The Greatest Night in Pop: Netflix doco lifts the lid on when Lionel and friends recorded all night long

Sunday, 28 January 2024

REVIEW: “Whoa, if a bomb lands on this place, John Denver’s back on top.”

Paul Simon’s quip is just one of the many magnificent details captured in the fascinating and enlightening new Netflix documentary The Greatest Night in Pop (debuting on the global streaming service tomorrow, January 29).

As the title suggests, director Bao Nguyen’s (2020 Bruce Lee documentary Be Water) tale focuses on the events of a single evening – January 25, 1985. That’s when the cream of American popular-music talent gathered together to record a charity single for African famine relief.

But while We Are the World became one of the biggest singles of all time (it spent seven weeks at No. 1 here on its way to being the top tune of 1985), selling more than 20 million copies on ‘45 record and cassette, as this fabulous tale highlights, its recording was sometimes as bumpy as the song’s somewhat stilted lyrical flow (let’s be honest, it’s not a patch on the magnificence of Band Aid’s Do They Know It’s Xmas?).

To be fair to songwriters Lionel Richie and Michael Jackson, they managed to turn the tune around in less than five weeks, after Harry Belafonte visited Richie’s manager Ken Kragen and suggested they “take the idea that Bob [Geldof, one of Band Aid’s founders] gave us” and create their own hit.

Even more impressively, they managed – in most cases – to create a song capable of allowing the eclectic range of soloists to deliver lines in their “sound”, their “style” and their ‘key“, as well as pretty much keeping all those egos in check during the marathon recording session which literally ran “all night long”.

“It had to be seamless,” Richie, our main guide recounts. “If we stopped for a minute it was going to be chaos.”

He proves to be a wonderful storyteller, adding value to the rich treasure trove of archival material preserved from those hours at Los Angeles’ A&M Studios.

You’ll learn how Richie rushed to the recording from hosting the American Music Awards (where he won six titles himself), the craziness he encountered on his visits to Jackson’s house (on one occasion a dog was having a fight with a mynah bird, on another, a snake was loose) and that no less than Rule Brittania was the inspiration for We Are the World’s melody and rhythm.

He’s aided by the likes of Huey Lewis (who it transpired was a stand-in on the track for Prince, partying elsewhere in LA at the time and resistant to all attempts to lure him there), Cyndi Lauper (whose jewellery caused sonic chaos), Kenny Loggins and Dianne Warwick, as well as lighting and sound engineers and cameramen, who all reveal their own experiences and highlights of that fateful gathering.

But it’s the humour and candidness that particularly shines here.

This is no rose-tinted look-back designed to enshrine the saintly status of all those involved. There’s bickering, bad behaviour, hurt feelings and Waylon Jennings walking out after Stevie Wonder suggested there should be Swahili as part of the song (even though it wasn’t a language spoken in famine-stricken Ethiopia).

Actually, the Master Blaster singer is at the centre of much of the action, lifting flagging spirits by offering to escort the also visually impaired Ray Charles to the toilet and suggesting that he or Charles could drive everyone home once they’ve finished.

The Greatest Night in Pop is available to stream on Netflix from 9pm on Monday, January 29.