Sing-along suicide
* Rock the planet
* Beat it
* The tour to end all tours
Imagine you are Simon Cowell. Actually, don’t. Instead, conceive the idea that you are a consummate svengali with the creative nous to create the biggest, baddest band in the world. Ever. And when you say bad, you mean bloody wicked. Your rock outfit’s legacy will be measured by its whoppingly impressive carbon footprint, its back catalogue fondly remembered for a not-so-ironic take on the planet’s impending doom. The straightforward excesses will cast your band as the Mötley Crüe of the Thom Yorke years. The message is simple: to rekindle an age of hedonism, excess, and old-fashioned ‘live for today’ sensibilities, all wrapped up in an ‘I don’t give a f**k about starving polar bears’ sentiment.
At the moment you are missing an important ingredient. Four bright young things, aka the Band. But not for long. You must choose your band members carefully. Your quartet must have been raised by left-leaning, upper-middle-class parents and weaned on a formative diet of William Wordsworth and Charles Bukowski. To locate these types you could venture down to the BRIT School in Croydon, the state-funded birthplace of many successful acts including Adele, The Kooks and Katie Melua. Take in a talent show, search the school noticeboard for a spare four-piece indie rock band; do anything – just find a Band. Pick the skinniest, razor-cheek-boned, big-haired youths you can find and name them The Grassroots. Give them attitude, to spare. Book an East End venue, where some good-looking groupies with famous parents are bound to be wasting their unearned riches. You are not duly worried that The Grassroots are bottom of the bill. At this stage, it is less about the music and more about the people they snog. You have high hopes for lead singer, Ralph, and he doesn’t let you down, succeeding in kissing Peaches Geldof, whose father had the foresight to criticize the recent Live Earth concert for lacking a ‘final goal’. Ralph and Peaches spill lopsidedly on to a Soho street and get ‘papped’ by waiting photographers. The image appears in the tabloids with an unmerited mention of ‘up-and-coming rock heroes The Grassroots’. Seizing the initiative, you book more dates.
After a particularly rowdy Barfly gig, your efforts to invite a senior A&R exec from 19 Entertainment, ‘the world’s most exciting and innovative entertainment company’, finally pay off. This firm was founded by Simon Fuller, a man who knows a thing or two about marketing and is responsible for creating Brand Beckham and the Spice Girls. His guys love The Grassroots and their ‘atitoood’. Fuller offers them a four-record deal. Their first single, ‘I’m Greener…’ is produced by DJ Mark Ronson and is a huge success. The Grassroots are promptly signed up by clothing retailer Gap to model the following season’s range.
‘I’m Greener…’ becomes the soundtrack for British teen television drama Skins and The Grassroots hit the big time. The second release, ‘Burning Up’, garners yet more media attention by being released solely on USB stick, with Toast PR creating a suitably futuristic campaign to ensure that even the hippest kids are on board. By this stage, The Grassroots are playing larger venues, like Central London’s Astoria and Koko in Camden. Now, somehow, Ralph bags Peaches’ extremely beautiful younger sister, Pixie.
To offset increased sniping that they have sold out, The Grassroots play a round of secret gigs in underground dives such as the Notting Hill Arts Club and the drummer’s bedsit in Whitechapel. Your lead singer is, once again, sick down his front, but manfully carries on performing. Ralph and Pixie begin hosting hilariously chaotic DJ sets together. They get very drunk in public. Days are rare that neither appear in the tabloid gossip columns. All of which is good – but you decide a change in gear is required. If The Grassroots are to have any lasting impact on the planet, then they are going to have to become considerably more famous.
You pay one of the less retiring members of the paparazzi to shove a telephoto lens in Ralph’s face. As hoped, he thumps the photographer on the nose in front of the world. The next step towards total world domination is a slight cliché: your lead singer develops a hard-drug addiction. You escort him to the Priory after tipping off ‘snappers’ from the newspapers, just hours after he was spotted at Amy Winehouse’s party in Camden. A slew of carefully placed stories appear, suggesting that 19 Entertainment are to sever ties with The Grassroots. Two weeks later, though, Ralph walks out of rehab, supposedly clean. Almost immediately, he gives a prearranged ‘warts ‘n’ all’ interview to NME in which the 21-year-old remembers to weep halfway through.
Recording begins for the difficult second album. As hype builds, a series of gigs are cancelled at the last minute to create a veneer of enigma and troubled genius. Finally, The Grassroots reappear. But the line-up is different. They have become a supergroup. All original band members, bar Ralph, have been jettisoned due to ‘mutual artistic differences’. Your efforts to piece together the biggest band in the world are about to come to fruition. On lead guitar, replacing Anthony from Muswell Hill, is Razorlight frontman Johnny Borrell, asked to join because he urged people to buy electric eco-scooters and then bought himself a 1000 cc Moto Guzzi bike (which he described as a ‘monster revving beast’). Backing singers include Madonna and Sheryl Crow, Madonna because her carbon footprint touched an absolutely delectable 1,018 tonnes during her 2007 world tour; Crow because her hit ‘Everyday is a Winding Road’ was used to advertise carbon-munching Subaru 4x4s. The rhythm section stars Genesis. This three-piece squeezed their appearance at Live Earth, where other popstars joyfully highlighted climate change amid a wonderfully carbon-heavy forty-seven-stop world tour. You’ve always had the utmost respect for drummer and singer Phil Collins, especially since his trans-Atlantic Concorde dash during Live Aid 1985, so that he could play both London and New York on the same day. Bon Jovi agrees to play bass guitar. He flew from the UK to the US in his private jet to play in a New York stadium for the American leg of Live Earth. Finally, your backing band is the Red Hot Chilli Peppers, who, like all true rock stars, like to travel in style, producing a neat 220 tonnes of carbon dioxide with their private jet alone in just one half of 2007. You did not invite Thom Yorke.
Your band now has something for everyone, except for Damon Albarn of Blur, who accused the G8 international concerts of being ‘too Anglo-Saxon’. The Super Grassroots’ opening gig is at Wembley Stadium – it is voted the best gig of all time by svengalis the world over. Leaked information reveals that tour provisions clocked up 170,000 food miles – The Ecologist magazine describes it as an ‘eye-popping feast that must surely be judged the most carbon-heavy food order for one group of people in the history of all humanity’.
The critics’ response to new-look The Super Grassroots is phenomenal. It’s the signal to arrange the Eat the World tour. Tickets, made from rare rainforest-sourced paper, are available only to those who make their own way. By ‘make their own way’, you mean private jet. Your egalitarian side finally wins, and you widen the criteria to allow tickets to those who can prove they have travelled at least 2,000 miles to attend. Cycle helmets are banned in case they are thrown into the crowd and cause head injuries.
The tour, naturally, is an ostentatious affair demanding enough electricity to power a small country for several months. In addition, you have requested the largest gathering of technicians, sound trucks, support staff, brass bands (with instruments sent separately by plane), and an eighty-strong troupe of dancers. The band plays to crowds of no less than ninety thousand in venues whose power supply does not come from renewable sources and whose facilities struggle to cope with the amount of waste and litter generated at each event. Each gig produces at least 1,000 tonnes of waste, which, as part of the venue contract, you have stipulated must not be recycled.
Each step of the 21-leg international tour (with one controversial performance in the Antarctic wilderness) eclipses the carbon emissions created by Live Earth, calculated by experts to be at least 31,500 tonnes. Your gigs produce the mileage total equivalent of an army. The total journey by fans and The Super Grassroots’ huge entourage beats the 222,623 miles travelled by the superstars who performed at Live Earth. It goes without saying that you do not indulge yourself in carbon offsetting, even if Jon Bon Jovi so eloquently once said: ‘We wrote a cheque, we took care of our footprint and raised awareness, blah blah blah.’
After the tour, you analyse Ralph’s carbon footprint. Your lead singer has notched up a creditable 2,020 tonnes, 200 times the amount of carbon produced by the average Briton, more than 500 times that of the average African and, more impressively, twice as much as Madonna. During the final gig – in Sydney – Ralph mumbles incoherently about the importance of saving the planet in a speech that is later revealed to be stolen verbatim from Yorke. At least one commentator condemns him ‘a massive, hypocritical fraud’, a phrase that was previously used by a columnist in a description of Live Earth. Without fail, you start planning another tour. Only, this time, it really will eat the world.
* Live Earth II returns in the summer of 2010. Despite projected television audiences of two billion, less than a quarter tune in. Likely.
* Thom Yorke’s carbon footprint is exposed as twice as large as the average Briton’s after the singer is revealed to have two giant-sized jacuzzis permanently switched on in his attic. Unlikely.
* Eco-aware bands take charts by storm in 2011. A punk version of ‘Greensleeves’ by eco-anarchists is surprise hit of the summer. Doubtful.
* In response to carbon concerns, Madonna announces that she will no longer play foreign concerts. Plausible.
* Use of private jets among rich rock stars declines sharply in 2013. This is, however, nothing to do with eco-concerns ; their popularity falls only after two crashes in the space of a month. Possible.
Likelihood of rock stars ceasing to use private jets by 2015: 15%