Donald Anderson: Singing songs and saving lives – Midge Ure is a special talent
This weekend I was at the magnificent Usher Hall to see Midge Ure in concert. Midge was on fine form going through one of the finest music catalogues there is.
The concert included Vienna of course and a host of other great songs, including a moving tribute to Phil Lynott of Thin Lizzy.
I couldn’t help having flashbacks during the concert to when I was council leader in Edinburgh and Midge helped lead the Make Poverty History and Live 8 campaign of 2005.
Edinburgh knew that the Gleneagles G8 Summit, at which debt relief was to be a defining issue, meant Edinburgh being the focus of demonstrations and marches the like of which Scotland had never seen.
A year of careful planning was upended when six weeks from the date of the summit Bob Geldof announced plans for Live 8 concerts in London and Edinburgh.
The immediate shock of a major new event taking place an Edinburgh was handled calmly and the police operation led by Deputy Chief Constable Tom Halpin was magnificent.
However, when Bob Geldof announced that he wanted a million people to come to Edinburgh all hell broke loose.
Edinburgh was well used to handling emergencies and having gone through the floods of the year 2000, the Cowgate Fire and the Gilmerton Limestone Mines Emergency without loss of life.
Everyone knew that lives had been lost in demonstrations at previous summits and the whole team in the city was equally determined to avoid any loss of life during the G8.
The proposal of a million people coming to Edinburgh was crazy, however if we engaged in a public row with Bob Geldof the city risked diverting attention from the whole Make Poverty History agenda.
We led with a message focused on saying that ‘While everyone in Edinburgh wants to do all they can to save lives in Africa, we don’t want to put any lives at risk here.’
Midge Ure and the team working on Live 8 were a pleasure to work with and clearly understood the implications of adding a million people to an already stretched city.
That message got through and Bob Geldof stopped talking about a million people and the numbers coming to the city were manageable.Thankfully no lives were lost. Live 8 was a massive undertaking and bands who didn’t get into the London lineup were added to the bill for Murrayfield. The end time of the concert got later and later, which was a concern as Murrayfield residents hadn’t signed up for a late-night gig in their midst. Remarkably not a single complaint was received after the concert finally finished after 1am, a tribute to the goodwill of Murrayfield residents.
So successful was the whole Make Poverty History message and Bob Geldof’s efforts that pretty much everyone in the city and the country understood the significance of what that campaign meant in terms of easing the burden of, and saving the lives of, people across the world. Bob Geldof and Midge Ure have been criticised – unfairly in my view, for indulging in ‘white saviourism’.
What they did was change the entire nature of the debate about poverty relief and aid. In the process of doing so they saved and transformed millions of lives. Midge also writes and sings some great tunes.