US Edition His long black hair slicked behind his ears, his white shirt crisp despite the balmy Caribbean evening, Mutassim Gaddafi sat back, took a drink of Cristal champagne straight from the bottle and enjoyed the show with an entourage of beautiful young women.
He had good reason to savour the moment. For the son and national security adviser of Libyan leader Col Muammar Gaddafi had just invested a reported $1 million to obtain the services of Beyonce to welcome in 2010.
Clad in a body-hugging outfit, the singer earned her fee by belting out just five numbers on stage at an exclusive resort on the on the jet-setting island playground of St Barts.
A British guest, who wished to remain anonymous for security reasons, described to The Sunday Telegraph how the party ran until dawn as hundreds of bottles of champagne were downed and shuttle boats ferried revellers between the beach and luxury yachts anchored offshore.
Beyonce was not alone on the payroll that night – her fellow RnB star Usher delivered the countdown to midnight. Other celebrities in attendance included Beyonce’s husband Jay-Z, hip-hop impresario Russell Simmons, veteran rocker Jon Bon Jovi and singer-actress Lindsay Lohan.
Twelve months earlier, Mutassim Gaddafi paid Mariah Carey a similar sum to provide the new year’s entertainment at the same flashy resort. As a leaked US diplomatic cable observed last year, he “kicked off 2010 in the same way he spent 2009—with a New Year’s Eve trip to St. Barts—reportedly featuring copious amounts of alcohol and a million-dollar personal concert”.
But the lucrative play-for-pay world of despots and divas, where entertainers are paid lavish sums to perform privately for autocrats and their clans, is now firmly in the spotlight after the revelations about the bashes thrown by the younger Gaddafi who was named in United Sanctions last weekend.
From the litany of stars who ignored apartheid era sanctions to sing for a very generous supper at Sun City in white-run South Africa and Sting’s concert for the daughter of a central Asian tyrant to Iran’s attempts to lure Chris de Burgh and Michael Jackson’s shows for Bahrain’s Abdullah al-Khalifa after his child molestation acquittal, celebrities have long shown little interest in the nuances of democracy.
But the attention has now left some big names squirming. Canadian singer Nelly Furtado, who was hired for $1 million to sing a 45-minute set for Gaddafi family members at a hotel in Italy in 2007, was the first to go public with her remorse.
In a brief statement on Twitter, she said that she was going to give away the fee to an undisclosed charity. After a flood of media inquiries and unflattering coverage, Beyonce then posted a statement on her website saying that she had actually donated money to earthquake relief in Haiti more than a year ago after learning that the St Barts promoter was working for the Gaddafis.
But it was Mariah Carey who issued the most gushing and revealing mea culpa, expressing her embarrassment at performing at an event “thrown by the sons of vicious, crazy dictator”. Despite her regret, she did not however promise to donate the fee, although she did say the proceeds from an as yet unreleased song would go to charity.
“I was naive and unaware of who I was booked to perform for,” she said in a statement on her website. “I feel horrible and embarrassed to have participated in this mess. Going forward, this is a lesson for all artists to learn from. We need to be more aware and take more responsibility regardless of who books our shows. Ultimately we as artists are to be held accountable.”
Carey’s admission, if accurate, that she did not know for whom she was being rewarded so generously to perform is telling and raises questions about whether her management had kept her in the loop about her lucrative gig.
Peter York, the social commentator and expert on tyrant chic as co-author of Dictators’ Homes, believes she is not alone.
“Despite the protestations of some to the contrary, do these stars really have any understanding of international affairs or are these performances just another booking?” he said.
“How much newspaper reading do they do? Were they aware that Gaddafi was implicated in the murder of so many of their fellow citizens on a plane over Scotland?”
Carey pointed out that Libya was “not in the news” at the time of her performance. Beyonce and Usher could not make the same claim when they performed a year later as Col Gaddafi was at the centre of an international furore over the release from a Scottish prison four months earlier of convicted Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi.
Mutassim Gaddafi threw his country’s oil money at star names after the end of the ostracism of his father’s regime for support of terrorism, music industry insiders say. In 2005, rapper 50 Cent sang for him at a festival in Venice, while the next year Lionel Ritchie crooned for the colonel himself in Tripoli at a concert marking the 20th anniversary of the US air raids on the Libyan capital.
Col Gaddafi’ son might well be an enthusiastic music fan, But for a tyrant’s children, there is also the kudos factor of showing they can land a world-famour star, said Peter York.
“There’s a big show-off factor here for new money – and dictator’s money is very new money, first generation and uninhibited. It’s a demonstration of their power and influence and well as the incredible wealth they have squirreled away. It’s a real kick. They are showing they can buy the biggest American stars.”
But this can backfire, as detailed by US diplomatic cables, obtained by Wikileaks, that reported the disgust at the excess by many residents of the dry nation. “Mutassim seemed to be surprised by the fact that his party was photographed and the focus of international media attention,” said one.
“His carousing and extravagance angered some locals, who viewed his activities as impious and embarrassing to the nation.”
One guest whose group had paid $25,000 a table said that “Mutassim looked like he accustomed to that life.” .Another described the scene to The Sunday Telegraph, saying: “He had a big table with male and female guests. Everyone was drinking from the bottle and it was expensive stuff.”
Wealthy international entrepreneurs and oligarchs – ranging from those whose reputation is not in doubt to some who have amassed fortunes by extremely shady means – have long flown in stars to deliver private shows for landmark birthdays and family celebrations.
The penchant of autocrats and their offspring for hiring celebrities from the coffers of the countries they are oppressing has added a new twist, however.
But some stars’ managers and agents, preferring anonymity because of the current backlash, told Steve Knopper, who covers the music business as a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, that the opprobrium is unmerited.
“Several senior figures believe that pop stars are being held to different standards than Western businesses that made money in Libya or Western leaders who wanted good relations with Gaddafi,” he said. “And they say that’s unfair.”
The condemnation has echoes of the condemnation of performers – such as Queen, Elton John, Frank Sinatra, Julio Iglesias, Black Sabbath, Boney M, Rod Stewart, Dionne Warwick and Tina Turner – who played the Sun City casino resort during South Africa’s apartheid era.
But of course there is also a fine line in international politics. The Manic Street Preachers, received an ecstatic reception when they played a concert at the Karl Marx Theatre in Havana in 2001. The Welsh band certainly did not receive a $1 milllion payday to perform, but Fidel Castrol, the guest of honour who chatted with the band before the show, has been widely condemned for human rights abuses and is reviled in Cuban exile circles.
And quite how much stars surrounded by a bubble of advisors, aides and sycophants know about the specifics of their bookings is unclear. But several music business sources told Rolling Stone that they were surprised by Carey’s protestations of ignorance.
“Oh, they knew, they absolutely knew, by the time they were there,” said Allen Kovac, manager for bands such as Motley Crue. “That’s being advised incorrectly.”
Nobody can accuse the British superstar Sting of lacking political awareness as a long-time champion of environmental causes and human rights.
But in October 2009, he accepted more than PDS 1 mill to perform at an arts festival in Tashkent staged by Gulnara Karimova. Her father, Islam Karimov, the Uzbek president since 1990, has frequently been denounced for human rights abuses, including the massacre of protestors, and an appalling environmental record.
When news of the trip, and remuneration, emerged a few months later, Sting issued an explanation that began: “The concert was organised by the president’s daughter and I believe sponsored by Unicef.”
The trouble was that when journalists checked, officials at the United Nations Children’s Fund disputed this version and indeed said they were “quite surprised” by his assertion.
But Sting then went on to defend his trip on artistic and political grounds, asserting: “I am well aware of the Uzbek president’s appalling reputation in the field of human rights as well as the environment.
"I made the decision to play there in spite of that. I have come to believe that cultural boycotts are not only pointless gestures, they are counter-productive, where proscribed states are further robbed of the open commerce of ideas and art and as a result become even more closed, paranoid and insular.”
Uzbek democracy activist and independent journalist Umida Niyazova,who fled the country in 2008 after spending four months in jail, was unimpressed by his arguments. “This is blood money, mafia money,” she said. “He might as well have performed in Burma or North Korea.”