David Hepworth: 'The beneficiaries of Live Aid in terms of fame were the older ones'

And next weekend the 74-year-old West Yorkshire native will be returning to the region to discuss it further at the Town Festival in Halifax.

Talking to The Yorkshire Post via video, Hepworth agrees that pop culture itself has become less throwaway. “We certainly stick to it for far longer,” he says. “In fact it’s not throwaway at all as far as most people are concerned because I think their bond with this music tends to get stronger as they get older.

“It gets mixed up with all kinds of things like nostalgia and the fact that the purveyors of this music, I always think, are like fantasy friends that you first adopted when you were 14 or 15, and you never expected that 50 or 60 years later, there they still are – and it doesn’t apply to anything else about your life. Everything else goes – your parents die and all that, you start the junior bit of the family and then you become the senior bit of the family – but I look around and think, crikey, Paul McCartney’s still there, Bob Dylan’s still there, Brian Wilson, whatever. These people who entered my life when I was about 13 and they were about seven or eight years older than me, and they’re still there, and they still kind of stand for the same things so that gives them a unique power with us.

“The same thing doesn’t apply to actors or novelists or anything else. It doesn’t apply to sportsmen – clearly. I saw an interview with Gary Lineker not long ago where he said he hadn’t kicked a ball since he retired at the age of 35 and I thought, that’s really quite sad, whereas if you’re Paul McCartney you can do what you did when you were 26 still in your 80s and get paid more money for it in front of more people. Why would you not do it?”

Hepworth’s book begins at Live Aid, the fundraising concert for Ethiopia famine relief organised by Bob Geldof at Wembley Stadium on July 13, 1985, which would, he suggests, bring about a sea-change within the music industry. Although he was there at the time, co-presenting TV coverage of the event with Smash Hits and The Old Grey Whistle Test colleague Mark Ellen, he says it took a day or two for its true impact to become apparent.

“As I say in the book, one of the most remarkable things about Live Aid, when you look back on it, was that it was accomplished without the use of a single mobile phone. That means you didn’t know how anything was being received at the time, whereas nowdays our experience of everything is we’re getting the feedback simultaneously. At Live Aid you were in the stadium and it was only when I got home at 4am and my wife said, ‘Well, that was quite something’. I thoughout, oh, OK. Then you realise the day after people were talking about how many people had watched it.

“So strictly on the day, no (I didn’t appreciate its impact), but it became clear in the days and weeks afterwards that it was a kind of sea-change thing. I think it was The Daily Mirror on the Monday that had a picture of Bob Geldof and Tina Turner and a representative selection of people who had taken part and the single word (headline) was ‘Heroes’. Nobody had ever said that about rock stars before. Suddenly they appeared to be accorded a certain amount of dignity which they’d never been accused of before, which was interesting.

“It was the beginning of a change in a lot of things – as I say in the book, I think it was the inaugural event in what I call the Age of Spectacle, in which (concerts) have been increasingly since something you look at rather than something you listen to. They’re spectaculars and if you talk to people afterwards and ask them how was it, they don’t say, ‘I thought the middle-eight of the fourth number was particularly good’, they go, ‘I liked the bit where so and so descended from the clouds’ or ‘there was a flypast of the Red Arrows’. I think that goes along with the fact that people pay a lot more money for those things now and the more money they pay, the more they will tend to interrogate their value for money in terms of spectacle, what they see rather than what they can hear.

“The other thing about Live Aid was it was an event put on by Geldof and Midge Ure and Spandau Ballet and whatever, who were the younger generation, but the beneficiaries in terms of fame were the older ones. It was Queen and David Bowie, Paul McCartney and Elton John and so forth, and when I started writing the book that was one of the things that attracted me. I thought how old was Paul McCartney when he sang Let It Be into a dead microphone at the end of Live Aid? Of course he was 43, which we thought was terribly old at the time; that seems ridiculous now. So all those things that have changed, you can trace them back to Live Aid, definitely.”

The reverence of Nineties Britpop groups towards older artists such as The Beatles and The Kinks cemented the idea that it was OK for a younger generation to like the same music as their parents. Hepworth even ventures that “Oasis et al were kind of responsible for the relaunch of The Beatles in 1995/96 as a massive cultural phenomenon”, and that with the Fab Four’s Anthology outtakes compilations, fans came to realise that “what we wanted from three double albums was not so much hits as archaeology, traces of stuff”.

“You can see what started to happen, which still goes on today, was that younger people – I’m talking my children in their thirties and forties – will generally be very respectful to music which comes from way before they were born and take no encouragement to describe anything old as ‘legends’ – I’m not quite sure why, but there is a feeling from younger people that music from further back is sort of more authentic. I don’t there’s any kind of music that’s authentic, it’s all music, but people like to feel that it’s authentic and the old ways of doing things lent themselves to that more readily whereas now people make records by posting bits to each other all across the globe.

“The spectacle of somebody making a pop record if you watch it now it’s like watching somebody do your taxes, it’s somebody sitting there on a laptop moving files around, whereas the old way of making a record was in a soundproof booth with a big window and loads of people looking through at a bunch of musicians and smoking. That’s our romance about the way records used to be made and we still feel it kind of ought to be done that way. I think that’s an idea that appeals just as much to an 18-year-old as an 80-year-old.

“I think it’s a cultural thing, and one of the things that I kept returning to during this book is that nostalgia is not simply experienced by people who were there at the time, it’s felt by people who weren’t there at the time. It’s like Oasis, not all of those tickets are going to people who were there in 1994; it’s loads of people who weren’t even born then just wanting to be part of it. So nostalgia is a huge force in popular music.”

One of the biggest beneficiaries of the public’s newfound appetite for nostalgia were The Rolling Stones, whose Steel Wheels tour from 1989 to 1990 grossed $175m under the watchful eye of Canadian sports promoter Michael Cohl. A key part of its success was beer and merchandise.

“You just have to keep reminding yourself that back in the Seventies and even the early Eighties, to go and see somebody live was cheaper than buying their album,” Hepworth says. “All of those prices were way lower, but even within that, you bought a Led Zeppelin album for £3.50 but if you could go and see them for £2.75, which is extraordinary when you think about it.

“That’s the big sea-change, the kind of ‘experience economy’, and it’s not insignificant that Michael Cohl’s background was in sport and sports was ahead of music on this. One thing we’ve seen in the 32 years the Premier League has been going is that people will pay more and more and more – they haven’t found the top of it yet. And it’s not just for gigs, it’s for replica shirts and beer and hot dogs and all that kind of stuff.

“The irony is that the most valuable commodity which The Rolling Stones own is not Satisfaction or Brown Sugar or Start Me Up, it’s the tongue and lips logo because it’s a quasi-religious symbol which can be whacked on anything, as I say in the book, from stickers to knickers.

“I think merchandise is really interesting. Even The Ramones, they’re no more as a group but they’re owned by one of these companies who buy up and manage the legacies of acts, and the most vaulable thing that they have is not Beat on the Brat or anything like that, it’s the T-shirt. There are loads of people who will wear a Ramones T-shirt and they’ve probably never even heard a Ramones record, and it doesn’t matter to them whether they have or they haven’t, but this just feels appropriately edgy when you dress yourself.

“I’m really interested in the afterlife of rock acts and these companies that own these rights are constantly looking for the appropriate time in which to reactivate them in some way, whether it’s an ABBA Voyage or a museum or an Elvis movie or whatever. You can’t do it all the time; they’re just picking their time. You can do one thing every ten years or something like that and it’s interesting how successful they’ve been.

“Whether they’ll continue to be successful when all of these people have gone, I don’t know, I remain to be completely convinced about that. I’m not one of these people who believes it will go on forever. Will people listen to The Beatles forever more? I don’t know. They don’t listen to Bing Crosby any more and Bing Crosby was as big as The Beatles in the 20th century, but Bing Crosby and Louis Armstrong have completely slipped from the popular radar. Personally, I think it’s very sad that they have, so who’s to say that the same might not happen to Madonna or Bruce Springsteen? We just don’t know.”

Hepworth, who was born in Dewsbury and attended Queen Elizabeth Grammar School in Wakefield, has fond memories of buying his first records from The Record Bar in Wakefield in the 1960s. “First of all it was Elvis Presley EPs then it was The Beatles and Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix and all that Sixties stuff,” he says. “I used to go into The Record Bar run by Ken and Betty, which was in a little kiosk at the side of the cinema in Westgate​​​​​​​. All cinemas in those days used to have a little kiosk that had been a sweet shop or something at some point in the Forties and then were adapted into very often schools of motoring or whatever. In this case it was a tiny record shop run by this very nice couple and I used to just go and look at the window every night on my way home.

“Then I used to get records from Auty’s in the Arcade in Dewsbury and then Thornes, I think, was another shop in Dewsbury, and then (WH) Smith and Boots became big retailers of records because they were on every high street​​​​​​​. Later on there was the advent of the hip shops, the Virgins and so forth, but by then I was living down in London. You couldn’t afford to buy lots of records but the records I did buy I can remember buying them and I think about this a lot, even in a place like Wakefield, you couldn’t move for record shops, there might have been 10 in one way or another, which is extraordinary to think about​​​​​​​.

“I remember playing the surface of them and occasionally taking them to school to swap them with other boys. The very excitement was the day you took a record to school because you would walk up Northgate with, say, The Animals’ album under your arms and you’d feel like king of the world because people were looking at you, and parties were just bottles of cider and a few records and games of Postman’s Knock.”

Hope I get Old Before I Die is published by Penguin, priced £25. David Hepworth will be at The Book Corner, Halifax on Saturday October 12 at 7pm. https://thegraystonunity.co.uk/event/town-festival-writers-evening-david-hepworth-hope-i-get-old-before-i-die/