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The Age of Spectacle: Live Aid at 40
When Bob Geldof exhorted audiences to fill Wembley Stadium and empty their pockets for famine relief in Ethiopia, he changed the face of charity fundraising – and of live music. On its 40th anniversary, David Hepworth – one of the BBC presenters on the day – explores the legacy of Live Aid
Published: August 6, 2025 at 9:00 AM
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If not quite the moon landing or the shooting of JFK, 13 July 1985 remains a day on which most people who were alive remember exactly where they were – a day marked by a seismic social and cultural shift.
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The defining moment came around seven o’clock in the evening. Queen, a rock band whose star had seemed to be on the wane, was performing ‘We Will Rock You’ at Wembley Stadium. The audience seemed almost possessed – overwhelmed at simply being part of the occasion. Frontman Freddie Mercury pointed the cameraman at the crowd – more than 70,000 people clapping in perfect synchrony, hands above their heads.
In this instant was born a new age of musical performance that would be notable as much for what things looked like as for the way they sounded. The road to today’s special-effects-packed, big-ticket concert experience was laid at Live Aid. The Age of Spectacle started here.
Essential viewing
What was to climax with a TV event that everybody watched because they wanted to began with a TV event that many watched because they had little choice. That was Michael Buerk’s report from the camps on the plain of Korem in Ethiopia’s Tigray region where, in October 1984, many thousands were dying as a result of famine and war.
Bob Geldof was at home on the evening of Buerk’s broadcast – because his career as the lead singer of The Boomtown Rats was no longer quite as chart-busting as it had been. Moved and enraged by what he saw, he took the prodigious energy that would ordinarily have been put into plugging a new single, and dragooned his pop mates into singing on a charity record.
Bob Geldof at Mekele relief camp, Ethiopia in January 1985. This visit sparked the idea of raising funds with a large-scale concert featuring huge stars (Image by Getty Images)
One of the most widely held misconceptions about the popular music scene of today is that it moves swiftly. That is not the case. It’s glacial. Glastonbury now involves more planning than the Normandy D-Day landings. By contrast, Band Aid (and the concert that followed, Live Aid) came together so quickly they took your breath away – and nobody realised the extent of what had been achieved until long after it was over.
When I went to Sarm West Studios on Sunday 25 November 1984 to report on the recording of ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’, there was no guarantee that the project would fly at all. Bob Geldof’s doing a charity record, the murmurs went: we’ll believe it when we see it. Two weeks later, it was number one – the biggest story in music – and all of your neighbours had snapped up a copy.
Why? Were they seized by altruism? That’s impossible to know. The motivations of those people who grabbed the single in Woolworths and Our Price and a thousand other retail outlets that December were probably as mixed as those of the people who had been invited to sing on it: happy to do something for a good cause, and also rather enjoying feeling at one with the national mood. Today we would call it a vibe shift.
The record was such a phenomenon that it demanded some kind of follow-up. By some extraordinary stroke of good fortune, Geldof – whose personal success had ebbed – had caught a wave of public sentiment. Suddenly, everybody in his orbit – the broadcasters, the acts, the record companies and the media – looked to see where he might lead them next. A show of some kind?
There had been benefit concerts before, of course, with proceeds donated to help the victims of wars and humanitarian disasters in Biafra (Nigeria), Bangladesh and Kampuchea (now Cambodia). In the years following Live Aid would come Farm Aid, Nelson Mandela’s 70th birthday, The Concert for New York City, and so many others that they swiftly hardened into ritual. But only Live Aid reverberates strongly enough in the public memory that it inspires people to recall where they were that day, and to reminisce about how they felt history was being made.
Performers gather at the close of Live Aid Wembley to sing ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ (Image by Shutterstock)
Benefit of experience
The big pop names of the early 1980s – the likes of Elvis Costello, Boy George, Paul Weller, Ian Dury and Joe Strummer – were notable for two things. The first was their readiness to opine on a wide range of subjects without fear of cancellation; the second was their awareness of where their predecessors – and here they were thinking about the likes of the Beatles, Stones and David Bowie – may have gone wrong back in the days when they were the new kids on the block.
None of this new galaxy of stars, whose profile was heightened thanks to MTV and the sudden ubiquity of the pop video, was more garrulous or more aware of their part in carrying on the tradition of big gestures and good works than Irishman Geldof.
When he decided to follow up the roaring success of ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ with a benefit concert to be called Live Aid, he consulted a former Beatle for advice. In 1971, George Harrison had organised the earlier star-studded Concert for Bangladesh in New York. Sort out the charitable side first, advised the Beatle who wrote ‘Taxman’, or the Inland Revenue will take most of what you raise.
Unlike Harrison’s Bangladesh show, which was poorly filmed and given an underwhelming cinema release months later, Live Aid would be planned from the start as event television. It was designed to be experienced by as many people as could be reached on the day – and in this it was a child of the times. It would be staged at two venues on the same day, with an impressive roster of mostly British and Irish acts playing Wembley Stadium in London, and an equally stellar line-up of largely American artists at JFK Stadium in Philadelphia. (In the event, Phil Collins jetted across the Atlantic to appear in both venues.)
Live Aid proved an even better use of Geldof’s talents than Band Aid or any number of Boomtown Rats records. It was precisely because his group had failed in the US that he understood the importance of appealing to the American market.
He could no longer allow the likes of Paul Weller and Status Quo to be his event’s only stars. He had to browbeat The Who and Led Zeppelin to get back on stage. He had to attract musicians of an older generation – veterans such as Elton John, David Bowie and Queen, most of whom were keen to be invited while wary of having their thunder stolen by each other. And, in order to ensure that the event was perceived as must-watch TV, Geldof had to get everyone to submit to playing no more than a handful of numbers – a difficult sell in a business where the pecking order is measured in stage time, and everybody wants to go on at dusk.
Princess Diana and Prince Charles attend Live Aid – a key publicity coup (Image by Shutterstock)
Having worked as a journalist, Geldof understood the importance of building Live Aid as a story that the popular press – still a big deal in those days – would get behind. He knew that the attendance of Princess Diana – who liked to have it known that she was a fan of George Michael and skated the halls of Kensington Palace to the songs of Dire Straits – was far more important than that of her husband, Charles. Geldof, a media tycoon in waiting, was able to put pressure on the BBC to bring its unmatched experience of outside broadcasts to bear on the day. Nobody else would have been able to bring it off, before or since.
Independent spirit
Although most of the acts involved would have blenched at the idea, it owed a lot to a can-do spirit that Margaret Thatcher would have applauded. Many of the prime movers had come up via the independent record labels of the late 1970s, where they had realised that nothing got done unless you did it yourself. Furthermore, since Live Aid was being planned during a ‘Second British Invasion’ when the commanding heights of American pop had been conquered by Annie Lennox and Boy George, the British music industry was going through one of its sporadic cocky periods.
The Band Aid Trust – the charity set up to ensure that the mistakes of 1971 were not repeated – may have been powered by established names such as promoter Harvey Goldsmith, artist manager Chris Morrison and television mogul Michael Grade, but it was Geldof who provided the leadership. He employed every inch of the bully pulpit provided by his unsought elevation to ‘Saint Bob’ status to pull everyone into line, from British Airways to Robert Maxwell to the trade unions.
It couldn’t possibly happen today. The world in which someone like Bob Geldof could pick up the phone to a handful of powerful, well-intentioned people in the media and have them order the clearing of whole TV schedules and entire newspapers to make room for this biggest of splashes has evaporated in the 40 years since 1985.
At the same time, the conquest of public discourse by social media has resulted in a world where well-meant initiatives are lambasted for falling short of perfection rather than modestly applauded for giving things a try. Back in 1985, very few people pointed out that there were relatively few women and next to no people of colour on the bill at Wembley. When you look back at the footage today, when identity politics is to our era what respectability was to the Victorians, those sins of omission are the first things that strike you. We would never be so innocent again.
Sunny disposition
As proceedings got under way in Wembley at noon that July Saturday, though, I remember looking out at the spectacle and thinking: somebody must have lit a candle for Geldof. At the time, the ticket price of £25 seemed a bit on the stiff side, but people were prepared to overlook that fact because half of the proceeds were going to charity. And on the day, it was easy to see that the crowd – far more ecumenical than the standard partisan audience at rock concerts – was in a good mood. That was partly because the sun was shining – rarely something Londoners take for granted. It glinted on the trumpets of the Coldstream Guards as they played their fanfare (a very Mary Poppins touch for people tuning in overseas) before Status Quo got things up and running with the most perfect song choice of the entire day: John Fogerty’s ‘Rockin’ All Over the World’.
In that glorious sunshine, the BBC’s live television coverage of the spectacle was pleasing to the eye. In retrospect, it felt as if that day had successfully sold Middle England the idea of a rock concert not as a brow-furrowing ordeal but as a festival in which you and your fellow audience members linked arms to join in with songs you had known since your teenage years.
The experience of open-air live pop music, now as much a part of the British summer as Wimbledon, was at the time in its infancy. Yet throughout that afternoon, swelling numbers of Britons abandoned mowing the lawn or cleaning the car to watch Sting and Phil Collins or Sade perform at Wembley – albeit from the comfort of their living rooms.
Live Aid had other unintended consequences. It confirmed the end of a generation gap that punk had done so much to foster in the previous decade. For several chart acts of 1985 – Howard Jones, Nik Kershaw, the Thompson Twins – it marked the high-water mark of their popularity. For others, such as U2 – who had feared that the whole experience would prove to be a career-ending disaster once Bono had disappeared into the crowd, unable to find his way back – it proved an accidental triumph.
Elton John was one of a number of long-established artists for whom Live Aid helped revitalise flagging careers, argues David Hepworth (Image by Getty Images)
For older acts that Geldof had attracted because he considered them vital to overseas sales, it came as a massive bonus. Overnight, the likes of Queen and Elton John went from being mildly passé to becoming bona fide ‘legends’, embraced by all and sundry. And, of course, what nobody noticed at the time was that we were entering a future in which the majority of pop stars would be old ones – not that it’s dented their popularity one bit. When Paul McCartney closed out the London side of Live Aid, we looked in wonder at this venerable figure taking to the stage to sing ‘Let It Be’, and wondered at his great age. (He was 43.) But he wasn’t retiring: as we were to discover over the next 40 years, he was just getting started.
Aside from all that, Live Aid provided the model for a new kind of media event on which burgeoning broadcasters would converge: World Cups, Glastonbury, the Oscars and state occasions across the world, consumed on more and more channels.
Phenomenal start
As it turned out, 13 July was just the start of the Live Aid phenomenon. Over the days and weeks that followed, the newspapers went all out with wall-to-wall coverage of the event, its organiser and participants. The campaign for Bob Geldof to be given a knighthood began next day, and the musicians who took part were most commonly described as ‘heroes’. Of course, most of them weren’t any such thing: they were just glad to be included, and happy to have the exposure. Yet there was no getting away from the fact that the way people seemed to feel about stars who play guitars was different from how they felt about actors or novelists. Live Aid played a key role in burnishing the status of these people to being somehow on the side of the angels. The road to the present, in which any rock star over the age of 60 has a good chance of being invited to Buckingham Palace, runs right through Live Aid.
Tina Turner and Mick Jagger duet during the US section of Live Aid in Philadelphia. The two-venue approach was a pivotal part of Geldof’s strategy (Image by Getty Images)
Some £40m was raised that day for famine relief in Ethiopia, and the events of 13 July 1985 changed the face of charity. Suddenly, it was no longer the kindly old lady coming down your street with the collecting tin. It was the most famous person that the organisers could find, looming out of your TV set in a T-shirt bearing a provocative slogan, demanding that you get involved.
And something else happened to us that day: we fell in love with scale itself. You can detect this every time you go to a big concert, which more and more of us do. Before anything has happened – often before a single note has been played – the crowd will begin roaring their approval, whooping and hollering to express their delight at simply being part of something.
This being 2025, they will also be capturing their own film of the occasion on their phone. Will they watch it back? Probably not. But it will live long in their memory. Like Live Aid.
David Hepworth is an author and broadcaster. His latest book is Hope I Get Old Before I Die: Why Rock Stars Never Retire (Bantam, 2024)
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This article was first published in the August 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
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