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Fact #90340

When:

Short story:

Eric Clapton plays a charity show for a local housing project in front of 102,000 people in Machava Stadium, Maputo, Mozambique, Africa.

Full article:

Andrew Zweck (booking agent) : I was working for Harvey Goldsmith as the producer of an Eric Clapton concert in Maputo, Mozambique. I'd been with Harvey at least fifteen years.

There had been a civil war in Mozambique for fifteen years, since the Portugese left in 1974, you could still hear guns every night, so this was the first foreign event in Mozambique for years.

The rebels held the land between Swaziland and Mozambique so it was too dangerous to drive the equipment in, couldn't get any insurance from Lloyds of London, so we had to fly everything in, sixty miles. I was sitting in the plane with the pilot and I asked where he was from. 'Brazil.' So I said, "What's a Brazilian freight plane doing in Mozambique?"

He explained that they were paid for by the United Nations to stay for a year and fly food to remote areas of Mozambique. However, the government had confiscated all the food, so they hadn't flown a single mission. So the government had rented this UN-funded plane to the promoters for $10,000.

That concert was such a big deal because it was the first time in fifteen years, since the civil war started, that any foreigners had come into Mozambique.

The reason the concert sold 100,000 tickets was because I got a South African colleague, Attie Van Wyk, to bring over a whole pile of stars from Johannesburg on a chartered 737, and they were the support acts, but that's what sold the tickets because Mozambique had been closed for fifteen years, so South African artists who'd had hits years earlier were still a huge attraction. There was no music business in Mozambique so artists who had been huge in the 70 and 80s, many of whom were now old and cheap, Attie put them in a plane for me and the concert was a huge success.

It was one dollar a ticket and a hundred thousand black people turned out – the most black people Eric Clapton will ever see in his life, for sure. I think there were four white people in the front row. Most of the audience had never heard of Eric Clapton, but don't tell him that.
(Source : interview with Johnny Black for Audience magazine, September 2009)

Attie Van Wyk (CEO Big Concerts International) : Andrew asked me to specifically assist in booking multiple South African Artists to support Eric Clapton’s performance at the Mashava Stadium in Maputo.

I recall that the ticket price was ridiculously cheap (around US$1) and 100,000 people turned up at the stadium; the majority of whom were there to see the South African support artists.

The infrastructure was primitive to say the least but Andrew went to great lengths to lay on a first-class production including a backstage compound that we would have been proud of today!
(Source : interview with Johnny Black for Audience magazine, September 2009)

Harvey Goldsmith (promoter) : I remember the Clapton show in Mozambique vividly because we had the government on one side of the stadium and the rebels on the other. They called a truce for the weekend while the concert was on and then went back to kicking the shit out of each other on the Monday.
(Source : interview with Johnny Black for Audience magazine, February 2010)

Andrew Zweck (booking agent) : Eric Clapton thinks to this day that he was a huge name in Mozambique, but he wasn't. They came to see those other artists, like Sipho Mabuse and Yvonne Chucka Chucka.
(Source : interview with Johnny Black for Audience magazine, September 2009)

Andrew Zweck (booking agent) : So it was 1989, we were in the airport in Mozambique loading the gear after the Clapton show, one dollar a ticket, 100,000 people, and in one flight case is a Polaroid camera. The airport workers had never seen a Polaroid camera in their lives, so I started taking photos of them and they went loopy, just could not believe they were instantly seeing photos of themselves. I had plenty of film so I took lots of pictures.

Next thing, the soldiers come around and ask what am I doing. They decide I'm a spy and I get arrested for photographing a military installation. It took several hours to get it all explained and get me out of jail.
(Source : interview with Johnny Black for Audience magazine, February 2010)