Live Aid, 25 Years ago this weekend

25 years ago this weekend the World’s largest music festival, Live Aid, took place.

In 1984 the BBC screened a documentary by Michael Burke that brought home the horror of the famine in Ethiopia.

This documentary inspired Bob Geldoff and Midge Ure to get almost 40 of the UK’s best known pop musicians together to record “Do they know it’s Christmas”, a single that they hoped would raise about £70,000 for the famine relief appeal. The single was released towards the end of 1984, flew to No.1 in the UK and raised over £10m worldwide.

Many other countries picked up on this idea, the most well known being “We are the World”, written by Michael Jackson and Quincy Jones, which involved many internationally famous artists and which has gone on to raise over $63m to date

Inspired by their success, Bob and Midge teamed up with music mogul Harvey Goldsmith to arrange the greatest and largest music festival that the world had ever seen, and the concept for Live Aid was born, a concert that took place on two countries across 2 continents, Wembley Stadium in the UK and the JFK Stadium in Philadelphia, USA.

In front of 72,000 in Wembley Stadium Live Aid kicked off at 12:02 with Status Quo “Rockin all over the World”. Acts as diverse as The Four Tops, Ozzy Osbourne with Black Sabbath and Phil Collins appeared on the revolving stage with the Wembley show ending at around 10pm with a massed choir on stage performing “Feed the World”.

Then, at 22:14, the US concert kicked off and in front of 99,000 people Tom Petty opened with “American girl”. The artists playing in the JFK Stadium included the Thompson Twins, Neil Young and Phil Collins – who had flown across the Atlantic on Concorde. It was not until nearly 4am (UK) that Live Aid came to a finish with “We are the World”.

Live Aid was televised in over 60 countries to an estimated audience of 2Bn – that’s over 1/3^rd of the global population.

At the time I was working for a well known high street electronics retailer and had a wall of TV screens showing the opening acts from London. As soon as we closed the store I dashed home, grabbed some food and a beer and settled down in front of the TV for a marathon session, watching all the way through UK and US broadcasts. After the US finale I was still wide awake and was quite overwhelmed by the event so went for a walk around the village. It was a beautiful summer morning, the sky was cloudless, the air was clear and I could tell who had been watching by the pattern of their lights – downstairs lights being turned off followed upstairs lights being switched on.

Other memories include clips from the documentary that started it all off, accompanied by The Cars playing “Drive” and Bob Geldoff exhorting us to “give us yer f**king money”.

Even today, whenever I hear “Drive”, my mind replays clips from the documentary and all I see are the dying children, so powerful is the link between that track and the video footage.

Live Aid went on to raise over $100m.

Did it make a difference? Of course it made a difference, even if it only served to bring the Ethiopian famine to the attention of the Western World.

Will Live Aid ever be beaten? That’s a really good question.