Wham! Style Council: Miners' Benefit, Royal Festival Hall, London
Adam Sweeting, Melody Maker, 15 September 1984
AS I LURKED round the back of the hall trying to get in, a small entourage swept past led by a short, greying man, curiously familiar... Arthur Scargill! The teenage girls hovering round the door paid no attention. They were preoccupied with the serious business of waiting for Wham!
A faint aura of culture shock lingered over the evening like a whiff of cordite. The boxes and decorum of the Festival Hall seem more Midland Bank than NUM, somehow, but the place was full of determined expressions and a keenness to applaud the right sentiments however they were expressed. The critic did not feel welcome, though the event was presumably as much about publicity as anything.
Alexei Sayle kicked off, resembling a bad-tempered grizzly who's woken up to find himself inexplicably sewn into an ill-fitting suit. On TV, Sayle is a chore. Tonight, he was belligerent and very funny, "political" only by inference but scourgingly provocative.
I couldn't hear much of Mike Harding because my seat was in the acoustic dead zone – still, I heard him say that the miners couldn't be beaten because they had nothing to lose, and this earned a tumult of applause.
"Kevin Turvey" was almost exactly as you'd expect, with some convoluted saga about something happening to him on the way to the auditorium. It ended with much talk of "pricks", rather rude in my view. Typecasting in a comedian is even worse than it is for pop stars, who can at least pretend to be actors when people stop buying their records.
Style Council took the stage for a packed, purposeful set which lifted off nicely with a rhumba-styled 'Speak Like A Child'. Weller sensibly let the music do the talking, apart from dedicating a lithe 'Move On Up' to "all the miners" (hardly necessary, one would have thought). For 'Mick's Up' Weller played bass as the admirable Mick Talbot rippled round his keyboards without visible effort. Style Council seem to be shaking down into a versatile unit, with tonight's short display showing a welcome lack of pop star ego. Weller and Talbot returned to the stage for a low-key encore of 'My Ever Changing Moods' and pottered off into the wings.
Still unable to hear much of what people were saying, I was at first under the impression that the man in the dark suit who'd stepped to the mike was some sort of stand-up comedian. However, I realised my error when I caught the bit about "this man is one of the finest TUC leaders this country has ever seen". Heavens, he was Arthur Scargill's warm-up man. Thereupon, Arthur (looking nervous) strode onstage and delivered an impassioned speech, evidently much shorter than his usual workout, thanking the artists and predicting victory for the NUM. Nothing new here, but he brought the house down.
After the interval we had the awful Nigel "Neil" Planer, mercifully brief, then it was Wham! All of Wham!, that is – backing girls, brass section, keyboards, guitars – all miming. George thought everybody had come to see them alone, and apologised to anyone who'd bought a ticket under the impression that Wham! would be playing live. He did add that this wasn't the point of the evening, but obviously Wham! were out to milk their 15 minutes for all it was worth.
We had 'Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go', the grim 'Careless Whisper', a new song called 'Everything She Wants' and the new single 'Freedom'. Dressed in white and posturing farcically, Wham! greatly pleased the three rows of young girls at the back of the hall and left everybody else stone-faced and baffled. I must admit, I'd never realised quite how dreadful they really are. This "performance" demonstrated no taste and less intelligence.
Working Week, dependable jazzers who've seen a thing or two, closed the proceedings with the right air of rewarding application. Ben Watt and Tracy Thorne sang the words to 'Venceremos' with astounding ineptitude, but the band then lit up for the long instrumental passage and left us sizzling. It had been an odd but eventful night.
© Adam Sweeting, 1984