‘We’ve raised £200m through Live Aid pro bono’

Harvey Goldsmith tells John Wright how his music career started at a students’ union

Harvey Goldsmith CBE, 76, is a producer and promoter of rock concerts, charity events and TV broadcasts. He promoted the world’s two biggest ever music events, Live Aid in 1985 and Live 8 in 2005. He has produced, managed and promoted shows with many of the world’s major artists, including The Who, Queen and Luciano Pavarotti. He lives in London with his wife, Diana.

HOW DID YOUR CHILDHOOD INFLUENCE YOUR ATTITUDE TO MONEY?

I was always aware of the value of money and not being a spendthrift. My family’s attitude was that money was precious. I grew up in north London with two brothers. My father was a tailor with his own business, my mother a milliner who worked with her brother for his hat factory. We weren’t that well off, but had holidays and pocket money, which I spent on comics and sweets.

WHAT WAS YOUR FIRST JOB? I worked in Davis Menswear on the Edgware High Street, a Saturday job. I progressed from there, at 16, to being a Saturday floating manager for the chain of 20 to 30 shops.

HOW DID YOU COPE WITH BEING THE BOSS AT 16?

I’m colourblind. In their flagship store they put me in charge of the hosiery department and selling ties. When a customer said he wanted the purple tie with the pink dots, I had to train myself to follow his eyes to figure which of these ties he was talking about. I’d run my fingers along the ties and he’d go: “Yes, that one.”

HOW DID YOU GET INTO MUSIC? I went to the Brighton College of Technology to study applied pharmacy and six weeks after the course started the grants for them stopped. I got involved in the student union. The president said: “Who are you?” Everybody laughed; they’d never seen a pharmacy student before.

I suggested we open a club and the president agreed, thinking that’ll get rid of me, and I opened a club in January 1966 called Club 66. The music bug got me and I ended up booking for 12

colleges and universities, all the money going to the student union.

SO THEY STOPPED LAUGHING AT THE PHARMACY STUDENT? They did indeed. I wanted to stand for union president but my professor said: “You’re here to study.” So I applied for an exchange course, went to America and thought, pharmacy’s not for me. I went to New York and bought a $99 99-day Greyhound bus ticket and arrived in San Francisco in the Haight-Ashbury scene during the Summer of Love.

There I learnt about marketing and how to present what you’re selling really well. I looked at posters (which can now be rare collectors’ pieces) and met US promoter Bill Graham [owner of the Fillmore Auditorium and its posters] and Chet Helms, who owned the

Avalon Ballroom and Family Dog posters, telling them I was the biggest poster distributor in Europe. They both gave me a contract to sell their posters in Europe, though I didn’t yet know how to go about it.

HOW DID THAT LEAD TO CONCERT PROMOTING?

Back in England, I decided no more university, though I hadn’t told my parents yet. I saw an ad in the Evening Standard saying: “Wanted – partner for poster company”. I thought, this is perfect. I went to see Peter Ledeboer at Big O Posters with the contracts. We started a shop, Bumph, in Kensington Market, where we sold the posters. We also subsidised International Times and Oz magazines, which were always getting into trouble.

They said to me: “You do concerts.

Why don’t you raise money for us?” So I kept being driven back to music. I did a huge event at Olympia with artists like Jimi Hendrix and the Animals to raise money to pay John Mortimer, their QC acting in the Oz obscenity trial. I was asked to do more and more shows, which started my music career again.

DO YOU INVEST IN THE STOCK MARKET?

Yes. I invested £100,000 in lastminute. com before it floated and made £1m the day of the flotation. I then sold half the shares, kept the other half, and soon thereafter the shares tanked.

WHAT ARE THE BEST AND WORST THINGS YOU’VE BOUGHT?

Best and worst: a Flying Spur Bentley. But I had a stalker who kept scratching

the paint and later broke in and scratched the veneer fascia as well.

HAVE YOU BEEN RIPPED OFF? For one show we had a supplier to pay and somebody had hacked into our emails and changed the bank account details. But we got the money back from the bank.

WERE YOU PAID FOR PROMOTING LIVE AID?

No. None of the people involved in Live Aid have ever taken a single penny out – not even a bus fare. We, the Band Aid Trust, have no overheads, no office, no legal fees (our lawyers are pro bono). The only thing we pay for is the annual audit, which we have to do legally.

Last December we hit a billion streams of the Live Aid concert and have distributed close to £200m, including the original £140m, mainly through royalties, legacy money, gifts and merchandise.

Every penny goes to the Sahel region of Africa, where we fund schools programmes and emergency supplies for the famine in Sudan and Somalia.

HAVE THERE BEEN MONEY-RELATED INCIDENTS WITH ROCK STARS?

One big star had a reputation for being mean. When eight of us went to Tramp nightclub I whispered to each of them that at the end of the meal they should make their excuses, go to the loo and disappear and leave him with the bill, which we did. We all left and were laughing our heads off. The next morning the club owner called and said: “We all saw you sneaking out last night. He said just to put it on your account.”

YOU SPOKE TO THE GOVERNMENT INQUIRY INTO THE BARRIERS THAT FACE UK ARTISTS TOURING THE EU. HOW IS IT GOING? When the Government negotiated the Brexit deal, they left hospitality and entertainment out of the negotiations.

So we got stuck: one, with the visa issue, which is pretty much resolved but not quite yet, as some countries haven’t allowed us not to have visas; second, the trucking issue, where you can only load and unload once. That’s been kind of resolved.

Someone in our team had the idea of dual registration as there weren’t enough trucks in Europe. We got a resolution that trucks could be dualregistered, so when you got on the ferry you just changed the number plate.

Ultimately, because we need to trade with each other, the issues will get sorted out. They’re just taking longer than they should.

DO YOU STILL THINK BIG MUSIC FESTIVALS ARE PAST THEIR PEAK? They’re still doing brilliantly so it shows what I know.

HAS MONEY HAD ITS FUNNY SIDE? I was in Europe with Deep Purple in the 1970s and we did four or five shows on the trot. Since it was easier to collect the cash than wait weeks for the money to be transferred, we arrived in England with a load of cash in a bag. Customs took one look and said: “Close the bag. Thank you very much. Goodbye.”