gestures towards something which, if we didn’t actually cause it, we certainly encouraged the pathway towards it. Plus, of course, it was great publicity for the paper, which was the main aim.

Can anyone name an all-star charity single that has a video not set in a recording studio? Is that really the only way to do it?

Not even the best of the genre – “Sun City” by Artists United Against Appartheid – entirely escapes that fate, though at least they try including other stuff.

SAW and Mel and Kim replaced themselves at number 1- the only other instance I can think of was John Lennon in 1981. Highly ironic that Mel helped out The Sun considering what happened shortly afterwards.A number of the artists were very dubious about taking part, Andy Bell in particular. In a portent of things to come Siobhan ‘Nana excused herself from the session

Kate Bush getting a second bite at the No 1 cherry is the only positive about this record. She had previously appeared at the Secret Policeman’s Ball for Amnesty International (I think her very last onstage performance) well worth checking out on youtube for the moment her dress strap breaks. Unfortunately she has quick hands.

It’s notable that McCartney didn’t take part in the sessions; Pete Waterman had been loudly proclaiming how much they wanted to work with Macca so the snub was surely deliberate.

#2 I don’t know why you’re singling out the over-maligned Simon Bates; there were loads of dubiously qualified people on the session including virtually the entire roster of Page 3 girls. And on the flip of the record in a moment that Chris Morris must surely have heard you have the Wanker of Wankers, Steve Wright declaring “We hope everyone who lost a relative goes on to have a great life as a result of this record.” Think of that the next time you hear him sneering at some unfashionable act on TOTP2.

#12 Actually Wright is nasty about Morten too. I remember him announcing one performance by A-ha as “how to be good-looking but dull” and a few years back on his R2 show he played “Cozy Prisons” then said “Hasn’t that Morten Harket got skinny arms?”

The best thing about this is that it gives us an opportunity to discuss the single event that, above all, sums up the decade. It was a pretty lethal decade – Valley Parade; Kings Cross; Hillsborough; Clapham. Clapham probably hit me hardest because many of the dead passengers were, or had recently been, colleagues of mine. The Bournemouth to Waterloo service that crashed was bringing many fellow Chase Manhattan Bank backroom workers up to the London office for the day. All of those disasters could be ascribed to the sacrifice of safety on the altar of the religion of the day – profit at any cost. The Sun was its high priest.

But Zeebrugge was the most cynical of the lot. Later in 1987 I went to an OU summer school at Preston Polytechnic (more anon) where I met and became friends with a woman whose husband was a chippy on the Herald of Free Enterprise who had just gone off duty on arrival in Zeebrugge. From her I heard the version of events that didn’t appear in the Sun or any other alleged newspaper. The skipper, David Lourie, along with other Ro-Ro (“Roll on, Roll over”) skippers, had been instructed by senior management to stop faffing about on departure and to raise the bow doors as the boat was departing, not before. I suppose Lourie could have taken a principled stand, but doubtless that would have cost him hos job and career and somebody else would have been found to carry out management instructions.

As it happened, Lourie lost job and career anyway when the subsequent enquiry made him a scapegoat. Jeffrey Sterling, head honcho at P&O who ought to have taken the rap if he had any decency, got a peerage for his trouble in Margaret Thatcher’s resignation honours list. That just about sums it up.

Oh, and I fear that this is my last excuse to link “Where’s The Dress?” (My apologies if someone else has already linked it.)

Thank you. I will do so.

There was a little ironic comment at the time about a boat being called the Herald Of Free Enterprise going down at the height of the Thatcher 80s.

Is is very shallow of me to wonder why Gary Moore is still wearing his overcoat? But at least he’s standing up I guess, unlike the other guitar hero on the record who looks like he needs a pipe and slippers.

The video is also a depressing snapshot of the dearth of pop talent around at that point.

I think that’s par for the course with him. Second concert I ever went to was Thin Lizzy when he was in the lineup and he kept trying to upstage Phil Lynott. A fool’s errand, that.

i don’t think ‘we’re all in the same gang’ has any recording studio shots nor ‘self destruction’ (just barely though – public enemy are at a radio station). i can’t remember if that corny allstar ‘perfect day’ was actually for a charity (it’s definitely the same lineage musically regardless) but it was just ppl staring at the camera right? i know this sort of allstar charity single stayed alive in the uk whereas in the us it basically stopped occurring and when it did it didn’t have anywhere near the success (chartwise or, dear god, as music) as ‘we are the world’. did the general lameness of these songs (nearing some nadir hear, though not reaching it just yet) + the relative success of the roughly contemporary hal willner albums prompt the different (and much more favorable, to my ears at least) red hot + blue?

Kate B. just sounds tired and depressed to me (understandable). So, a pretty dreadful record on every level it seems.

The vague, otherworldliness of the ‘it’ in McCartney’s lyric is nicely balanced in the original by the sense of personal encounter (‘me’), and together with the lone voice and beautiful piano part, everything just works I reckon. In the context of a big social disaster, however, the ‘it’ starts to seem evasive, and the sense of personal encounter/’me’ evaporates with all the different (and then massed) voices. So, while Tom may be right that LIB was doomed to be a charity record at some point, I suspect it was also doomed to be a *pretty poor* charity record!

Thanks to both punctum and rosie for their detailed backgrounders. I would add just the caveat that negligence, corner-cutting, and all the rest of it know no ideological boundaries (crony-capitalist-at-best, illiberal, non-democracies in the South Pacific have had a bunch of negligence-related disasters with their government-run ferries recently). That said, calling your ferry HOFE (capitalism is a monarch? an angel?) definitely invites ideologically specific criticism!

wot no Harry Chapin ‘Danceband on the Titanic’?

30 – I prefer his deadpan stand-up stuff. The Ipswich episode was a bit League Of Gentlemen for me.

29 – Same subject matter in And The Band Played On by Flash & The Pan

There are two longer stories I’d like to see here;

One is a behind-the-scenes critical exploration of the charity singles phenom: which takes cognisance of sir blob’s position (“whatever it takes to souyrce the money”) as much as david stubbs’s (“of course the real crime here is an aesthetic one”), because think there’s a lot of really really interesting political and social tensions (the melody maker line is something like Art for Art’s Sake as a Stance of Radical Refusal, which is a lot easier to argue off in semi-detached corners of culture than it is in the cockpit of mainstream debate)

(shorted version: if you want to swing people to your cause, do you pick a perfomance that’s popular or a performance that’s good?)

(nitty gritty details i\’d like to know more about: was the choice of song here — “let it be” — was positively or negatively ideological: ie taking a strong risk, diving into the potential controversy, by opting for a title and a “philosophy” which is translates as “laissez faire”, as in “good can only come when the market decides; when every individual is left to pick their own path”… or taking a minimal risk, this being a well-loved easy-to-singalong beatles staple, of uncontroversial and very-unconcrete content, which people on all sides of politics will, if they don’t actively embrace it, at least not actually boycott it…)

the other thing i’d like to see a fully researched history of: is the gradual arrival in the chatter of pop of the sun in particular — this was an 80s thing, and not at all a foregone conclusion till round about 1987, i’d say… how pop’s chatter moved out beyond the music papers and fanzines and quite localised and specialist discussion, into the contested mainstream

#33:

Ideally one would want to make a decent AND relevant record.

The choice of “Let It Be” as an uncontroversial singalong is in itself a highly political act; I fail to see how the use of a song so unconnected to, and indeed opposed to, the purpose of the fundraising, has any worthwhile benefit, and by “worthwhile” I do not mean the raising of funds.

Briefly, New Pop wanted to infiltrate and change the mainstream, but the mainstream (principally via John Blake) dutifully absorbed it and, as all mainstreams do, diluted it until its original purpose was impalpable.

(but i don’t generally think of the mainstream as a thing in itself: for me it’s the sum of a totality of smaller forces, of varying and sometimes antoagonistic kinds…)

#36: The question with things like Ferry Aid is not so much raising of funds but more “why are we raising funds in the first place?”

I’d say Paul Dacre’s Mail has ultimately been rather more successful in the avant-gardism tabloid stakes since reliable sources tell me we’re pulling closer and closer to the unravelled cloak AHA IT WAS ALL A PUT ON DO YOU SEE NOW LET’S SMASH IT ALL UP moment. Once a hardcore socialist, always a hardcore socialist, eh PD?

With every charity record since Band Aid, I have begun to question their “worthiness” for raising funds for this disaster or that catastrophe. Raising money in these cases is always going to be a kneejerk reaction. “Something must be done” everybody says and the music industry rushes out a record for everyone to buy, and the funds are raised end everyone feels better and carry on with their lives. The single becomes the focus. A tangible piece, an artefact that we can pick up and say “at least I did my bit”. Earthquakes are random, as are tsunamis, but Zeebrugge and to a certain extent Ethiopia were preventable. No single person was held to account. And this is the problem with Ferry Aid, it doesn’t assuage the feeling of injustice. It’s merely a rallying point for the public to donate money to ease their grief/guilt/whatever. Each time a new charity record is released, the public are almost pavlovian in their response and propel the single to #1 without considering it’s quality or where the money will go.

I was working for British Rail when Clapham Junction occurred. I was part of the team that restored the track after the disaster. Many of us worked longer and harder than normal to get the system working again. The accident was preventable and ultimately led to the privatisation of British Rail. Railtrack, later re-named Network Rail, stayed under Government control. The train operators were privatised, the maintenance of the tracks were sold off to outside contractors. As a result, under Payne Restructuring, my job as well as many others, was lost. Since then, Paddington and Potters Bar indicated that no real improvement to Rail infrastructure had happened. Vital lessons had not been learned.

Clapham inspired no charity single AFAIK. Here’s the thing, I don’t think a charity single could have had a positive lasting result to the disaster. First of all, a train full of commuters from the Stockbroker Belt not making it to work that day was not “sexy” (wrong word maybe, struggling to think of an alternative) enough for pop stars to make a charity single. Secondly, the families of the victims would have been appalled that something as trite as a pop record could ease their grief and growing anger over Thatcher’s government shrinking their subsidy to BR year on year, forcing management to cut corners on health and safety, in this case not updating the ancient signalling system at Britains busiest railway station. If you took the train to work in London from Surrey or Hampshire, there was no real alternative, you still had to pass through Clapham Junction.

The real difference in the case of The Herald Of Free Enterprise, was that the ferry operator Townsend Thoresen, eventually was wound up as passengers voted with their feet, upon learning of the company’s disregard of health and safety in favour of making a quick profit. The Sun owed a debt to the families of the victims for using TT as the ferry operator. The motive of the “Let It Be” single was to assuage guilt first, offering comfort for victims’ families second.

One final point: Charity singles, as a result of natural disasters have a degree of merit, because of the randomness of the event, we feel compelled to help in whatever way we can. Charity singles for those disasters caused as a result of human error or negligence are diminished because of our anger at the injustice of such an event. That’s the only way I can equate it.

As I happened to have the YouTube window open anyway: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwTLvJ5GU90

I definitely remember Mike Read being involved (which would also explain Cliff) but I don’t entirely recall whether he wrote it or co-wrote it. Either way, the turnaround does give the faint impression that he’d been waiting for a disaster to record it for.

#43 – I think this raises an important point. Acts of God are one thing, disasters caused by human error are quite another because they are to varying degrees avoidable. Therefore, one’s tolerance to the inevitable charity record is likely to be diminished correspodingly. The bleak truth, is, though, there is always low comedy to be found in any tragic situation. On a pure “Boxing Day Bobby” level (see Waldo on “She” 1974), it does nor stretch the imagination too much to concoct the story of a failed unpopular band blowing up their local gig venue, a place where they had been abused many times by patrons, killing everyone. Naturally “Islamists” are blamed and our boys (the devestated house band, who just by the grace of God were not performing that night) rush into a studio to record the tribute, fighting off the usual sanctimonious suspects they accuse of opportunism when they try to mussel in. The superstars back down and the record sells shitloads; and although our band doesn’t earn anything from it, they have achieved a number one record, are destined to be discussed by a bunch of saddoes on a blog in the future, and don’t look back…

Pretty grim, huh? C’mon, all you creative writers, let’s be ‘aving you!! Could YOU do it, Mr Sinker?