Live Aid at 40 review — Bob Geldof answers his critics with bristly brio
Bush told this story with a chuckle in Live Aid at 40 (BBC2). I suspect it's his regular party ice-breaker. An aide had said he was about to meet Bono to discuss giving more money to Africa. 'You know who Bono is, don't you?' the adviser asked. 'Yeah,' replied the president. 'He married Cher.' Meaning Sonny Bono, who was dead. A Google search reveals the story has been circulating for about ten years. Shame on me for missing it.
You may wonder what more there can possibly be to say about Live Aid, the 1985 concert watched by 1.5 billion people, aka 'the day that rock and roll changed the world' and when Paul McCartney was given a duff microphone.
Not because it wasn't a spectacular achievement. It was. But because so much about it has already been said, debated, raked over. Not least the question of whether a bunch of mostly pale pop stars with bouffant hair and loud jackets raising money for starving Ethiopians was a classic case of 'white saviour'. (Bob Geldof recently called this 'bollocks' in The Times.)
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Well, to use an insensitive metaphor, Live Aid at 40 had plenty of fresh meat to bring to the table. I feared three hours, covering Band Aid, Live Aid and its 2005 successor, Live 8, would be too long but it is fresh, multifaceted and zesty, serving up a nostalgic slice of British politics through the lens of pop with a high calibre of talking heads, not least Birhan Woldu, the little girl we saw dying before our eyes on news footage back then but who survived and, now aged 44, appeared in the film with her father.
Bono said he couldn't bear to look back at footage of himself playing the concert because of his terrible mullet hairdo. Fair enough. I too went the way of the mullet in the 1980s to ghastly effect. Geldof, the movement's leader, greyer and even wilder of hair but still fond of an f-bomb, said he hadn't initially wanted Queen to play because 'I just thought it was overblown; operatic. 'We use the studio as an instrument'? Oh, f*** off.'
He now realised, he said with a smile, that he was wrong. Queen are widely considered to be the concert's highlight. He has said the series doesn't feature enough of the music and I agree.
The interviewees were honest. Here was Dawit Giorgis, then Ethiopia's minister for aid, saying that Geldof, Midge Ure et al hadn't 'done their homework' regarding the lyrics of the hugely successful Band Aid single Do They Know It's Christmas? 'Ethiopians are the oldest Christians in the world, so that offended us …' he said, also quibbling the line 'where nothing ever grows, no rain nor rivers flow'. Ethiopia has many rivers, he said. One is the Blue Nile.
We can all cringe at the 'clanging chimes of doom' etc but what astounding feats Geldof, the 'mad general' of the operation, and his team pulled off. The word 'passion' is overused but how laudable Geldof's determination was to tackle famine rather than scoff free canapés and champagne at showbiz vanity parties.
Yes, it was unfortunate that more black artists didn't feature. Kolton Lee, editor of The Voice, said that despite the obvious good intentions it felt 'white' and 'paternalistic', and named some black bands that should have featured.
Interesting to see Geldof's businesslike retort to such a charge. Basically: yes, but at that time they weren't selling records and the gig needed bands that were. He wished there had been a Stormzy figure then but there wasn't. It was 'an entirely practical, logical endeavour' to draw the world's attention. The object was to 'stop people dying'.
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The movement's achievements have been huge — billions of dollars sent to Africa to fight HIV and Aids; $40 billion of third-world debt cancelled. The series reflects skilfully the sheer, complex effort this took.
It evoked a simpler, more analogue time, a 'can-do' optimistic age with less cynicism and no trolls on social media, when you could scramble together a Wembley concert at short notice in the pre-download era, when people still bought vinyl singles and everyone, young and old alike, recognised the singers. And it brought back to us those shining lights who are now sadly dead such as Paula Yates, George Michael, Freddie Mercury and David Bowie.
But what it mostly showed is, despite repeated charges of the 'do-gooder white saviour', what an intelligent, compassionate, bristly and utterly driven man Geldof is. At the very end, Tony Blair says that what he, Bono and others have done has resulted in probably millions of people living who otherwise would have died, 'and I don't think there's any type of remote ideological argument that should stand in the way of that'. How many people can claim a legacy like that?★★★★☆
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