Band Aid: the day rebellious music died (yet again)

Great news. It’s time to start giving out about Band Aid again. Every 10 years or so, Bob Geldof and Midge Ure (Andrew Ridgely to the Irishman’s George Michael) pop up to provide facetious columnists with material for counterfeit incandescence. Have no fear. We’re not getting into the slippery issue of whether high-profile charity campaigns give governments an excuse to back away from global catastrophes. Questions about precisely where the money went will be left to people who actually know what they are talking about.

We are, today, tackling the phenomenon from a cultural perspective. As Geldof and Ure announce a new recording of Do They Know It's Christmas? – this time in support of Ebola victims – let us be sober and measured in our language. Band Aid killed rock 'n' roll! The throbbing synths that kick off the awful 1984 single stand as the funeral dirge for an entire family of music. The sounds emerged from the Mississippi delta, mutated in Liverpool and gained new energies in urban Detroit and the punk clubs of New York's Bowery. They passed away in a west London recording studio 30 years ago this month.

Hang on. That’s not quite right. There are still records worth listening to. What did die, however, was an irreplaceable rogue spirit. It is hard, even for those who fought in the great rock wars, to recall the level of distaste directed, during the 1960s and 1970s, at popular music by The Man (as he was then still known). Most people born before 1940 still regarded this awful racket as a class of aural anarchy performed exclusively by drug-addicted sex maniacs. Footage of early Slade or Roxy Music seems, to many of us, slightly incomplete without running commentary from a theatrically appalled parent.

Could you read these few words out for me please? “Is that a man or a woman? Why can’t you hear the words? Why’s he wearing sunglasses indoors? That Suzie Quatro wishes she was born a boy. That’s her problem.”

Ah, that's much better. 48 Crash now makes sense again.

What made this horrible situation bearable for the older folk was the certain knowledge that everything would go back to normal sometime soon. To be fair, there was precedent to support this prediction. By the end of the 1950s, the first wave of rock ’n’ roll had withered and the charts had again been taken over by nice young people singing sweet songs about chaste love. More than a few music journalists predicted that trad jazz would turn out to be the youth craze of the 1960s. Then The Beatles kicked off a second wave and another generation of adults was confronted with musical apocalypse.

Wild thing

While they waited for youths to grow up and begin buying Perry Como records again, the greatest generation managed to keep the barbarians away from the good china. Why was the gruesome Top of the Pops so influential? Because there was nowhere else on prime time to see the music of the era. Bearded older brothers could stay up late to watch the Edgar Broughton Band on The Old Grey Whistle Test. But the core audience got to see very little footage of the groups they admired.

Fifty years ago, people were expected to become officially certified adults at the age of 30. When the fourth decade arrived, they pulled on sensible clothes, began caring about garden supplies and disconnected themselves entirely from youth culture. The notion that a 40 year old might still listen to the Rolling Stones would have seemed utterly ludicrous to their older enemies. After all, nobody would have any idea who this lot were by 1970. Right?

Of course, far from making the music less attractive to young people, this lack of respectability only enhanced its deliciousness. Nobody who bought the Sex Pistols' first singles liked the band any less because they would never get to play Sunday Night at the London Palladium. The horror that greeted Bob Geldof's infamous appearance on The Late Late Show – you could see his armpit hair, for God's sake! – cemented his appeal as Punk Lite's own Jagger.

This is where we came in. All right, it wasn’t really Band Aid that finally made rock music respectable. The Beatles and the Stones were, by then, middle-aged and their original fans had teenage children of their own.

Clap hands

If that charity single hadn't come along, something equally unthreatening would have confirmed the music's absorption into everyday show business. There were still red-faced majors who couldn't quite believe that this "Gondorff fellow" wasn't in it for personal gain: "Fellow's wearing a mop on his head. Got to be a wrong 'un." But, a year later, when Princess Diana clapped along at Live Aid, it became clear that rock's dangerous years were definitely in the past. Oh well. It's all in a good cause.