Live Aid at 40: Memories of a lie revealed by U2's Bono
"Bono just came to the front, he was pointing down and it just felt like he was pointing at one of us but we didn't know," she said."We were escorted round, up the ladder and onto the stage and we were looking out and wow, 72,000 people plus the other 1.9 billion across the world."He hugged me and kissed me and did the same to my sister and there was a big roar from the crowd."Fortunately, her mother was forgiving. Elaine said: "My mum said, 'you promised you wouldn't go', and we thought that was going to be a launch into her saying she could never trust us again but she was quite subdued about it."For a while she became something of a local celebrity."We felt like we were somebodies for a few weeks," Elaine added.It was a remarkable moment in an extraordinary day, one she says she will never forget."People are always very shocked when I tell them," she said."I told my colleagues again recently and when I told them what Bono did a couple of the younger ones asked: 'Who?'"The rest of them were: 'What? That was you? Seriously?'. "It's a bit of a funny one having something that follows you your whole life."
Sue, 61, from Chichester, West Sussex, was another one of a select few to secure a ticket for Live Aid.She said: "I phoned up one of my friends and said to her, 'this concert looks like it might be quite good, do you fancy it?'."I had no idea it was going to be one of the most amazing days of my life."Aged 21 at the time, Sue paid the £25 asking price for what was the hottest ticket in town.She has kept it to this day in a scrapbook of memorabilia.Arriving early, Sue recalls waiting patiently in the hot summer sun for the first act, Status Quo, to hit the stage.She said: "The place erupted, it absolutely erupted...it was incredible. People were bouncing around and it was like arrghhhh!
"I just felt at the time I was part of something big."Queen, whose performance provided some of the most iconic images of the day, was a highlight."I wasn't a particular fan before but Freddie Mercury was incredible," Sue said."He just had everyone in the palm of his hands."I remember having shivers up my spine all day standing up and thinking, 'oh my God, this is incredible'."A picture of an exhausted Sue, sat post-concert among the detritus left on the Wembley turf, captures the moment perfectly. She said: "We thought we'd just let everyone file out so we decided to hang back and let the crowds disperse."I could not believe the mess but I didn't care, I just sat there. Looking back on it now I just feel privileged to have been there."
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The Guardian
40 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Live Aid at 40: When Rock 'n' Roll Took on the World review – the moment Bob Geldof bursts into tears is astounding
On the evening of 23 October 1984, Bob Geldof, singer with the waning pop act the Boomtown Rats, had a social engagement. He had been invited to Mayfair for the launch of a book by Peter York, profiler of London's most privileged bons vivants. But before he left the house, Geldof watched the BBC television news and a report by Michael Buerk about a hellish famine in Ethiopia. Among the many startling, blackly comic archive clips in Live Aid at 40: When Rock 'n' Roll Took on the World is footage of Geldof at that glitzy party, reeling from what he had seen on TV and remarking to a fellow guest that it was 'gross' for them to be enjoying champagne and canapes. That tension between glamour and guilt is at the heart of this three-part retrospective that doesn't ignore the flaws in Geldof's grand plan to use music to feed the world. It's a fascinating portrait of a complex man's imperfect attempt to solve an impossible problem. The grand achievement commemorated in the title of the series is Live Aid, the Geldof-organised mega-concert that took place in London and Philadelphia in the summer of 1985. Episode one, however, is all about the smaller but still massive cultural moment that resulted from Geldof's initial impulse to raise funds for Ethiopia: Do They Know It's Christmas?, a single by the hastily assembled supergroup Band Aid. Having written the song with Midge Ure of Ultravox, Geldof sets about convincing every pop star in Britain to gather at a recording studio in west London on 25 November 1984. For the first time but not the last, something that shouldn't be possible happens very quickly: Geldof has the balls to demand participation from A-list stars, who have all seen the Buerk report and are keen to help. Pop is far too globalised, atomised and digitised now for such a project to take off: at best in the 21st century, the equivalent celebrity charity effort would be a co-authored viral video. Geldof and Ure both make the point that in 1984, pop gods were overwhelmingly from working-class backgrounds, which is also much less true today. But however it came about, everyone turns up, from Spandau Ballet to Duran Duran, Phil Collins to Sting, Status Quo to Bananarama. The footage of them there together is still intoxicating. George Michael sings a line, looks dissatisfied then fixes it, changing 'but say a prayer' to 'BUT say a prayer' on the next take. Bono might be characteristically cringeworthy in his 2025 interview, with his talk of how he and fellow Irishman Geldof 'have the folk memory of famine' and are thus particularly attuned to the cause, but he also knows exactly what he's doing when a lyric sheet and a microphone are in front of him: having been given the song's darkest, most difficult line, he shifts 'Well tonight thank God it's them, instead of you' up an octave to the top of his register, doubling its impact. Once the single has sold a zillion copies, we witness Geldof's transformation from musician to activist. Before long he is meeting Mother Teresa ('She played the old lady shtick but boy, this was showbusiness') and telling world leaders what he thinks of them: the documentary has dug up a clip of him ambushing Margaret Thatcher over her initial insistence on collecting VAT on every record sold. In a situation where one could so easily think of the right thing to say afterwards when it's too late, Geldof rather magnificently knocks down her glib defence of western inaction there and then. He is even more unapologetic with the president of Ethiopia, swearing at him to his face, although sadly there's no footage of that and we have to rely on Geldof's recall. The most stunning moment is another Geldof recollection, from when he was in a desert in Ethiopia and heard Do They Know it's Christmas? on the radio: when he gets to the part about listening to that Bono line while looking directly at the horror it referred to, the present-day Geldof suddenly bursts into tears. 'All the rage, all the shame' is his bluntly eloquent summary of emotions that are still with him, and he is frank here about becoming a white saviour figure who placed himself in the spotlight – but had to do that to keep the media interested. Whether Geldof ultimately struck that balance is explored in the two further episodes, as is the question of how the money was distributed and how much self-interest drove the artists who performed at Live Aid. But there's no debating what an extraordinary phenomenon it was. Live Aid at 40: When Rock 'n' Roll Took on the World aired on BBC Two and is on iPlayer now.
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