10 May 1986
Not a good sign: I can’t find this single on the usual video or streaming sites. The live version in the video below, plus whatever I can remember from the time, will have to suffice. First, though, a lot of background and explanation: what was Self Aid?
Just as Band Aid inspired other countries to make their own charity collective records, Live Aid was soon followed by similar fundraising telethon concerts. Of these, Farm Aid in the US is probably the best known. In Ireland of 1986 we wanted to get in on the act too, but we needed an Irish cause. Obviously it couldn’t be abortion, divorce, church institutional abuse, “women’s issues”, the continued criminalisation of homosexuality, mass emigration, the AIDS epidemic, the marginalisation of the Traveller community, the Kerry Babies affair or the Troubles; we either didn’t talk about those, or had already passed superbly brainy constitutional amendments solving them forever. So, that only left the weather and Ireland’s high rate of unemployment. We went with the unemployed. Even better, we would help them to help themselves: ergo, Self Aid.
Rather than gather funds to deport the unemployed or air-drop sacks of grain on dole queues (which, joking aside, may have been a lot more useful to those concerned) Self Aid wanted you to phone in to pledge jobs and pledge money to create jobs. If this strikes you as quite specious, or as feel-good busywork to draw our ire away from official government inaction and failure, then welcome to the ranks of the loyal opposition. Debate on those lines raged in the Irish media ahead of the big day, 17 May 1986, so much so that even my small child brain picked up the mood around Self Aid as being akin to a guilty pleasure or a “sure we’ve the hall booked, we might as well use it”. U2 and the Boomtown Rats would be appearing, so it had the imprimatur of Bono and Geldof. The show went on; I didn’t see much of it on TV as my parents were happily watching the other channel.
Because Ireland’s home-made Band Aid record, ‘Show Some Concern’, was for a different cause entirely, someone at Self Aid HQ had the idea of a Self Aid single. ‘Make It Work’ is that single. An ‘issue’ song must by necessity lead with its lyrics, so it can’t have helped the Self Aid debate to have its anthem be, if I’m charitable, just as naive as the event itself. “I can build a house / I can dig a hole / I can mend a fuse / I can climb a pole / I can work in a factory”: rebuilding the self-worth and value of the unemployed is an essential part of the conversation, but presenting it as the Big Idea is just condescending. Skill shortage wasn’t the problem; there just wasn’t a factory to work in or a hole to dig, not in Ireland anyway.
And as if there wasn’t enough controversy around this record, even the chart-topping status of ‘Make It Work’ is open to debate. The powers-that-be designated it a ‘special’ number one in addition to the actual chart-topper, Patti LaBelle and Michael McDonald’s ‘On Our Own’. This had initially been done before with the original 1984 ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ and its 1985 Irish counterpart ‘Show Some Concern’, seemingly from well-meaning exceptionalism and sales figures that grossly outstripped the competition, with perhaps a soupçon of record-industry realpolitik, but in those cases both singles subsequently topped the charts on their own merits. Once shorn of special number one status, however, ‘Make It Work’ first dropped to no. 2 and then right out of the Irish top thirty completely. It’s still recorded on the IRMA chart database as an official Irish number one, though. We’ve not had ‘special’ number ones since.
Aside from that, “Let’s make it work” is a fairly vapid chorus slogan, though I accept that it scans better than “Let’s make Ireland a corporate tax haven”, which was how that particular problem was eventually addressed. “Let’s make it work” here sounds quite similar to the chorus of another song, one that goes “feed the world”, though that’s probably to be expected. Also, I’m not a fan of Christy Moore and find his ‘legendary’ status in Ireland quite puzzling, so any record with him on it won’t appeal to me anyway.
But hey, I emigrated during the Celtic Tiger and returned during the recession, so I was never part of the solution.
