By the 1980s, the area had changed massively since Osbourne’s day. I was the only white child in my class, and in the space of a generation Prince Albert had gone from being a breeding ground for heavy metal fans and musicians to being a multi-ethnic playground in which Steel Pulse, The Beat and later Apache Indian were local heroes. I discovered hard rock and heavy metal just as I was leaving Prince Albert to go to the local grammar school (located just down the road, but a different world). My point of entry wasn’t the innovative heaviness of Sabbath, but the lighter American rock of Aerosmith and Bon Jovi.Yet they were the gateway drug to what had been on my doorstep all along. Wandering around Tower Records in Piccadilly Circus, I was drawn to a set of two VHS tapes featuring recordings from the Moscow Music Peace Festival. The iconography of the front cover – the double-headed Eagle of the Russian coat of arms into which the flags of the home countries of the musicians who participated had been inserted – was suitably heavy to convince me that the tapes were a worthy investment for my pocket money:. Back in Birmingham, I opened the tape with the recording of Bon Jovi with excitement and must have watched it a dozen times before curiosity got the better of me and I looked at Ozzy’s performance. I knew some but not all of his songs, and was shocked that young Russians were more familiar with them than the mighty Jovi songbook. When Jon Bon Jovi was interviewed in 1989 about the Moscow Peace Festival, he said perhaps the most remarkable thing about what was being dubbed the Russian Woodstock would be that Ozzy was on the radar of George H.W Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev (neither would get as close George W. who made the mistake of introducing a pissed Prince of Darkness at a White House Correspondents Dinner – Gorbachev, a more discerning host, did invite the Scorpions to the Kremlin in 1991).
The Moscow Music Peace Festival ranks amongst the strangest live events in rock history, but it also tells us a lot about the international music industry and soft power. Chicago born Don McGhee was a player in 1970s Miami who was busted in 1982 for his involvement in a deal importing weed into the US from Colombia. Before sentencing took place, he had become arguably the biggest manager of hard rock bands on the planet with Bon Jovi, Mötley Crue and the Scorpions on his roster. This enabled him to negotiate a lighter sentence (almost all of his fellow defendants did prison time) in exchange for, ironies of ironies, launching a drugs and alcohol-awareness charity for which the first major rock festival in Moscow would serve as a fundraiser.
The Scorpions had previously played behind the Iron Curtain, but nothing of this scale had been attempted before. Evidence presented on the Wind Of Change podcast that the Scorpions’s ballad of the same name was written by the CIA is circumstantial as opposed to definitive. The lesser claim that US authorities saw in rock and metal the opportunity to promote the superiority of the American way of life is beyond dispute. Footage of flags in the audience for Springsteen’s 1988 debut in East Berlin during his performance of ‘Born In the USA’ reflect none of the song’s ambivalence.
From the vantage point of the present, watching the MTV documentaries about the Moscow Peace Festival on YouTube is akin to entering a parallel universe. The everyday Russians in the street or on public transport seem much less strange than the musicians who speak in platitudes and have no compunction in showcasing their ignorance or hypocrisy in being obviously inebriated at an event advocating for sobriety. Ozzy once sugge…
