It’s time for one of those MY GOD WAS IT THAT LONG AGO? moments, because 39 years ago to the day it was Live Aid. If you are under 50 you might be thinking, “Live What?” Well, it was, and here I quote wikipedia, “a multi-venue benefit concert and music-based fundraising initiative held on Saturday 13 July 1985. The original event was organised by Bob Geldof and Midge Ure to raise further funds for relief of the 1983-1985 famine in Ethiopia, a movement that started with the release of the successful charity single “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” in December 1984“, a song by the way, that featured the wonderfully tasteless line, “Well, tonight, thank God, it’s them instead of you.” The British part of the show was staged at Wembley Stadium and inevitably sold out instantly and the BBC decided to cover the whole thing live. It was a truly great day, right? Er … no.
I watched from the confines of the living room in my house in Brislington. Shortly before noon on a bright sunny day, I switched on the crystal bucket and there was Status Quo, kicking the show off with a leaden version of John Fogerty’s Rockin’ All Over The World, quickly redeemed, it has to be said, by the excellent Caroline and, better still, Don’t Waste My Time. I liked the Quo and had seen them in concert several times a decade before Live Aid and thought them a decent opening act. But thereon, things only got worse.
I know that time loves a hero and in this instance Live Aid was judged to be a stellar success in musical terms, but it wasn’t. Paul Weller’s Style Council followed and things went downhill from there. Geldof’s Boomtown Rats, well into decline by 1985, did a few songs, as did Adam Ant, Ultravox, Spandau Ballet, Elvis Costello (singing All You Need Is Love FFS and singing it very badly) and endless dross, punctuated by lengthy gaps between acts and tiresome fillers by the hosts in the BBC gantry, which became a hotspot for celebrity luvvies.
The BBC played a video of people starving to death in Ethiopia to the tune of Drive by The Cars, which actually worked and you’d have needed a heart of stone not to be affected by it. But the music on stage, played largely by fading stars whose careers were in decline, was bang average. For some of the stars, their careers were not just saved but propelled into the stratosphere by appearing. The main beneficiary of Live Aid, apart from the people who were starving to death in Africa, was Queen.
Following a sensational opening to their career, Queen were on the slide and had recently trashed their own reputation by playing shows in apartheid friendly Sun City in South Africa, breaking the international cultural boycott. With Nelson Mandela still banged up in Robin Island, I found the act deplorable and unforgivable. Still do, actually. But fair’s fair and Queen stole the show with a hit heavy six song set, starting with the execrable Bohemian Rhapsody and ending with the gobbledegook of We Are The Champions. From being a fundraiser for starving people in Africa, the show was now all about Queen and that was the big memory of the whole event. I thought they were shit, with their overblown faux AOR shtick, but then I always did and still do. As Mandela sat in his cell, Freddie Mercury and co returned to the top and stayed there. Racial segregation and discrimination, as well as human rights abuses, were just too bad when there was money to be made.
Anyway, fuck Queen and the rest of the show in London plodded on. David Bowie, The Who and Elton John did what they do and Paul McCartney closed the show with a shambolic version of Let It Be, with the microphones failing, but to be fair no one really complaining because, together with the US version in Philadelphia, some £150 million was raised and lives were saved, in all likelihood many thousands of lives. The star-studded mess that was Live Aid had to be judged a success for that reason alone. Artistically, it was largely established artists who could largely be relied upon to not swear nor expose themselves on stage.
To this day, I have not seen the US show, though with the Four Tops, Crosby, Stills and Nash, the Beach Boys, Neil Young, Santana, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Madonna, Hall and Oates and Bob Dylan in the line up, as well as some absolute dross, like Wembley, but I’d have probably enjoyed that one far more.
The legacy, apart from the obvious one, the cash, was, according to one aid worker at the time that “humanitarian concern is now at the centre of foreign policy” for the west. I agree with that and while I am no great fan of Bob Geldof the musician, there’s no question that Live Aid was A Good Thing. Although the day was about music, in truth the music was largely mediocre, it didn’t matter. The world was a better place because of it.
It really was that long ago, 39 years, and even I was young then. The fact that I remember it so well shows it had a lasting good effect on a lot of people. At the time, I thought it would just be a gig and it would soon be forgotten. It wasn’t. A cynical hack I may be, but I would be a fool not to acknowledge and even celebrate the goodness in people’s hearts. Feed the world and all that. In a small way, we really did.
