By The Landlord
"Bono wants to give the world a great big hug and I want to punch its lights out." – Bob Geldof
“If two tossers from Ireland and Scotland can get off their butts and do something , maybe other tossers will do the same.” – Midge Ure
“All these bands going on and no one’s overrunning. That’s a statement in itself.” – Jimmy Page
“If I had stopped to think, I certainly would have said No.” – Harvey Goldsmith, Live Aid promoter
“I can’t do what you can do and you can’t do what I can do. But we both have to do it.” – Mother Theresa to Bob Geldof, 1985
“We will move a little from the comfort of our lives to understand their hurt.” – Joan Baez
“All for one and one for all, united we stand divided we fall.” – Alexandre Dumas, The Three Musketeers
“The essence of the beautiful is unity in variety.” – Felix Mendelssohn
“Talent perceives differences; genius, unity.” – William Butler Yeats
“The Destiny of Man is to unite, not to divide. If you keep on dividing you end up as a collection of monkeys throwing nuts at each other out of separate trees.” – T.H. White, The Once and Future King
"Me, We.” – Muhammad Ali
"Fuck the address. Just send your money, now!"
"I was in London earlier. Funny old world, ain't it?"
“Day-oh! Day-ay-ay-oh!"
From a passionately angry Bob Geldof swearing on the BBC to a Concorde-jumping jet-setting double-venue Phil Collins, to the strutting showmanship of Freddie Mercury, it was an unprecedented event, filled with magical and bizarre moments, a mass gathering of pop stars, an extraordinary feat of organisation and fundraising, and at the time a record global audience of almost 2 billion people, all starting a huge charity movement – Band Aid and beyond. Incredible, improbable, and seemingly impossible, it somehow all came together 40 years ago this weekend, on 13th July.
How does that anniversary make you feel? Do you remember watching on TV or listening on the radio that day in London's Wembley Stadium, and the continuing concert in Philadelphia? Were you actually at the gig? Or do you remember what you were doing, and where? Were you excited, inspired? Perhaps you were dismissive, angry, completely indifferent, or a bit on the fence? Perhaps you were just too busy with work or family, or too young to remember, or not even yet born?
Whoever, wherever, and however old you were, Live Aid must likely have some place in your musical knowledge. My memories of it, as a teenager, was intrigue and excitement, watching it on TV at home, or, as it was a hot summer’s day, listening it on my small portable transistor radio in the park, and in the street, being amazed when each act came on, famous stars sometimes in random combinations, and wondering who might be the best. It was a fascinating, amazing global musical dog show of rock star mullets and brilliant mass entertainment, but magically everybody putting aside their individual egos for the greater good.
At times cringeworthy, awful, patronising, misfiring, but undeniably also well-meant, positive, inspiring and unifying, there's no denying it was an extraordinary time, fired by the passion of the lanky, scruffy Irish fading rock star frontman of The Boomtown Rats, who who started it all, and continued to do so for years afterwards - helping form the Band Aid Trust, reigniting it with Live 8 in 2005, then with the African Commission, stirring up governments and definitely saving hundreds of thousands of lives. It changed things, at least for a time, tackling preventable suffering and death.
It all started when Bob Geldof, alongside many others, was watching the 23rd October broadcast of Michael Buerk's 6pm BBC1 News report of a massive Ethiopian famine, one sent to biblical levels by crop failure and a massive civil war. The images were powerful and shocking.
That evening Geldof went to an opulent party of a book launch organised by fashion and style celebrity Peter York. It was the epitome event of 80s shallow opulence, and over the champagne and nibbles, he felt a creeping sense of guilt and injustice, and felt compelled to act. And unlike most of us, who would simply feel bad, he did do something about it, and he wouldn’t take no for an answer.
Working with Ultravox’s Midge Ure, together they created a collaborative, single, Do They Know It's Christmas?, a bell-jingling, catchy, well-meant but actually pretty terrible charity record (“there won’t be snow in Africa this Christmas time …”), but one that galvanised and inspired the nation because of the sheer number of pop stars who got involved and, selling a million copies in the Yuletide season’s first week. Lyrics were divided up, with memorable warbles variously from Sting to Boy George and others, but it was Bono’s “Tonight thank God it’s them instead of you!” a line that certainly jumps out as perhaps among the most cringeworthy, but also retrospectively remains strangely powerful and telling, because shines a light on that dark, secret feeling of cosy guilt many of us feel when seeing other parts of the world in a horrible crisis while we are doing OK.
The rest, as they say, is history, with Geldof going to Ethiopia in January 1985 to check that the money was being well spent, witnessing the horrors and mass daily deaths, and as he explains on a current new BBC documentary, breaking down in tears when hearing that Christmas single being played, feeling “all the rage and all the guilt”.
Bob Geldof visits controversial resettlement Ethiopian camps in January 1985
Bob Geldof with Mother Theresa
In America, in March 1985 there was another supergroup sort of copycat charity single, We Are The World, written by Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie and produced by Quincy Jones for the USA For Africa charity. It was another bizarre night of chance gathering and recording, only possible because the studio was in easy reach from the venue of a big awards event.
Live Aid’s finale …
Meanwhile, Geldof put together what seemed like the craziest of crazy ideas, to organise a mass summer pair concerts in London and Philadelphia, broadcast around the world and put together by seasoned geezer promoter Harvey Goldsmith. Thousands of people gave their time for free. The fact that this all came together seems like a miracle. But memories of it are etched in the memory, from Queen, who like many, were as much in it for the exposure as the principle (they’d performed in Apartheid-era Sun City South Africa the year before), putting on huge, crowd-pleasingly fun show, to Bono’s emotional U2 crowd-visiting performance. But it was actually David Bowie, first performing Heroes but had the biggest impact on the cause itself, by giving up one of his songs to show a news footage video of the famine, overlaid by a Cars number. It stopped the partying crowd in its tracks. It was his selfless use of stage time that made the charity phone lines really light up and the donations to flood in. It was a stark reminder that this event wasn’t just about fun, but famine.
That video included footage of a dying child, Birhan Woldu, who had been presumed dead, but somehow survived and became a poster figure for the Feed The World movement, later appearing as a young woman on stage with Madonna at the Live 8 events in 2005.
Birhan Woldu close to deah in 1985…
… and in a recent interview
That revival, 20 years ago in early July, was an even bigger charity moment, billions raised from events in all the G8 countries - UK, USA, Canada, France, Italy, Japan, Germany, and even in Russia, plus additional events in Johannesburg and elsewhere. Of course there were many controversies and criticisms, the ‘white man saviour’ culture not showcasing many Black artists. Was it about race, or about big-selling artists inspiring donations? The arguments persisted.
But July 2005 was an equally extraordinary time in many ways. Geldof, who had promised himself he’d never organise another concert, heard that famine was recurring in Ethiopia and accordingly changed his plans. He and the by now rock megastar Bono visited George W Bush in a bizarre scenes, and persuaded him to donate millions to charities fighting the Aids epidemic across Africa. And at the G8 summit, all the key countries eventually agreed, albeit in staggered stages, to cancel billions in debt to Third World countries. Tony Blair, for all his faults and hypocrisy over the Iraq War, chaired the summit, and managed to get this over the line in the middle of the 7/7 attacks. Irony and political consequence was pushing and pulling in different directions.
It was a significant coming together that did some good. There are many caveats to this of course, but the idea of this sort of achievement happening now - Vladimir Putin being in accord with other leaders, or the idea of another Republican, Donald Trump, making generous donations or cancelling debt, all of this seems a very long time ago indeed. Was this the last time international politics was this united?
What happened to the world in the last 20 years and the 20 before it? Has politics become more right-wing, more selfish, more market driven, more populist, and brazenly more stupid? It seemed at the time that could not be possible, but almost certainly. Have many of those key figures, once so motivated are now too old, and have lost their focus and energy? Are we, and especially the new, younger generation simply too wrapped up in small internet bubbles, or financial and mental insecurity, to care or to take risks? Are we all simply too prone to online culture, misinformation, or information overload?
From Gaza to to Sudan, Ukraine and entire climate change issue, it’s not as we are short of crises that might galvanise and motivate us. But this week, it seems like a good anniversary to examine the past and compare the present, and to express all this through the prism of song, with examples on the theme of unity and togetherness, or songs that have that effect.
We’re all connected. Everything we do has an effect on others. Let’s at least connect a bit more, and reflect on the world in the last 40 years with this theme. But who will take up the baton? It’s the tincanman! Place your suggestions in comments below for deadline at 11pm on Monday UK time, for playlists published next week. Feed the World Wide Web.
David Bowie sings Heroes at Live Aid, 13 July 1985
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