Stevie Wonder has been hailed as “an inspiration” as city leaders agreed to award the music legend the Freedom of Newcastle.
Councillors voted on Wednesday evening to confer Newcastle’s highest civic honour on the American chart-topper. The 72-year-old, who played at the City Hall in the 1960s, was chosen in recognition of his campaign to establish Martin Luther King’s birthday as a national holiday in the USA.
Newcastle has long held great pride in its links with the civil rights leader, who visited Tyneside in November 1967 to receive an honorary degree from Newcastle University – the only British institution to honour him before his assassination, which came just five months later.
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Wonder, whose song Happy Birthday was written to campaign for the creation of Martin Luther King Day, met with a delegation from Newcastle when he performed at Hyde Park in 2016 to discuss Dr King’s connections to the North East and the city’s plans to mark the 50-year anniversary of his visit. That meeting, which included Newcastle Central MP Chi Onwurah, was set up by music organisation Northern Roots via Wonder’s Newcastle-born manager, Keith Harris.
Businessman Tommy Caulker, one of the people who nominated the music icon for the award, said he had been “an inspiration on a lot of levels” – his music, overcoming the challenges posed by being blind since he was six weeks old, and fighting for racial justice and equality. Mr Caulker, a nightclub boss behind the World Headquarters venue, added that Newcastle should sometimes be “outward looking” in who it chooses to honour with the freedom of the city.
He told the Local Democracy Reporting Service: “I am very supportive of people within the city being recognised too, but once in a while it is nice to look out to the rest of the world and try and pull the rest of the world in. In the same way, the university gave Martin Luther King a degree in the 1960s when people might have asked what on earth he had to do with Newcastle – but that helped to really identify it as an inclusive university that reaches out on a global scale.
“I would like to think that there is a similarity there with recognising Stevie Wonder with the freedom of the city. The fact that Newcastle connects to these people says something about the city as a regional European capital.”
Wonder played at the City Hall in April 1965 as a teenager, when he was on tour with a collection of acclaimed Motown acts including The Supremes. But one music-loving city councillor who was at the show, Liberal Democrat Gerry Keating, remembers it as a commercial “disaster” – with just 63 people in attendance.
The North Jesmond councillor told the Local Democracy Reporting Service: “There were a lot of groups that had been top of the American charts and we thought there would be more people there – but 63 was the number.
“Stevie Wonder came out just before half time and he played his song Fingertips and a couple of others. He was just 14 at the time. Fingertips had been a number one in the USA but not many people in the UK would have heard it.
“Later on we found out that in Wolverhampton there had only been 21 people at the show, so at least Newcastle did a bit better!”
Other prominent figures to have been awarded the Freedom of Newcastle include Sir Bobby Robson, Alan Shearer, and Nelson Mandela.
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