Sandra Harris Writes

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 ...

  LIVE AID, QUEEN, FREDDIE MERCURY AND AIDS. BY SANDRA HARRIS. © Do you remember where you were when LIVE AID happened? I do. I was just a kid, obsessed with pop and rock, glued to the television on which the biggest benefit concert the world had ever seen was about to kick off with British broadcaster Richard Skinner uttering the immortal words, ‘It’s twelve noon in London (also Ireland, where I was!), seven am in Philadelphia and, around the world, it’s time for LIVE AID.’ It was a gorgeous sunny Saturday in Ireland and I was super-excited about having a day of top quality pop and rock from some of the biggest stars on the planet to look forward to. The legendary concert, organised by rock musicians Bob Geldof and Midge Ure, happened on this day thirty-seven years ago, and it was conceived of after the BBC aired some horrific news reports by Michael Buerk on the 1983-1985 famine in Ethiopia. The initial Band Aid project saw the song performed by Various Artists, Do They K...