The singer and activist Bob Geldof at home in London. The Live Aid shows were seen by about 1.5 billion people in more than 150 countries and would go on to raise more than US$140 million. Photo / Chris Hoare, The New York Times
The rock star-turned-activist reflects on the 1985 benefit concert and why it could not happen now.
On October 23, 1984, Bob Geldof, the lead singer of the Irish rock band the Boomtown Rats, sat down at home in London to watch the evening news. It changed his life – and saved the lives of millions more.
The BBC ran a report on what it called a “biblical famine” in Ethiopia caused by drought and exacerbated by civil war. Searing images of emaciated and naked children were beamed for the first time into homes across Britain, and then around the world.
Geldof was incensed and horrified. How could this be happening in the 20th century? And what could he – an angry pop star – do about it?
July 13 marked 40 years since Live Aid, two epic concerts held in London and Philadelphia that he helped organise in response to that question. They were arguably the most successful charity events in history, and have a claim to be among the best gigs ever, too.
Geldof persuaded many of the world’s top artists at the time to play for free, including Queen, David Bowie, Madonna, the Who, Elton John, Tina Turner and Paul McCartney. The shows were seen by about 1.5 billion people in more than 150 countries and would go on to raise more than US$140 million ($235m).
The concerts followed the success of the Band Aid charity single, Do They Know It’s Christmas?, which Geldof had co-written with singer Midge Ure and released the previous year. The song featured a who’s who of British music, and raised £8m ($18m). It also inspired Harry Belafonte to organise an American equivalent, We Are the World, which remains one of the bestselling singles in history.
Live Aid transformed Geldof into one of the world’s best-known and most successful activists. The Band Aid Charitable Trust, a foundation he co-created, is still funding international development projects to alleviate poverty and hunger in Africa. These include supporting maternal health care facilities in Ethiopia and a programme to provide meals for children.
To mark the Live Aid anniversary, the BBC and CNN co-produced a documentary series, Live Aid: When Rock ’n’ Roll Took On the World. It also covers Band Aid and Live 8, concerts that Geldof organised in 2005 that helped pressure the world’s richest countries to cut the debt owed by the poorest countries and increase aid spending.
Geldof, 73, is currently on tour for another anniversary – celebrating 50 years since the founding of the Boomtown Rats – and spoke in a video interview from Novi Sad, Serbia, where the band performed last week. This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Q: Tell me about that day in 1984 when you saw the BBC report.
“I was anxious at the time. I don’t think my band had made a great record, and we weren’t getting in the charts. A measure of how well we were not doing was I was home at 6 o’clock: Pop singers should not be doing 9 to 5.
“But everyone in Britain came home and watched the 6 o’clock news. The BBC gave this story about famine in Africa about eight minutes – the reporter went to the epicentre of the famine in Korem, Ethiopia, and sent this devastating piece of journalism. The objective truth and the subjective rage of what he was telling us about was evident, and certainly struck me.
“We were riveted by the prurience and the horror of it. This other world was suddenly thrown at us. I very much remember those images, and if you force me to articulate them again, I start crying again. Those images are the things that my mind will not allow me to obliterate.”
Q: Yet you revert to those images when you want people to understand the horror of what motivated you in the first place.
A: I suppose it’s been the animus through the years. I can lobby and write policy, but when push comes to shove, it’s only the end object that animates me to act.
It can come to a head in a personal way. In Montreal last November, I was staying at a posh hotel. My wife ordered breakfast. The guy arrived and asked if he could say hello to her husband. He came into the room in an ill-fitting suit, pushing the trolley. He was a small guy and obviously Ethiopian.
He said, “Can I shake your hand?” He then stood bolt upright – he had prepared this – and made a speech at me. He didn’t know who his parents were, he had been in Korem, and said he was raised on Band Aid food in a Band Aid orphanage, and he got to Paris to study catering and he was now here.
I asked if he had a family and he said yeah, he had met an Ethiopian girl and he showed me a picture of her and his two cute kids, 8 and 9.
Then he suddenly rushed at me and hugged me, and laid his head on my chest and said, “Thank you for my sons, thank you for my life.”
Obviously, Live Aid and Band Aid were the work of thousands of people. But you know, it worked.
Q: But there is a difference between being enraged and actually doing something.
A: What I’ve learned is that it is no use walking around singing, We Shall Overcome. Because you won’t. Singing the song isn’t enough. Protest songs are only ever protest songs. Music can be a call to arms, but music itself changes nothing. It won’t go further unless you are determined to act upon it.
The bands at Live Aid were the Pied Pipers, and the audience gathered around the electronic hearth of television and radio. The symbolism of it all carried through to 20 years of lobbying to change policy.
Q: You saw music as a platform to do things. Could Live Aid happen today?
A: I don’t think it’s possible now. Society has changed. The web is an isolating technology. It knows what you are, it drives you, it gives you what it thinks you want, and as you get jaded it gives you more extreme versions of that.
Now, music is free and you get the news that you want to see. The web is an echo chamber of your own prejudices, so you only hear the music that it thinks you like. It’s a silo of the self. So I don’t think music can survive being the spine of the culture as it was.
Q: Bohemian Rhapsody, the 2018 film about singer Freddie Mercury, suggests that Queen’s Live Aid performance was the moment when the donations started flowing in.
A: The movie isn’t right. Queen were completely, utterly brilliant. But the telephone lines collapsed after David Bowie performed.
I was given the outtakes of a report that the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation couldn’t show, because it was just so appalling, the visual images. The editor had cut the film in Addis Ababa to the tune of Drive, the Cars song, and it’s worse than the BBC report.
Harvey Goldsmith, the concert promoter, and I had gone to see David about what songs he would sing. But before we started talking about the songs, I said, “Look at this thing,” and I put it on.
David was crying and said he would cut a song from his set to show the CBC report instead. It’s an extraordinary moment during the concert, because at the end of Heroes, which the crowd were all singing, he quietly introduces the clip and asks people to send their money in. It was like a slap in the face.
Bowie brought the house down. That was the key moment.
Q: How do you respond to criticism that you and Live Aid are examples of a “white saviour” complex? You have said it simply isn’t relevant when you are dealing with an emergency or disaster.
A: There is nothing to argue. It’s nonsense, like any dogma. It’s like Catholicism that says you are born with original sin. Or Freudianism. It’s theory and notional. It’s not even worth entertaining. It doesn’t exist.
Q: You have always been pragmatic with your activism, and you’ve dealt with politicians of all stripes. How do you feel about President Donald Trump and Elon Musk, and their decision to gut USAID, which worked in many of the areas and causes that you have fought for?
“We’re in a radically different world now. It’s the argument between nationalism and internationalism.
“What is profoundly shocking is the cackling glee with which the Trump-Vance-Musk triumvirate went about declaring war on the weakest and most vulnerable people of our planet. America was always the most generous by far of all the countries.
“Why would great America do that, while the richest man on the planet cackles that we’re going to feed USAID into the wood chipper? It is grotesque, it is a disgrace to the country.”
Musk said that the great weakness of Western civilisation is empathy. You fool. Empathy is the glue of humanity. It is the basis of civilisation.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Ravi Mattu
Photographs by: Chris Hoare
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