Bob Geldof was in a French cafe recently when a man came up to him and said, “Thank you for the best day of my life.”
“I didn’t know what he was talking about, but I assumed it was Live Aid — I don’t think it was our third hit single,” Geldof tells Billboard via Zoom. “And I go, ‘Thank you very much.’ What else do you say?”
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That’s happened a lot to Geldof over the past 40 years, since the Live Aid concerts — benefitting the Band Aid Charitable Foundation’s continuing efforts to combat famine in Africa — took place on July 13, 1985 in London, Philadelphia and other locations around the world. Following the all-star Band Aid “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” benefit single the previous December, it was 20-odd hours of music transmitted globally by 16 satellites to 169 countries, for a reported audience of nearly two billion. With legendary performances by a who’s-who roster that Geldof branded a global jukebox, it raised $140 million during the shows and the following week.
Live Aid is being celebrated on its anniversary by rebroadcasts of the concert by the BBC and 80sCentral.com, while CNN debuts a new four-week documentary, Live Aid: When Rock ‘n’ Roll Took on the World, at 9 p.m. ET on July 13. (It will air in three episodes on the BBC.) And an original cast recording from Just For One Day — The Live Aid Musical, which is back on London’s West End, comes out July 11.
Four decades later, Geldof proclaims that, “I’m not interested in the nostalgia of it. It’s a vivid thing to me.” But he understands what happened on that day, when many felt united across the globe.
“It’s that sense of being there, and connected,” he explains. “Everyone just felt this sense of humanness — not humanity, but humanness. For the first time in 300,000 years, since we all left the Rift Valley, we were all talking to each other about a common problem and using a common language, the lingua franca of rock ‘n’ roll. Everyone in the world understands ‘a wop bop a lula, a bop bam boom.’ Rock ‘n’ roll is beyond language; it’s an attitude and it’s a sense, and it’s universal.”
He adds that, “The number of people who have watched Live Aid on YouTube has far exceeded the huge numbers that watched it initially, and they keep going back. It’s constantly referred, like in the Queen movie (Bohemian Rhapsody) or Just For One Day. Occasionally what rock ‘n’ roll achieves hits you really hard.”
“If anybody could have pulled that miracle off, it was Bob and no one else,” says Sting, one of the many Band Aid artists who also performed at Live Aid. “His passion, his energy, his bloody mindedness…all of us were just passengers on his coattails. We saw the logic of what he was saying, but we wouldn’t have got it together, singly or as a group, without him — and that’s not false modesty. This was Bob’s thing.”
The Next Step
A concert was not on Geldof’s agenda when “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” came out. “I thought (with) Band Aid, I’d get to Christmas, make $100,000 pounds, give it to OXFAM, job done,” he recalls. But with its huge success and the appearance of other songs from the U.S. (“We Are the World”), Canada (“Tears Are Not Enough”) and other territories, the idea began to take root; during the “We Are the World” sessions Geldof even told those artists he’d “be back knocking on the door” for a potential concert.
“You think, ‘Okay, how serious are you about actually stopping this (famine)?’ So Live Aid was both the practical means of stopping the horror and the political lobby to bring that sort of thing to a close.”
George Thorogood, who performed in Philadelphia, offers a blunter assessment: “It was really a crying shame that the world has so much money and resources, yet there are people on our planet that are starving. That doesn’t make sense. And what do they do when they want to make money? They call a rock ‘n’ roll band.”
Starting in the spring of 1985, Geldof enlisted British promoters Harvey Goldsmith and Maurice Jones for London and also presented the idea of a global telethon that would take place there and in the U.S. “I stepped back and said, ‘He’s barking mad!’ Goldsmith recalls in the CNN documentary. The late Bill Graham handled the U.S. show with Larry Magid of Electric Factory Concerts firm in Philadelphia. Like Goldsmith, he was not a little apprehensive about what had to be accomplished in a very short amount of time.
“For five weeks (after announcement), you had to figure, ‘Well, the one thing I’m not gonna get is a lot of sleep,’” says Magid, who also helped produce Live 8 in 2005. “When it first came up, I was numb just sitting there and listening for three hours. The idea of doing something 10 or 15 time bigger than you’ve ever done, with the eyes of the world on you, is staggering. It was either going to be a great success we could all bask in, or we were gonna look…stupid. Logistically it was daunting, but we had a lot of experience putting on shows and we had a plan, and we executed that plan perfectly.”
Geldof readily acknowledges that “I was out of my depth. My mouth had written the check my brain couldn’t cash. All I really remember is being frightened; the fear was failure, and personal failure was the least of it. I’d asked these bands to help, and they all had and I really didn’t want to let them down. But much important was the fear of failing those in whose name we were doing it for in the first place, and that would have been catastrophic.”
Best-Laid Plans
Fortunately, with the help of Michael Mitchell — who’d been involved with sponsorship and networking for the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles — Live Aid put together an unprecedented network of support from media, including MTV, the BBC and an ABC primetime telecast hosted by Dick Clark. The logistics — chronicled in Geldof’s memoir Is That It? and the Just For One Day musical — were dizzying and mind-numbing. “I was on an organizational continuum,” he says, and that included fatigue and a pinched nerve that hampered his movements on the day but did get him a backstage massage from David Bowie. (“Alternative career — David Bowie, masseuse,” Geldof quips.)
Quite a few acts had agreed to be part of a show even in advance of Live Aid’s conception, while others were roped in in short order. “I knew the kids from Band Aid would come, so there were all your ‘80s hits,” Geldof says. He harangued others, including Queen, the Who and, unsuccessfully, Bruce Springsteen. And despite Goldsmith’s desire to “keep it very opaque or obscure” when Live Aid was first announced, Geldof went ahead and included names that weren’t formally secured yet.
“Harvey was there kicking me under the table and literally squeezing my leg and screaming at me afterwards,” Geldof remembers, “and I said, ‘They can’t really refuse now,’ ’cause it was everywhere.” Several acts on the first edition of the event poster wound up not playing, however, including Stevie Wonder, Billy Joel, Huey Lewis and the News, Paul Simon and Tears For Fears. As the Wembley lineup filled up, some groups, including Pretenders and Simple Minds, were sent to Philadelphia, where Graham and Magid also worked on putting together a roster.
“We just set out to figure out who were the best people and try to convince them,” Magid says. “Obviously one of the first things you say is, ‘Who does the public want to see? Who can we get to balance out what this London show is?’ The Beach Boys came right to mind. We knew Clapton was in the States, and then Jagger wanting to do something but not to compete with the show in London, so he thought it was a better fit for him to do this (Philadelphia) show.
“Not everybody we wanted could do it, and there were people who in the beginning turned us down and came back and said, ‘We can be on the show,’ but at that point we pretty much had it booked.”
While there was some jockeying to be primetime on ABC, Geldof says that mostly “no one moaned about where they were in the bill. The answer was, ‘There’s no bill.’ Who do you put over this person? It’s not possible. It doesn’t mean if you’re on third you’re actually third. It just means that’s the only spot we can stick you in. And all of them played way beyond their normal concert ability — all of them. They played real good for free.”
Live Aid’s highlights went on to become legend: Queen’s galvanizing set; Mick Jagger’s solo set that included Tina Turner and Hall & Oates, plus his “Dancing in the Street” video collaboration with Bowie; Phil Collins crossing the Atlantic Ocean on Concorde to play both shows; Sting’s stripped-down collaboration with Collins and Branford Marsalis in London (and guesting with Dire Straits on “Money For Nothing”); U2’s epic, unintentionally extended rendition of “Bad”; Patti LaBelle’s soaring vocals; Teddy Pendergrass’ first performance since being paralyzed in a car crash three years prior; and Paul McCartney closing London with “Let It Be” in his first live performance in six years, with Geldof, Bowie, Pete Townshend and Alison Moyet stepping in to help out when his microphone failed.
Even acts that fell short — Led Zeppelin’s semi-reunion and Bob Dylan’s meandering set with Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood — are still spoken about now. “They dropped the curtain in front of the monitors, so we couldn’t hear ourselves,” Richards explained a few years later. “Here’s three guys with acoustic guitars and they were getting ready for (sings) ‘We Are the World’ with 50 people behind us…Bob and I kept looking at each other, like, ‘Where’s the blindfolds and last cigarettes?’ But it was all for a good cause, so what the hell?”
Those About to Rock
The Beach Boys’ Mike Love says his band definitely felt the global connection between the Live Aid concerts during its five-song afternoon set, which featured Brian Wilson in a then-rare live appearance with the band. “We were playing in Philadelphia and they were singing along to our songs at Wembley Stadium, thousands of miles away. The whole thing was so euphoric and inspiring.”
Joan Baez began Live Aid in Philadelphia with, “Children of the ‘80s, this is your Woodstock,” but Graham Nash, who also performed at both concerts, drew a stark contrast between them.
“There was a feeling at Woodstock that we weren’t alone,” says Nash, who walked away with the day’s dressing trailer assignment chart as a souvenir (and still has it). “Yeah, we knew that Richard Nixon was crazy, that his administration was corrupt. But when we were at Woodstock we realized that here’s almost a half a million kids that felt the same way we did. There was a certain amount of that in Philadelphia, but not as much as Woodstock. It was a different purpose.”
Meeting Baez was a personal highlight for Rob Halford of Judas Priest, who had covered her “Diamonds & Rust” in 1977. “She was very cool,” remembers Halford, who watched part of the show with the rest of the crowd on the JFK field. “I was sh-tting myself. I’d just got a Budweiser and a cigarette and I see this lady getting closer and closer — ‘Omigod, that’s Joan Baez!’ My immediate thought was, oh, Christ, she’s gonna go, ‘You massacred my song’ but she comes up and we had a hug and she said, ‘I just want to tell you my son said, “If you see anybody from Judas Priest, can you tell them I prefer their version of ‘Diamonds & Rust?”’ I just thought, how sweet she is, so beautiful and self-effacing. It was a great moment.”
Sting’s Live Aid performance came less than a month after the release of his first solo album, The Dream of the Blue Turtles, and found him trading off songs with Collins during a stripped-down set that also included Blue Turtles collaborator Branford Marsalis, who was part that project. “It was pretty easy,” recalls Sting, who rehearsed with Collins via phone. “We know our songs. I like the idea of the impromptu. It was completely the opposite of what Queen did, which was staggering and wonderful and crystal clear. But we were, in the spirit of the original Band Aid record, kind of amateurish and thrown together — genuine passion, but not particularly polished. It was good to get it over with and just enjoy the show.”
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers were among the Live Aid bands on tour at the time, fitting it in between Southern Accents Tour stops in Florida and New York. “That was overwhelming. I felt very honored we were part of it,” says guitarist Mike Campbell. “Backstage there was this tent with (Bob) Dylan and Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood, and this tent over here was Jimmy Page and his entourage. And then Madonna had a tent in another area and she came marching over and wanted to be in our camp but there was no room for her, so she had to go back to her area. But we had all cool people in our spot.”
Nash also had a Madonna moment. While standing with emcee Jack Nicholson backstage when Madonna and then-husband Sean Penn were approaching, “This roadie says, ‘Look the other way, look the other way.’ And me and Jack said, ‘What?!’ (laughs) Yeah, look the other way. Sure.”
Simple Minds frontman Jim Kerr, who was married to Pretenders’ Chrissie Hynde at the time, had a more pleasant encounter, however. “We were in our dressing room/cabin or whatever,” he says, “and we heard this voice from behind us, this Glasgow accent, and we turn around and it’s Sean Penn! He had just studied a Glaswegian play and had been practicing the accent — which is a very hard thing to get — and had it down. We became friends that day and hung out and all that.”
Kerr, whose band was riding high on the Billboard Hot 100-topping success of its The Breakfast Club hit “Don’t You (Forget About Me),” adds that while he and his mates “knew it was a big deal” to be part of Live Aid, “it didn’t feel mind-blowing, as you think of it now. We turned up and played; that’s what we do. We didn’t think 40 years later we’d be looking on it like this. If we had thought about that I’m sure we would’ve been beside ourselves with nerves, but I don’t recall that on the day.”
“The Best Day Of My Life”
For Geldof, meanwhile, playing early at Wembley with the Boomtown Rats — declaring “I just realized today is the best day of my life” — “was the only time of the day I felt relaxed. Walking on stage, I was perfectly at home, ’cause that was my job. This is what I do. But about halfway through our set I realize, ‘No, no, this isn’t a huge crowd — dude, this is everybody! F—k!’ So that pulled me up short. That was the only time I felt, I suppose, what everybody felt.” (Geldof will play a dozen U.K. shows celebrating the Rats’ 50th anniversary this October and November.)
Four decades later the world is still feeling it. The Band Aid Charitable Trust is continuing its efforts (donations can be made to bandaidtrust.co.uk). Twenty years after Live Aid, Geldof and company put on Live 8, a series of eight global concerts in front of the 2005 G8 Summit in Scotland that he feels “were more important politically and economically.” And while Dylan rankled some with his concert-ending suggestion to send some of the money raised at Live Aid to American family farmers, it did spawn Farm Aid and its annual concerts.
Yet the template remains Live Aid. In the CNN documentary, Bono notes that, “Something went on at Live Aid that is still with us….It began a journey for all of us from what you might call charity to what you might call justice.”
“The world tilted that day,” Philadelphia promoter Magid adds. “We can all say we changed the world. (Geldof) is the guy that led the way, but this was a main contribution of our lives, to be involved in such an incredible undertaking, not just for African famine relief but all of social consciousness…and what you can do to help. We were just happy to be part of it.”