LIVE AID: FORTY YEARS ON. BY SANDRA HARRIS.
LIVE AID: FORTY YEARS ON.
BY SANDRA
HARRIS. ©
It’s been described as a ‘musical moon landing.’ It was
certainly the defining musical moment for my generation, the way that, I don’t
know, the Oasis reunion is probably the one for my son’s generation. Even then
though, of course Live Aid was much bigger. Nothing before or since has ever come
even remotely close.
So, what was it exactly? Well, it was a pop-and-rock concert
for famine relief in Africa, and it was the brainchild of Bob Geldof, former
frontman of the Boomtown Rats. It was held in Wembley Stadium in London on the
thirteenth of July, 1985, with a parallel concert taking place in JFK Stadium
in Philadelphia on the same day.
It was shown in one hundred and fifty countries round the
world, some of which were holding their own obviously much smaller Live Aid
concerts, and it was watched by an estimated 1.9 billion people, a good forty
percent of the world’s population. Those are crazy numbers, lads.
Over seventy artists performed across all concerts, and
approximately one hundred and fifty-four million English pounds were raised as
a result, both on the day and overall. But enough statistics. Who played at
this mammoth pop-rock concert?
People generally agree that QUEEN- at Wembley- were the best
band on the day, mainly because of frontman Freddie Mercury’s electrifying
performance during the twenty minutes of their allotted time. Every
group got just under twenty minutes, and there were clocks all over the place,
so there was no excuse for going over time!
Freddie just seemed genuinely delighted to be there. He was
grinning all over his face the whole time he was onstage, belting out hits such
as RADIO GAGA, WE ARE THE CHAMPIONS, CRAZY LITTLE THING CALLED LOVE,
BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY, WE WILL ROCK YOU and HAMMER TO FALL, the song I
want played at my funeral.
They planned it so well. Twenty solid minutes of nothing but
hits, shortened if necessary to keep the set under the twenty minutes. None of
this ‘crap from the new album’ nonsense or playing songs the audience weren’t
familiar with.
Like, what the heck, David Bowie, the one man who could follow
Queen onstage, starting with TVC 15, when he had songs like Starman and
Let’s Dance to choose from? And Adam Ant, singing something called VIVE
LE ROCK when he himself had classics like PRINCE CHARMING, STAND AND DELIVER
and GOODY TWO-SHOES in his back catalogue? Rock stars are weird…
Freddie and Brian May also came on together shortly before the end
of the night to perform IS THIS THE WORLD WE CREATED, a song which
seemed to fit the occasion really well. Freddie was present again for the grand
finale, for which everyone who was still there at ten o’clock at night gathered
onstage to sing DO THEY KNOW IT’S CHRISTMAS, the Band-Aid single that
had kicked everything off the previous Christmas.
QUEEN hadn’t sung on the Band-Aid single so I don’t know if Freddie actually knew the words to the song, but that sure didn’t stop him from bawling out ‘Let
them know it’s Christmas time!’ every time the chorus came around…!
Elton John was fantastic on the Wembley stage, sharing it
with George Michael for his beautiful song, DON’T LET THE SUN GO DOWN ON ME,
giving the whole world a glimpse of the star GM was on the verge of
becoming in his own right, and Kiki Dee for their smash hit, DON’T GO
BREAKING MY HEART.
THE WHO did a phenomenal rendition of WON’T GET FOOLED AGAIN,
with an open-shirted Roger Daltrey looking surprisingly sexy, and U2, an
Irish band whom I’ve never liked, did a set that boosted their album sales and
their profile around the globe.
My favourite of the Philadelphia acts has to be Madonna, then
riding the crest of a wave that saw her become one of the biggest-selling female
acts of all time. She bounced around happily to HOLIDAY and GET INTO
THE GROOVE, wearing more clothes than I was expecting her to sport, and the
audience loved her.
One of people’s complaints about Live Aid is that women
artists, and black artists, were grossly under-represented. Stevie
Wonder famously pulled out because he didn’t want to be the ‘token black’
artist on the bill. Michael Jackson, then the biggest star on the planet, said
he was too swamped with work to attend. Diana Ross pleaded touring commitments
and Prince sent a video but declined to attend in person.
To finish, I’ve compiled a short list of random facts about Live
Aid that you may or may not have heard about.
1. Through the medium of Concorde, Phil
Collins became the only artist who performed on both stages on the same day.
Showoff…
2. ‘Give us your fucking money!’ Bob Geldof swore on live TV, but, because he was being passionate about the cause, he got away with it.
3. Simon Le Bon of Duran Duran, probably
the biggest ‘boy band’ of the nineteen-eighties, fluffed a note quite badly
during their song, A VIEW TO A KILL. If you think he’s forgotten it all
and brushed it off by now, you’d be wrong. Quite wrong…
4. Bob Dylan accidentally invented Farm
Aid when he demanded onstage in Philadelphia that some of the monies raised for
Africa be diverted to America’s struggling farmers. A worthy idea, but this
concert was for famine relief in Africa…
5. Some of the monies raised may
actually have been diverted, not to Farm Aid, but to the then ruler of Ethiopia,
head of a regime of which Margaret Thatcher, the then PM of Britain,
disapproved. It is also alleged that some of the cash was spent on guns, which
would have been an abysmal fail for Live Aid…
6. The whole ‘white saviour helping out
poor black people’ thing that was bandied about in certain circles wasn’t a
good look for the Live Aid brand either.
7. The Led Zeppelin reunion, the first
since the death of John Bonham in 1980, sucked so bad that the band had it
pulled from the footage of the concert. To this day, I still haven't seen it.
8. Even if you have the four-disc Live Aid box-set, which I do, you still don’t have all the footage, due to scrappy recording of the epic event. The audience had no smartphones on which to record every second of their day either, and yet, look at them there. They seem perfectly happy to me…
Today is the fortieth anniversary of that behemoth concert. A lot of the biggest names from that day have since passed away: Freddie Mercury, David Bowie, George Michael, Tina Turner, Dennis Wilson, and probably a goodly handful of promoters, crew members and technicians from the day as well.
Comments
Post a Comment