Live Aid: When the world's rock stars came together just for one day

The Herald Scotland

a day ago

As Live Aid promoter Harvey Goldsmith told Mojo magazine recently: 'Queen performed a short set, but it was the set of a lifetime, and it transformed them as a band. If you talk about Live Aid, most people go 'yeah, Queen'.' Francis Rossi of Status Quo, the band that opened proceedings at Wembley on July 13, 1985, later said that, in his view, Queen were the best band on the day.
For many musicians – Queen's drummer Roger Taylor among them – the reaction of the 72,000-strong crowd remains an imperishable memory.
'During Radio Ga Ga,' he says in the new edition of Radio Times, 'it did seem that the whole stadium was in unison. But then I looked up during We Are The Champions, and the crowd looked like a whole field of wheat swaying.'
U2's set was equally memorable, especially when, during the song Bad, Bono panicked his bandmates by disappearing from their sight in order to get closer to the audience. Confusion then reigned among security staff as he picked out three young women from the crowd.
As Bono vanished over the edge of the stage, and showed no sign of reappearing, drummer Larry Mullen thought to himself 'how long can we do this for?'.
Mullen admitted to Rolling Stone magazine in 2014: 'It was kind of excruciating. We didn't know whether we should stop, we didn't know where he was, we didn't know if he had fallen.'
U2's guitarist The Edge told the same magazine: 'We lost sight of him completely. He was gone for so long I started to think maybe he had decided to end the set early and was on his way to the dressing room.
'I was totally thrown, and I'm looking at Adam [Clayton] and Larry to see if they know what's going on and they're looking back at me with complete panic across their faces. I'm just glad the cameras didn't show the rest of the band during the whole drama, because we must have looked like the Three Stooges up there.'
Though Bono's inspired, impromptu interaction with the audience meant that U2 had no time to play a third song, Live Aid turned out to be a key chapter in the story of the band.
As he wrote in his memoir Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story, it was 'a gigantic moment in the life of U2. In the life of so many musicians'. He took a more detached view of U2's actual performance, however: 'Influential though it was in the arc of our band, I confess that I find it excruciating to watch. It's a little humbling that during one of the greatest moments of your life, you're having a bad hair day.
'Now, some people would say that I've had a bad hair life, but when I am forced to look at footage of U2 playing Live Aid, there is only one thing that I can see. The mullet. All thoughts of altruism and of righteous anger, all the right reasons that we were there, all these flee my mind, and all I see is the ultimate bad hair day.'
The line-up of artists at Wembley and Philadelphia's JFK Stadium that July day included so many stellar names: Bob Dylan, Sting, Beach Boys, Led Zeppelin, Santana, Dire Straits, David Bowie, Joan Baez, Eric Clapton, Simple Minds, Elton John, Madonna, Paul McCartney, Black Sabbath, Neil Young, Crosby, Stills & Nash, The Who, Brian Ferry, Mick Jagger, Tina Turner and Run DMC. Watching them all over the course of one unforgettable day was a global audience of one and a half billion - the largest ever.
Led Zeppelin, who had broken up in 1980 after the death of drummer John Bonham, reformed as a one-off for Live Aid in Philadelphia. The Who, playing Wembley, had also got back together for the occasion.
Zeppelin's performance, so eagerly awaited by their fans, was marred by any number of setbacks, and the band subsequently refused to allow footage of their songs to be included in the official Live Aid DVD.
Black Sabbath, for their part, had been going through a particularly disruptive period, and their bass guitarist, Geezer Butler, seriously doubted whether the original line-up - himself, Ozzy Osbourne, Tony Iommi and Bill Ward - would ever play together again.
Osbourne, the band's singer, had been fired in April 1979, and replacements Ronnie James Dio and Ian Gillan had come and gone. Ozzy's solo career in the States was proving hugely successful, and when all four original Sabbath members got on stage in Philadelphia, it was the first such occasion since 1978.
Sabbath were managed by the notorious Don Arden, Osbourne by his wife Sharon, Arden's daughter. A reunion had been tentatively mooted but in any event, Arden served Ozzy and Sharon with a writ.
'My father-in-law and my wife and I were in a f*****g war,' Osbourne said a few years ago. 'I was f*****g served [a lawsuit] at Live Aid by my father-in-law, for interference or some b******t, and nothing ever materialised from it.' Butler, for his part, has said that Arden was threatening to take legal action if Osbourne appeared under the Sabbath banner.
Sabbath, a late addition to the line-up, had only one rehearsal before playing the first of their songs at Live Aid at 9.55am. "We hadn't slept and some of us were a bit hungover", Butler writes in his memoirs. "We didn't do a Queen and steal the show, but Think we got away with it".
Dire Straits, for their part, didn't have far to walk to get onto the Wembley stage, as they happened to be playing 12 nights at Wembley Arena, across the road. At 6pm, they played a brief Live Aid set – Money for Nothing, and Sultans Of Swing – and casually made their way back to the Arena.
'We literally walked off the stage, out of the stadium and across the car park to the Arena,' the band's Guy Fletcher said in a Classic Rock magazine interview last month. 'I think John [Illsley] was even carrying his bass – and to some funny looks from the car park attendants, I might add.'
Backstage in London, Billy Connolly heard Bob Geldof barking at someone on the phone. The call over, Connolly queried: 'Somebody on your back there?'
Geldof replied: 'Somebody wanted to put Santana on next. They're f*****g c****!'
Connolly, interviewed on a BBC documentary Live Aid: Against All Odds, laughed as he added: 'This guy from the Boomtown Rats telling me that Santana are c****. I don't think so!'
Backstage at Wembley, David Bowie was a bag of nerves; and Eric Clapton, in Philly, was said by a later biographer to have been overcome with nerves, such was the global profile of the acts with whom he was competing.
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Live Aid, which was put together by Geldof and Midge Ure, raised £40 million on the day – the equivalent of over £100m today – which was then used to provide relief of hunger and poverty in Ethiopia and the neighbourhood thereof. Between January 1985 and the release of the official Live Aid DVD in November 2004, the Band Aid Trust spent over £144m on the relief of famine in Africa.
More than 30,000 TV viewers in Scotland got through to the special phone lines on July 13, 1985, donating a reported £300,000. Millions of people were moved to make all sorts of donations. Old couples sent in their wedding rings. One newly-wed couple even sold their new home and donated the proceeds.
Live Aid was a colossal achievement, given that in excess of 70 artists and bands performed over 16 hours of live music across the London and Philadelphia concerts, all of them organised in just a few months.
* Tomorrow night (Sunday, July 6) at 9pm, BBC Two will broadcast the first two parts of a three-part series, Live Aid At 40: When Rock'n'Roll Took on the World. Greatest Hits Radio will replay the entire concert next Sunday, July 13. Just for One Day: The Live Aid Musical is playing at the Shaftesbury Theatre in London.