Tony Hollingsworth

Tony Hollingsworth

Introduction

Tony Hollingsworth is one of the key world figures in the use of popular culture as a campaign tool for causes. He has produced a large number of major events, many of them for liberal causes and many conceived and organised to be broadcast worldwide (see below).

The most renowned of the events – both as campaigns and worldwide broadcasts – were two landmark concerts for Nelson Mandela, the first calling for his release from an apartheid prison, the second celebrating it. The first, Nelson Mandela’s 70th Birthday Tribute at Wembley Stadium in June 1988, contained a vast array of music and film stars and was perhaps the most politically influential of any concert held in the world . The event, which was conceived, funded and produced by Hollingsworth , was televised in more than 65 countries to an estimated audience of 600 million. It is regarded by many, including the Anti-Apartheid Movement, as raising worldwide consciousness of the imprisonment of Mandela and others by the South African apartheid government and forcing the regime to release Mandela earlier than would otherwise have happened .

Eighteen months after the first concert, with his release thought to be approaching, Mandela asked for Hollingsworth to create a second event that would be broadcast around the world and would act as an official international reception for him to address the world . Mandela was released in February 1990 after 27 years in prison and the event took place on April 16. He spoke for over half-an-hour as part of a four-and-a-half hour event broadcast to more than 60 countries and an audience of 500 million.

Hollingsworth had already been assistant director of the first seven CND Glastonbury festivals (ref) and organised several big events for the Greater London Council. These included two major Jobs for a Change festivals aimed at showing that the GLC was helping to create jobs at a time of mass unemployment ; several smaller concerts for the unemployed (ref); and two ethnic-minority concerts, one featuring Miriam Makeba on her first appearance in the UK for several years, the second a Bollywood show that filled London’s Albert Hall.

In March 1987, he produced the four-day show of Amnesty’s The Secret Policeman’s Third Ball, co-producing a feature film and a set of two videos of the event . After the Mandela concerts of 1988 and 1990, he put on several spectacular events around the world, all organised as worldwide broadcasts. These included:

• Moscow’s 850th anniversary pageant in Red Square, featuring Russian classical, choral and folk music, and broadcast across the CIS countries and elsewhere

• The Wall - Live in Berlin, featuring Roger Waters’ rock opera, The Wall, in Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz in July 1990, celebrating the fall of the wall seven months earlier

• The Great Music Experience, a Unesco-backed show featuring Japanese and Western musicians, staged at an 8th century Japanese Buddhist temple, Todai-ji, and featuring Bob Dylan, Jon Bon Jovi and Joni Mitchell

• Guitar Legends, a show of top guitarists/singers, including Bob Dylan, Keith Richards and B.B King, in Seville to draw support for the city’s Expo ’92.

Listen Campaign: Hollingsworth is now running a multi-media charity campaign, Listen, to raise money for disadvantaged children across the world. It has sent film stars such as Samuel L Jackson, Jessica Lange, Goldie Hawn and Natalie Portman to visit children’s projects in developing countries, and these have been filmed to create short internet videos and press coverage. A further five visits are planned before two worldwide broadcasts are made.

Listen is now seeking international sponsorship to take its aims further. It plans to create a worldwide social-networking community of registered supporters and donors on the web and on mobile; and will send members digital content of one kind or another provided by visual artists, novelists, film stars and music stars. It will ask members to create their own content.

According to Hollingsworth, the first worldwide broadcast, Why Listen, is planned as a documentary about children across the world. The second will be a fund-raiser. Half the content will come from a live music event and half will be film of disadvantaged children telling their own stories in their own words, introduced by film stars and VIPs. . The broadcasts are intended to provide a major stimulus to reaching a donation target of $1 billion over 10 years. The money will go to a large list of projects already put in place by major charities.

Background

Hollingsworth was born in Letchworth, Hertfordshire, in July 1957, the fourth of five children. Both his parents were teachers, his father a headmaster and later a senior inspector of schools; his mother an infants teacher. When he was nine, the family moved to Grantham, Lincolnshire, where he disliked his new school, failed his 11-Plus examination and was sent to a technical school. At 16, he went to a further education college, gained an Ordinary National Diploma and went to Bradford University, reading technology and management – “from a left-wing perspective”. He gained an MSc at Imperial College and took a job in a company making ejector-seats for jobs, but quit after three months because he was being asked to cut the staff by half. He soon won a three-year post-graduate scholarship to the Open University to research theories of ideology as applied to nationalisation.

Meanwhile, he was falling into the music industry. In 1978 he went on a camping holiday with his girlfriend to the farm of his mother’s cousin, Michael Eavis, in Glastonbury, Somerset. Eavis had been persuaded to allow a small outdoor concert of Moroccan musicians to be held on his land and Hollingsworth helped out, as he did for a concert the following year. In 1981, Eavis asked him to help run a music festival whose profits would go to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. As a CND marcher himself, Hollingworth accepted, and for seven years provided a “management and financial structure” – as well as helping to get artists contracts signed, erect marquees and stages, organise a supply of food and medicine, build toilets and attempt to stop the use of drugs.

In late 1983, while still a research student, he was approached by the GLC– through a contact on a socialist economics group – to help organise a "Jobs for a Change" festival for the Ken Livingstone-run authority the following summer. He became the key figure in the production of the festival, a second similar festival the following year and several other concerts leading up to the abolition of the GLC on March 31 1986.

Key concepts

Hollingsworth developed a growing belief during the production of the first GLC festival that the use of music as a campaign tool had to be carried out in a positive rather than negative manner. The message would work only if the atmosphere was “happy” or “celebratory” rather than “angry” and he insisted successfully that the music platforms were run in this way.

The GLC festivals were regarded as a major success. But by the time of the second, in mid-1985, he believed that he had gone about their organisation in the wrong way. Instead of simply putting on festivals or concerts, hoping that press and television would pick them up, he should have sought to make television the main product, organising television distribution beforehand, perhaps even providing film to television.

There was a third important ingredient. If television was crucial or at least important, then a concert or event had to be made as a television programme as well as catering for the live audience. Among other factors, this meant ensuring that the television audience is not lost as a result of awkward gaps between acts and that there are top acts spread throughout the event, including the beginning.

Events produced by Hollingsworth

GLC Jobs for a Change festivals, June 10 1984 and July 7 1985. Live. Hollingsworth was the key person in setting up and producing the two festivals against a background of massive unemployment, a miner’s strike and the hardening of plans by the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, to abolish the GLC and other metropolitan authorities. The festivals were set up because the GLC was worried that its initiatives to combat unemployment and help create and fund jobs were not getting across to a wider public.

The first festival attracted about 150,000 on a long stretch of the South Bank, taking in County Hall, the Royal Festival Hall, the Queen Elizabeth Hall, National Theatre and the National Film Threatre. It consisted of theatrical groups, film and film lectures (by director Ken Loach and others), speeches, a rolling debate in County Hall and stalls manned by community and other groups. The musicians appearing at the festival included The Smiths, Billy Bragg, Aswad, Hank Wangford, The Redskins, Gil Scot-Heron, Mari Wilson, Ivor Cutler and Misty in Roots. While The Redskins were performing, a group of National Front supporters who had been diverted by police from a march on Trafalgar Square stormed the stage, injuring a guitarist.

The second festival attracted an estimated 250,000 visitors to Battersea Park, south-west London . Again, there was a wide range of activities. There were five music stages. The musicians included Ravi Shankar, Aswad, Billy Bragg, Hank Wangford, The Pogues, The Communards, The Opposition, The Blues Band, Frank Chickens, Thomas Mapfumo and OMD.

GLC Concerts for the Unemployed, 1985. Live. Hollingsworth produced several smaller concerts at town halls across London, showing “some of the best acts in the world…for a mere £2 entry fee for people with a UB40 [unemployment] card”.

Hollingsworth also produced two large-scale multi artist concerts for the unemployed. The first, at the Albert Hall on January 26 1985, was an international Jazz and African show featuring Abdullah Ibrahim (aka Dollar Brand), the South Arican-born jazz and blues pianist. The two other acts were flamenco guitarist Paco de Lucia and the African band Xalam.

The second was a Christmas Party for the Unemployed in two big-top marquees in Finsbury Park, north London. The musicians included Madness, Ian Dury, Imagination, Gregory Isaacs, Marc Almond and Billy Bragg. Hollingsworth and television producer Neville Bolt, who was soon to become his partner in the Elephant House production company, produced a video of the event, Burning the Boats, that included backstage interviews with artists attacking the use of drugs and was distributed by the GLC to schools .

GLC Miriam Makeba concert, September 28 1985. Live. The concert was booked and arranged over three weeks after the Royal Festival Hall management told the GLC it had a free date available – the last act of a long-running dispute between the two organisations on the RFH’s high-culture emphasis. The GLC told Hollingsworth it wanted “something different that represents our view of the world”. Hollingsworth flew in Miriam Makeba, who had not appeared in Britain for 11 years, with the Department of Employment providing work permits for her and her band just as they arrived at Heathrow.

Columbian Volcano Concert, February 9 1986. Live, video. Hollingsworth was asked to help produce the concert in aid of a disaster fund for the Nevado Del Ruiz volcano which erupted the previous November, killing 25,000 people. Artists including Annie Lennox, David Gilmour, Pete Townshend and Chrissie Hynde were brought together by Columbian musician Chucho Merchan .

GLC Evening of Asian Music, March 25 1986. Live. This Bollywood show was one of a number that the GLC funded to mark its abolition. Hollingsworth proposed the concert because the authority had done little for London’s large Indian population, bringing in an orchestra, singers and dancers from Mumbai. He sold the tickets through corner shops and newsagents in the local communities, providing free tickets in lieu of commission. The concert filled the Albert Hall, with many of the 6,000 crowd standing and singing or screaming through most of the three-hour show.

The Secret Policeman’s Third Ball. March 26-29, 1987. Live, film, video. This was the fifth Amnesty Secret Policeman ball, but the first for six years. Amnesty, which came up with the name, asked Hollingsworth to produce the shows and also a film and videos for world release. Hollingsworth also provided the risk finance.

Previous Amnesty balls had been mainly comedy, but this time there were four evenings (at the London Palladium), two for comedy and two for music. A 92-minute television and video highlights show was created from the four evenings, but two other videos, one for each genre, were also produced (by the Hollingsworth-Bold production company) as well as two vinyl records. Hollingsworth brought in the artists, with assistance on musicians from Paul Gambaccini, broadcast presenter and music critic, and with some comedians recruited by Paul Jackson, later controller of BBC entertainment.

The musicians included Mark Knopfler, Chet Atkins, Peter Gabriel, Bob Geldof, Jackson Browne, Paul Brady, Lou Reed, Kate Bush, Joan Armatrading, World Party, Duran Duran and Erasure. The comedy acts included Ben Elton, Lenny Henry, Spitting Image, Rory Bremner, Mel Smith, Griff Rhys-Jones, French and Saunders, Fry and Laurie with John Cleese, Hale and Pace and Phil Cool.

Nelson Mandela 70th Birthday Tribute. June 11 1988. Broadcast live to 67 countries and 600 million people. The event was regarded by the African National Congress and the Anti-Apartheid Movement as successfully putting pressure on the South African government to release Mandela (see introduction). Most broadcasters showed live all 11-and-a-half hours of the Wembley Stadium event, the main exception being Fox Television in the USA, which showed six hours, delayed, in a heavily de-politicised version .

The event’s success was largely the result of Hollingsworth determining that it would be a musical tribute to Mandela, calling for his release, as opposed to a demand for the release of all prisoners and for the imposition of sanctions wanted by the AAM and ANC. This and his booking of a huge cast of top musicians and film stars ensured that the entertainment divisions of broadcasters around the world would sign up. Once they had contracted, the broadcasters could no longer allow their television and radio news divisions to refer to Mandela as a “black terrorist leader” - Hollingsworth's first campaign objective.

Several songs were geared towards the freeing of Mandela. Others were made relevant by the change of a few words or simply because of the context of the event . The musicians included Stevie Wonder, Dire Straits, Eric Clapton, Simple Minds, Tracy Chapman, Sting , Steven Van Zandt, George Michael, Whitney Houston, Eurythmics, Peter Gabriel, Miriam Makeba, Hugh Masakela, Selif Keita, Youssou N’Dour and Jessye Norman.

Film stars who presented the acts included Harry Belefonte, who gave the opening address, Whoopi Gooldberg, Richard Gere, Ali McGraw, Daryl Hannah, Denzil Washington, Emily Lloyd and Jennifer Beals.

Looking East. November 7-9, 1989, East Berlin. Looking East was a media conference conceived by Hollingsworth to further business opportunities between television and music executives of the West and Eastern Europe. On the first day, the East German government resigned. On the last, the communist party opened the gates of the Berlin Wall for people to cross over to the western sector, and demonstrators started hacking chunks out of the wall.

East Germany had several weeks earlier tried to call off the conference. Hollingsworth had agreed a deal with Reinhard Heinemann, head of entertainment in the East German government, after an introduction by Jack Rieley, former manager and part-time lyricist of the Beach Boys. Each side would invite speakers and 200 executives, with Hollingsworth organising and funding the western end.

Hollingsworth had gone a long way in organising his part of the deal when Heinemann took him aside to say that he had been ordered to stop working on the conference. However, this would not be announced but, critically, if East European executives said that they were coming, he would have to provide accommodation. Hollingsworth’s response was to telex senior television and music business executives throughout Eastern Europe, asking to meet them. He then flew out to invite them personally to the conference, telling them to telex their reply slips to Heinemann’s office. About 180 delegates from each side said they would come, forcing the government to accept that the event would take place.

Nelson Mandela: Tribute for a Free South Africa, April 16 1990. Broadcast live to 61 countries and 500 million people for the event’s full four-and-a-half hours. In asking for Hollingsworth to organise and produce the show in November 1989 (see Introduction), Mandela made two requests: that he would be free to talk for as long as he liked; and he would not be edited by television. As with the first Mandela concert, worldwide television was key. It was agreed that the widest possible international coverage would be sought and that broadcast fees and gate money would be geared to the concert breaking even rather than making a profit.

Mandela’s lawyer warned that Mandela could not commit himself until he had got the approval of the ANC after he was released. The approval came three days after his release. Several weeks later, senior ANC members at a meeting in Sweden persuaded Mandela to withdraw because he should not be holding his international reception in “Thatcher’s Country” – a country whose government supported the South African regime. By this time, Hollingsworth had financially committed himself to the event. He had booked Wembley, which had been sold out, announced many of the artists and agreed deals with many of the broadcasters.

His views on the withdrawal were conveyed to Trevor Huddleston, the AAM president, who was due to meet Mandela for breakfast the following day. Huddleston told Mandela that he would resign if Mandela withdrew. Mandela had given his word to him and he, Huddleston, had given his own word to Hollingsworth. Mandela accepted he should be going to Wembley and the ANC gave its support .

The event was organised in a hurried 54 days after Mandela’s release from prison. Mandela Mandela spoke for 37 minutes – once an eight-minute ovation had ended. One of the main thrusts of his speech was that people across the world should continue pressing for apartheid’s abolition. Musicians performing at the concert included Peter Gabriel, Neville Brothers, Geoffrey Oreyama, Jonas Gwangwa , Simple Minds, Tracy Chapman, Youssou N’Dour, Neil Young, Natalie Cole, Chrissie Hynde, Jerry Dammers, Johnny Clegg, Steven Van Zandt, Jackson Browne, Lou Reed, Manhattan Brothers, Neneh Cherry, Patti Labelle, Anita Baker and Bonnie Raitt.

The Wall: Live in Berlin. 21 July 1990. Broadcast live to 52 Countries and 300 million people. The Wall rock opera by Pink Floyd’s Roger Walters was staged on Potsdamer Platz, and attracted 250,000 people to an area that had been part of no-man’s land between the divided parts of Berlin seven months earlier.

Hollingsworth cast the show with singers and actors taking the characters of the rock opera. The musicians included Cyndi Lauper, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, Sinead O’Connor, Bryan Adams, The Band, Hugh Masakela, The Scorpions, The East Berlin Rundfunk Orchestra and The Marching Band of the Combined Soviet Forces in Germany. The actors included Albert Finney, Marianne Faithfull, Thomas Dolby, Tim Curry and Ute Lemper.

Looking East and West. 1990. Hungary. This media conference was a follow-up to that held in Berlin 12 months earlier, looking at how television and music executives between the West and Eastern Europe might work together. This time, with the communist bloc now fractured, the discussions were of a more pragmatic nature. This time, Hollingsworth’s co-producer was Lazlo Hegedus, a Hungarian promoter and producer, who had approached Hollingsworth at the Berlin event. While the opening day of the Berlin conference coincided with the resignation of the East German government; the opening day of the Hungarian event – Thursday November 22 – coincided with the resignation of the British prime minister Margaret Thatcher.

The Simple Truth: A Concert for Kurdish Refugees. May 12 1991. Broadcast live to 36 Countries from Wembley, London, in the aftermath of the Gulf War. The BBC asked Hollingsworth to produce the event in three weeks, making use of BBC facilities. The broadcast used satellite links to tap into singers performing in Australia, the US, Holland, Japan and Manchester and included film on the plight of the Kurds as they fled into the mountains from Saddam Hussain’s troops.

It is thought that the BBC was pressed to hold the concert by the government. Jeffrey Archer, the author and deputy chairman of the Conservative Party, said that the idea for the concert came from his teenage son, James (ref Independent). A major controversy followed when Archer Snr claimed that the Simple Truth charity he had set up – and the centrepiece of which was the concert – had raised £57 million. The figure turned out to be a huge exaggeration – though no fraud was found – but the charity led to Archer being awarded a peerage. According to Hollingsworth, who was not involved in handling the donations, seven countries ran appeals or telethons around the broadcast, raising $15 million for the Red Cross.

Musicians appearing at Wembley or via satellite link included Paul Simon, Rod Stewart, Sting, MC Hammer, Chris de Burgh, Gypsy Kings, Hall and Oats, INXS, Shiven Perwer, Tom Jones, Whitney Houston, Peter Gabriel, Sinead O’Connor and Gloria Estefan.

Guitar Legends. October 15-19 1991. Seville, Spain. Live. Broadcast first to 45 countries, then to 105 countries. The Expo ’92 organisers part-commissioned the concerts to position the city as an entertainment destination to draw support for Expo ’92 six months later. Five 90-minute shows and and a one-hour documentary were broadcast. Hollingsworth had already developed the concept and format and had agreed a co-production deal with Spanish state television RTVE, but the organisation dropped out on the day the contract was due to be signed when the director-general (and film director), Pilar Miro Romero, departed the company.

Later, the organisers of Expo ’92 took on the project to help overcome the problem that Seville was being seen merely as a civil engineering project. They provided half the $7.2 million budget, with Hollingsworth raising the rest from television pre-sales. RTVE bought the Spanish rights, but paid only by giving television and radio airtime for advertising slots. Hollingsworth sold these on to Coca-Cola.

The event featured 27 top guitarists, including BB King, Brian May, George Benson, Joe Walsh, Keith Richards, Les Paul, Robbie Robertson, Robert Cray, Roger Waters, Albert Collins, George Benson and Steve Vai. The vocalists included Rickie Lee Jones, Bob Dylan and Joe Cocker.

The Great Music Experience. May 22 1994. Todai Ji, Nara, Japan. The three-hour concert was broadcast live to 50 countries, along with two one-hour documentaries showing western musicians getting acquainted with Japanese culture and rehearsing with Japanese musicians. Hollingsworth, who conceived and produced the show, asked western and Japanese musicians to work together, with western musicians producing music influenced by Japanese culture. The event took place at an eighth century Buddhist temple, the largest wooden building in the world and containing the largest Buddha statue in the world.

Hollingsworth had developed the concept earlier to overcome western hostility towards the Japanese economic success story – although by early 1994 the bubble had burst. The show was supported by Unesco. The musicians included Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Ry Cooder, The Chieftains, Jon Bon Jovi, INXS performing with two Buddhist Temple Choirs, Shoukichi Kina, Tomoyasu Hotei, Yoshiki and X Japan. There were also two orchestras – the Tokyo New Philharmonic Orchestra and a sixth century-style Japanese Orchestra directed by Ryuhong Jun.

The Greatest Music Party in the World. December 13-17, 1995 . Birmingham. Broadcast to 36 countries. Broadcasters took one of two programmes, one lasting three hours, the other 90 minutes, filmed from a five-day live show staged at the UK’s National Exhibition Centre. The project was commissioned by Mars Corporation to reposition its confectionery brand Twix across Europe The musicians included Diana Ross, Rod Stewart, Eternal, Shaggy, Lightning Seeds, Alanis Morissette. Back Street Boys, Des’ree, Soul II Soul and David Bowie.

Songs & Visions. August 16 1997. Wembley, London. Broadcast live to 61 countries. The Carlsberg brewery approached Hollingsworth to produce an event for its 150th anniversary – and he made use of a concept he had already been working on – asking musicians to work together in duets, trios or quartets to sing a hit from each of 40 years (in this case, moving backwards from 1996), against a background of images from the year of the song. Carlsberg used the material for different promotions in different countries.

In the UK, Hollingsworth was turned down by Channel 4, but BBC 1 showed the concert in the Match of the Day slot on Saturday night, giving it a 38-per-cent audience share at the beginning, rising to 45 per cent at the end.

The musicans, working under the direction of Stewart Levine, included Rod Stewart, Jon Bon Jovi, Seal, Toni Braxton, K.D Lang, Chaka Khan, Robert Palmer, Steve Winwood, Yazawa and Mary J Blige.

Moscow’s 850th Anniversary Pageant: Saint George, The Bell and The Dragon. September 5 1997. Broadcast live to CIS Countries. The show, staged in Red Square in front of St Basil’s Cathedral, opened Moscow’s weeklong anniversary celebrations. It featured a cast of a thousand (plus horses), with Russian classical, choral and folk music and dance. Large-scale graphics were used to depict scenes from Moscow’s past. The pageant was commissioned by the mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov, and Hollingsworth was brought in as co-international executive producer because of his record of staging complex live shows. Andrei Konchalovsky, the renowned Russian film director, was creative director.

List of Hollingsworth productions and campaigns

1981-1987 Manager, Glastonbury CND festivals

1984 (Jun 10) Producer, Jobs for a Change festival, GLC, South Bank, London

1985 (Jan 26) Producer, Jazz Festival (incl Abdullah Ibrahim), GLC Jobs Year 85, Albert Hall

1985 (July 7) Producer, Jobs for a Change festival, GLC, Battersea Park, London

1985 (Jan-Dec) Producer, weekly concerts for the unemployed, GLC, various London town halls

1985 (Sep 28) Producer, Miriam Makeba Concert (GLC), Royal Festival Hall, London

1985 (Dec 21) Producer, Christmas Party for the Unemployed, GLC, Finsbury Park, London

1986 (Feb 9) Co-producer (show) Columbian Volcano Concert (disaster fund), Albert Hall

1986 (Mar 25) Producer, Evening of Asian Music, GLC, Albert Hall, London

1987 (Mar 26-29) Producer (show), co-producer (film) The Secret Policeman’s Third Ball, London Palladium

1988 (Jun 11) Producer, Nelson Mandela: 70th Birthday Tribute. Wembley,London. Worldwide broadcast

1989 (Nov 7-9) Organiser, Looking East media conference, Berlin

1990 (Apr 16) Producer, Nelson Mandela: An International Tribute for a Free South Africa. Wembley, London. Worldwide braodcast

1990 (Jul 21) Producer, The Wall: Live in Berlin. Worldwide broadcast

1990 (Nov 22-25) Producer, East-West second media conference, Hungary

1991 (May 12) Producer, The Simple Truth: A Concert for Kurdish Refugees. Wembley, London. Worldwide broadcast

1991 (Oct 15-19) Producer, Guitar Legends. For Expo 92. Seville, Spain. Broadcast worldwide.

1994 (May 20-22) Producer, creator, The Great Music Experience. Unesco/UN. Todai Ji, Nara, Japan. Broadcast worldwide

1995 (Dec 13-17) Producer, creative director, The Greatest Music Party in the World. NEC, Birmingham. Broadcast worldwide

1997 (Aug 16) Creative director, Songs & Visions. Wembley, London. Broadcast worldwide.

1997 (Sep 5) Co-exec-producer, Moscow’s 850th Anniversary Pageant. Broadcast across CIS

2007 ongoing Producer, Listen Campaign. Worldwide