The International Language of Music

I don’t think anyone was more surprised than I, following our big reunion gig in May in Las Vegas, when Christopher Milk was invited to be part of the big World Cup-opening entertainment extravaganza in Johannesburg on Friday. If you missed it on television, we performed three songs between Alicia Keys and the Black-Eyed Peas, and then came out at the end for the big all-inclusive version of “We Are the World (Cup),” for which Lionel Ritchie and the late Michael Jackson had written poignant new lyrics.

While living in London in 2006, I had occasion to do some freelance design work for a woman ]trying to put together a dating Website for fellow South African expatriates, but it didn’t go very well because their accents are even weirder than Aussies’, to which Americans are more accustomed on the strength of Steve Irwin, commercials for the Outback restaurant chain, Olivia Newton-John, and the Easybeats’ 1966 classic “Friday On My Mind.” I could barely understand a word out of this woman's mouth! But our hosts’ accents weren’t a problem on Friday night, as we were all speaking the international languages of music and love.

Karl, who the years have made only handsomer, seemed to have a lot to talk about with Ms. Keys, but he’s always been able to get just about any "sheila" who struck his fancy into a conversation, and usually even out on a date. I loved his opening line, delivered with his customary poker face: “Is Key West named in your honor?”

Later, after our brief but rapturously received performance, his greater interest seemed to be in Peas’ singer Fergie. I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn he’d broken the ice with her by asking, in that straightfacedly mischievous way of his, how she’d enjoyed being married to Prince Albert, namesake of the popular male genital piercing. Of course, it was Prince Andrew to whom the non-singing, Weight Watchers-shilling Fergie was married; therein the joke!

Looking out at them as I spoke of how our strongest commitment as a band had always been to universal brotherhood, I was nearly moved to tears of my own by the sight of the audience's. I pointed with pride to the fact that none of our great-grandparents had owned so much as a single slave, even when it was fashionable to do so. Indeed, my, Rafe’s and George’s great-grandparents were all in Russia, Scotland, Norway, and Italy at the time of the American Civil War, and Karl’s were probably fervent abolitionists. And when I mentioned that we hadn’t played a single note in South Africa during apartheid, you might have heard the crowd’s roar of approval in Key West.

Ordinarily, given such a narrow window of opportunity, we would have performed three of our biggest hits, of which of course we hadn’t any, but in this context it seemed fitting and proper that we should play at least one anthem of racial harmony. Our first impulse was to do The Yardbirds’ "Mister, You’re a Better Man Than I," but Axl Rose claimed that one, so I suggested Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come” in spite of its having become a favorite of Caucasian American Idol contestants. In retrospect, maybe it wasn’t the greatest idea to do it in the style of the Velvet Underground, but I, for one, have little use for Monday morning quarterbacking, especially in view of the fact that in the World Cup, there isn't even such a thing as a quarterback.