Looking back on it now, the mid 1980s really do feel like innocent times.
In the UK, there were just four terrestrial TV channels - BBC1 , BBC2, ITV and Channel 4.
Ireland had two - RTE1 and RTE2.
Satellite television was still in its infancy, with Rupert Murdoch's Sky Television about to woo viewers with the promise of live football and a dedicated film channel.
There were significantly less radio stations than there are now.
There was no Spotify, YouTube, no Internet, Amazon, no social media, no tablets or smartphones
People learned about the latest music on 'Top of the Pops' or, in Ireland, 'MT USA' with Vincent Hanley.
If you were discerning, there was always 'The Old Grey Whistle Test,' 'The Tube,' BBC Radio One's John Peel or RTE's Dave Fanning if you weren't already buying the NME, Melody Maker or Rolling Stone.
MTV was also in its infancy.
Newspapers like The Sun and The Daily Mirror had clout.
That was the world of Band Aid and Live Aid.
Margaret Thatcher was in power in Britain, Ronald Reagan in the US, Garret Fitzgerald in Ireland and the Troubles were raging in Northern Ireland.
Nelson Mandela was still in jail in apartheid South Africa. The Soviet Union and nuclear annihilation was still a concern, with Germany split into two nations.
General Augusto Pinochet ruled with an iron fist in Chile, violating human rights.
PC Yvonne Fletcher was gunned down outside the Libyan Embassy in London, sparking a tense diplomatic row that resulted in the ransacking of the British Embassy in Tripoli and the taking of British hostages.
It was a time when few people could imagine a world where we would carry phones around in our pockets.
Nor could they imagine people driving non-petrol cars or robots replacing factory workers on the shop floor.
Glastonbury and the Isle of Wight were just fringe rock festivals, with no coverage of their performances on TV or radio.
CNN had been established in the US but there were no partisan 24 hour news channels like there are now.
On this side of the Atlantic, TV news was consumed watching bulletins at 1pm, 6pm, 7pm, 9pm or 10pm on BBC1, ITV, Channel 4 or RTE1.
Britain reeled in 1984 from a bitterly divisive miners strike, Margaret Thatcher survived the IRA's Brighton Bomb, President Reagan glided towards a second term and John DeLorean beat drugs charges.
Then in October 1984, a harrowing news report suddenly landed on our screens from the BBC's Michael Buerk that rattled viewers.
The BBC's Africa correspondent brought to the attention of the world the horrific sight of children dying in Ethiopia in what he memorably described as "a Biblical famine in the 20th Century".
The rest is history.
Moved by what he had watched in his living room, Irish rock star Bob Geldof was spurred into action.
Gathering his contemporaries, he and Midge Ure created Band Aid's charity single 'Do They Know It's Christmas?'
The song's phenomenal success begat USA for Africa which begat Live Aid and 20 years later, Live 8.
Forty years on, Geldof's campaign to prick the conscience of ordinary citizens in 1984 and world leaders 21 years later at the G8 Summit in Gleneagles is the focus of BBC2's three part documentary 'Live Aid at 40: When Rock N'Roll Took On The World'.
A mix of celebrity anecdote and archive footage, it comes from the production company Brooks Lapping who gave us the compelling documentaries 'The Death of Yugoslavia,' 'Endgame in Ireland,' 'Murdoch' and '9/11: Life Under Attack'.
Typically, it's a fascinating account of how a group of mostly naive white rock stars genuinely tried to bring Africa's problems centre stage.
Directed by Thomas Pollard, it is a warts and all tale of how they tried to do good and inspired young people to change the world for the better.
In an era where there was no X, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube or TikTok to pollute our minds with a daily diet of anger, cynicism and demonisation, it was a more idealistic age.
The notion that pop stars could record a vinyl record that would help feed the starving was noble and plausible.
Gambles could be taken, with no-one fearing derision or accusations that they had a white saviour complex.
Geldof, Midge Ure, Sting, Nile Rodgers, Bono, Brian May, Lionel Ritchie, Patti LaBelle, Tony Blair, President George W Bush, Condoleezza Rice, Richard Curtis, Ethiopian politician Dawit Giorgis and famine survivor Birhan Woldu are among those interviewed for the docuseries as it traces the Band Aid Trust's journey from a half baked idea on the back of Buerk's news report to an ambitious global campaign in 2005 to get the G8 to cancel Africa's debt.
It is to the credit of director Thomas Pollard that the docuseries openly acknowledges Live Aid and Live 8's failings and puts them directly to the protagonists.
Geldof, Bono and others are commendably frank at times - the former admitting his own band, the Boomtown Rats were on the slide when he hit upon the idea of Band Aid, the latter recognising the lack of African artists at the Live 8 concerts as a huge dropping of the ball.
There are delightful anecdotes about Geldof getting Sting involved while bumping into him on the street, the Boomtown Rats lead singer meeting Mother Teresa and admiring her sense of showbiz, Bono wooing President George W Bush to support African AIDS sufferers by gifting him an Irish Bible and later the U2 star warning the German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder at the G8 summit he would call him out at a gig in Berlin that week if he stalled a deal cancelling Africa's debt.
We hear about David Bowie's selfless decision to drop a song from his setlist at Live Aid to allow the Canadian broadcaster CBC's harrowing video of starvation in Ethiopia to be aired during the gig to the sound of The Cars' hit song 'Drive'.
That was the moment when it dawned on most people that Live Aid wasn't a celebration of music but was about saving lives.
A sobering piece of television, donations around the world started to go from a trickle to a flood and not during Queen's masterful Live Aid performance, as the movie 'Bohemian Rhapsody' would have you believe.
Ethiopian famine survivor Birhan Woldu beams as she recalls standing onstage holding Madonna's hand as she performed 'Like A Prayer' 20 years later at Live 8 in London's Hyde Park and proudly shows the footage to her father.
Bono recalls Paul McCartney's insistence that he join U2 in a pre-performance huddle in Hyde Park before they cleverly went onstage to begin the day's events with a great version of The Beatles' 'Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band'.
Geldof is genuinely tortured by the "Saint Bob" persona the tabloids gave him post Band Aid and notes the desire of photographers to catch him crying on camera on his first visit to Ethiopia.
While it's fashionable now to slag off him, Bono and other stars who campaigned for Africa, the fact remains that the Band Aid Trust has raised £140 million for Africa and kept millions of people alive.
They didn't have to do it.
They could have easily sat on their backsides and shrugged their shoulders as people died.
But they didn't.
As the world endures immense suffering in Gaza, South Sudan, Yemen and other places around the world, you have to ask where are today's Geldofs and Bonos?
Instead of relying on the two of them or beating them for not intervening in Gaza, where are the next generatiok might damage their brand?
Why act, after all, when you can just sit at home and bore everyone by pontificating on social media why you hate Bono?
Get me a Marty McFly De Lorean, so we can go back to 1984.
('Live Aid at 40: When Rock N'Roll Took On The World' was broadcast on BBC2 between July 6-13, 2025)
Not content with examining the legacy of Band Aid, BBC2 also gave us edited highlights of the 1985 London and Philadelphia concerts.
Watching the trimmed down version of the original broadcast, a couple of things stand out.
Tonally, Wembley Stadium was a much more impressive gig than its sister gig in JFK Stadium.
It felt more focused and was more sensibly curated.
Status Quo's 'Rockin' All Over The World' was a really clever choice of first song for Bob Geldof's live global jukebox.
Spandau Ballet, Nik Kershaw, Phil Collins, Sade and Paul Young were riding high in the charts and brought teenagers into the Live Aid cause with their clean cut, if rather boring sounds.
Meanwhile Joan Baez was an odd choice for an opening act in Philadelphia - a relic of the 1960s with very little commercial pull.
The US bill was a bit of a schizophrenic affair, with The Hooters, Billy Ocean and The Four Tops mixing it early on with Judas Priest, Bryan Adams and The Beachboys.
Yes, there were performances in Philadelphia from Simple Minds, the Pretenders, Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers, Madonna, Led Zeppelin, Duran Duran, Hall and Oates, Bob Dylan and Lionel Richie.
But where were Prince, Michael Jackson, Paul Simon and Billy Joel?
Across the Atlantic, U2 raised the bar with a superb, instinctive performance in Wembley of 'Bad' - something that remains electric to watch even to this day.
Dire Straits and Sting, David Bowie, Elton John and George Michael delivered knockout performances and, yes, Queen did steal the show by being really shrewd about the way they used their time slot.
A very classy Elvis Costello showed how one man with an electric guitar and a Beatles classic dressed up as "an old English folk song" could captivate a stadium audience.
Meanwhile Bob Dylan trotted out a typically eccentric set in Philadelphia, while Mick Jagger and Tina Turner tried to spice things up.
Watching the BBC broadcast again triggered memories of Access cards, National Girobank donations and people jetting across the Atlantic on Concorde which enabled Phil Collins to rather disappointingly perform the same songs at both Live Aid concerts.
BBC Radio One DJs brought a lot of Smashy and Nicey-ness to the proceedings.
But there was also something really amusing about watching the indie DJ Andy Kershaw's soul gradually dying onscreen while he tried to feign enthusiasm when interviewing backstage Sting, Howard Jones and Phil Collins.
With the BBC DJs banging on about the live acts, it took an increasingly frustrated Bob Geldof (much to the amusement of Billy Connolly) swearing on live TV followed by CBC's powerful video to the tune of 'Drive' to sober the world up and start donating.
'Live Aid at 40: The Concert' was a nostalgic peek back at innocent times when we rarely saw live gigs on TV and we thought pop stars could help inspire a better world.
But that was then. This is now.
So get back to your daily diet of performative outrage on Fox News, MSNBC and their many imitators on radio, TV and social media platforms.
Return to your reality show stars, podcasters and social media influencers who are only interested in hoovering up your money, - not using their wealth to help those who really are less fortunate.
Scroll your social media feed and rant at the world instead of doing anything.
Or maybe, just maybe find a new way to engage generations in solving world problems and standing up to the bigotry, callousness and selfishness that are dominating the airwaves and are making the world a much harsher place.
('Live Aid at 40: The Concert' was broadcast on July 12, 2025)
Comments
Post a Comment