Tony Hollingsworth

Tony Hollingsworth is a British impresario and producer of popular-music events, several of which were for liberal causes and/or conceived as worldwide broadcasts. The events included two concerts for Nelson Mandela, the first calling for his release from an apartheid prison, the second celebrating it.
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The first Mandela event, Nelson Mandela’s 70th Birthday Tribute at Wembley Stadium in June 1988, was broadcast to 67 countries and an estimated audience of 600 million. It is regarded by many, including the Anti-Apartheid Movement and the African National Congress, as raising worldwide consciousness of the imprisonment of Mandela and others by the South African apartheid government and forcing the regime to release Mandela earlier than would otherwise have happened.
Eighteen months after the first concert, with his release thought to be approaching, Mandela asked for a similar event that would be broadcast internationally and would act as an official international reception at which he would speak. Mandela was released in February 1990 after 27 years in prison and the event, Nelson Mandela: An International Tribute for a Free South Africa, took place at Wembley Stadium on 16 April. He spoke for over half-an-hour as part of a four-and-a-half hour event broadcast to more than 60 countries and an audience of 500 million.
Before the Mandela concerts, Hollingsworth had been assistant director of the first seven CND Glastonbury festivals and had organised several events for the Greater London Council. These included two Jobs for a Change festivals aimed at showing that the GLC was helping to create jobs at a time of mass unemployment. In March 1987, he produced the four-day show of Amnesty’s The Secret Policeman’s Third Ball.
Events produced after the Mandela concerts of 1988 and 1990 included:
* Moscow’s 850th Anniversary Pageant in Red Square, featuring Russian classical, choral and folk music, and broadcast across the CIS countries and elsewhere
* The Wall - Live in Berlin, featuring Roger Waters’ rock opera, The Wall, in Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz in July 1990, celebrating the fall of the wall seven months earlier
* The Great Music Experience, a Unesco-backed show featuring Japanese and Western musicians, staged at an 8th century Japanese Buddhist temple, Todai-ji, and featuring Bob Dylan, Jon Bon Jovi and Joni Mitchell
* Guitar Legends, a show of top guitarists/singers, including Bob Dylan, Keith Richards and B.B King, held in Seville to draw support for the city’s .
Hollingsworth is now running a multi-media charity campaign, Listen, to raise money for disadvantaged children across the world. It has sent film stars such as Samuel L Jackson, Jessica Lange, Goldie Hawn and Natalie Portman to visit children’s projects in developing countries, and these have been filmed to create short internet videos and press coverage. It is planning to make two broadcast concerts and to create a worldwide social-networking community, on the web and on mobile, of registered supporters and donors.

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