The Music Quiz: How much were the tickets for Live Aid at Wembley Stadium?
Abbey Road Studios
Britannia Row Studios
Olympic Studios
Sarm West Studios
Which British Army band opened Live Aid?
Grenadier Guards
Irish Guards
Scots Guards
Coldstream Guards
The Boomtown Rats' song, I Don't Like Mondays, is about the elementary school shooting spree of US teenager Brenda Spencer. In which California city did the incident take place?
San Francisco
Santa Barbara
San Jose
San Diego
Which Beatles song did Elvis Costello introduce as an 'old northern English folk song'?
Yesterday
All You Need Is Love
Let It Be
Here Comes the Sun
How many minutes did Queen perform for at Live Aid?
20
21
22
23
Which music act played the longest set on the day?
David Bowie
The Who
Elton John
Paul McCartney
Which UK pop act at Live Aid did Bob Geldof think of as 'passé'?
Status Quo
Nick Kershaw
Howard Jones
Adam Ant
How much were the tickets for Live Aid at Wembley Stadium?
£5
£10
£15
£20
Which UK music act were so embarrassed by their performance at Live Aid Philadelphia that they disowned it?
Black Sabbath
The Thompson Twins
Duran Duran
Led Zeppelin
Which US music act officially opened Live Aid Philadelphia?
The Beach Boys
Madonna
Joan Baez
Tom Petty
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Irish Times
3 hours ago
- Irish Times
‘Going to concerts is kind of my thing, my hobby': Why Gen Z are paying big for live music
For Kate Henshaw, from Malahide, Dublin, concerts are a guilty pleasure. The 24-year-old estimates that she spends well over €1,000 a year on tickets but believes that they are 'the best night out you can have as a young person in Ireland'. Henshaw is one of Gen Z's Ticketmaster warriors, who count ticket purchases as their 'biggest expense' but worth every cent. The significant spend is not unusual. Irish adults spent an average of €757 on music events in 2024, according to research published last week by the Irish Music Rights Organisation (Imro). READ MORE This figure includes both festivals and individual concerts, accounting not only for the price of tickets but also additional costs incurred such as transport and accommodation. Those in the 25-34 year old age bracket spent the most on live events in total last year, averaging at €849 per person, while those aged 45-54 and 18-24 weren't far behind, at €823 and €811 respectively. There was a notable dip in spending here for 35-44 year olds – €615 on average – which Imro chief executive Victor Finn suggests may be due to social factors such as an increase in 'care responsibilities'.'That tends to be a high expenditure period in people's lives in general,' Mr Finn said. Kate Henshaw (24) at Taylor Swift's Eras tour in 2024 According to her calculations, Henshaw attended 16 gigs last year and a whopping 19 live music events in 2023. She recalls a 30-day concert marathon during summer 2023, which saw her going to nine events. 'I was exhausted.' 'I think they're my biggest expense. I justify it because I buy them so far in advance. Then it feels like they're free,' she said. She estimates she spent a total of almost €1,500 on tickets alone in 2024, 'if I was being truthful with myself'. But she believes 'Irish crowds are unmatched. I think concerts are the best night out you can have as a young person in Ireland.' Being from Dublin certainly comes with its advantages as a music fan, with several large-scale gigs on Henshaw's doorstep. She avoided the crowds attempting to flee Malahide and return to the city centre after Charli XCX's recent performance. 'Public transport could link in better with some of the major events,' Imro chief executive Victor Finn commented. 'They're well flagged in advance so there could be better collaboration here. If there was better transportation I think it could cut down on other costs.' Henshaw has observed a surge in ticket prices since a return to regular scheduling post-pandemic. 'I used to go to quite a lot before Covid and it was so much cheaper.' [ Oasis sell out Croke Park after fans wait hours to buy tickets costing over €400 Opens in new window ] Demand is certainly high, a factor which, coupled with inflation, has driven ticket prices to new levels. 'There's a sort of social shift in experiencing live events and I think that's feeding into live music events as well,' said Finn, noting this demand. He has seen a 'very positive bounceback with live ticket sales' since Covid. 'Was it something to do with people wanting to get out and socialise more after the pandemic? There certainly seemed to be a need for people to get out and enjoy themselves and music has benefited from that.' While admittedly a big spender on music events, Henshaw said VIP tickets are where she draws the line, calling them 'a scam'. 'I have never paid VIP for a gig and I never will. Back in the day VIP used to mean soundchecks and meeting the artists, now it's a gift bag.' [ My three nights at Taylor Swift cost me €47 an hour. Cheaper than therapy Opens in new window ] She points to Taylor Swift's Eras tour VIP package as a recent example. Merchandise bundles included items like postcards, stickers, souvenir tickets and a commemorative tote bag, which doubled if not tripled ticket prices for fans. Henshaw said she paid approximately €200 for her front-standing Eras tour ticket, while a friend who opted for VIP paid almost €700 for an equally good view of the pop star. There are 'only a few' artists, she would pay to see 'over and over again', with Irish singers Hozier and CMAT among the favourites. Johnny Wang (23) a student from Ballsbridge, Dublin is 'not surprised in the slightest' that Irish adults are spending big when it comes to live music. Johnny Wang (23) at Lido Festival in London, June 2025. 'It's such a rip-off in Ireland at the moment. All the big acts people go to, they are going to get rinsed,' said Wang, who spent 'at least' €700 on concert tickets in the last year. 'Big venues are still charging people exorbitant amounts so I'm not surprised in the slightest.' Having attended about 10 gigs in the last 12 months, he says his most expensive purchase was for Lido Festival in London which saw alternative acts such Arca, Jamie xx and Panda Bear take to the stage in Victoria Park in June. General admission started at £75 (€87). Wang enjoys going to smaller gigs, sometimes to support friends such as Child of Prague, who recently performed in the Workman's Club. Tickets for the indie rock band's gig in May cost €12.50. 'I'd love to work in music so I enjoy seeing the technical aspect of performances,' he added. Wang played bass in another young band called Reco, who won a performance slot by popular vote at Trinity College's annual ball in 2023. Aoibhinn Clancy (22), from Dublin, said that gigs most likely 'take up the bulk' of her expenditure as a student who works part-time. Aoibhinn Clancy (22) before seeing Lana del Rey in concert this summer. She estimates that the 14 concert and festival tickets purchased in the last year cost her approximately €1,100, 'which is a lot, but I have never regretted spending money on a concert'. 'I'm someone who really enjoys spending money on an experience and it's for that reason I like the investment and having something to look forward to,' Clancy said. 'I've seen some really cool people in the last year, like, I went to see Elvis Costello with my mam.' Other highlights included Lana Del Rey at both the Aviva in Dublin and Wembley Stadium in London, Charli XCX in Birmingham and at Malahide Castle, and Primavera music festival in Barcelona. 'I think that concerts in Ireland can be quite expensive,' she says. The most Clancy paid for a single concert ticket last year was €150, for Lana Del Rey. 'I would say it was worth it.' With above-average annual spend on live music events, Clancy recognises herself as an outlier. 'I am definitely in the upper echelons of concertgoers among my age group ... Going to concerts is kind of my thing, my hobby.'
Irish Times
3 hours ago
- Irish Times
A good spread of food memoirs: from the sanitised to the ‘slutty'
Picky Author : Jimi Famurewa ISBN-13 : 978-1399739542 Publisher : Hodder & Stoughton Guideline Price : £20 The Jackfruit Chronicles Author : Shahnaz Ahsan ISBN-13 : 978-0008683795 Publisher : Harper North Guideline Price : £16.99 Moveable Feasts: Paris in Twenty Meals Author : Chris Newens ISBN-13 : 978-1805224204 Publisher : Profile Books Guideline Price : £18.99 Tart: Misadventures of an Anonymous Chef Author : Slutty Cheff ISBN-13 : 978-1526682697 Publisher : Bloomsbury Guideline Price : £16.99 Care and Feeding Author : Laurie Woolever ISBN-13 : 978-0063327603 Publisher : Ecco Guideline Price : £22 Strong Roots: A Ukrainian Family Story of War, Exile and Hope Author : Olia Hercules ISBN-13 : 978-1526662927 Publisher : Bloomsbury Circus Guideline Price : £20 Early on in Picky, his ode to growing up second-generation British Nigerian and 1990s junk food, restaurant critic Jimi Famurewa unmasks the illusion that is food memoir. 'Working as a food writer,' he writes, 'can have a warping effect on childhood memories ... The past becomes an editable document.' It's provocative but risks spoiling the show. There's masterful writing, as Famurewa rhapsodises about a Twix 'scraped down to a soggy, denuded girder of a shortbread', the 'wincing remnants' of Brannigans crisps. It's refreshing to read an account of a reasonably happy existence – especially when it's of a single-parent son. Picky is also a significant meditation about the 'cultural performance of immigrant life', crucial to understanding the machinations of code-switching that is instinctive to multinational children. He is wonderful at expressing the heightened sensations of childhood, such as the giddiness of travelling to the US as an unaccompanied minor, 'a continent-hopping Paddington Bear of the sky'. His paean to McDonald's enlightened this second-generation immigrant reader why the 'slender, elegant uniformity of McDonald's fries in a pillar-box-red sleeve' held not only me, but my parents, in its sway. Famurewa, whose previous book was the eloquent Settlers, about the British black African experience – is a thoughtful, thorough writer. However, in a memoir the author must be the star, and even though he studied drama at Royal Holloway, Famurewa is reluctant. Out of respect, he never really delves into the people he loves, particularly his mother. Perhaps it's his British reserve coupled with the modesty of a 'Nice Nigerian Boy' but in Famurewa's conscientious refusal to manipulate his story, he and his characters never really take flight. READ MORE Shahnaz Ahsan. Photograph: Tracey Aiston If Famurewa is diffident about showcasing his immigrant family, Shahnaz Ahsan has no qualms about bragging about hers. Her cookbook memoir, The Jackfruit Chronicles, starts with her grandfather Habib, who arrives in Manchester from what is now Bangladesh in 1953 and starts a family that thrives despite Enoch Powell, Thatcher-era racism and post-9/11 anti-Muslim sentiment. British-Bangladeshis such as Habib created what we know as the 'Indian curry house', where one pot of house gravy is tailored into different dishes with proteins, vegetables and spices. Jackfruit's 'Benglish' recipes offer an intriguing glimpse of early immigrant adaptation: cheese and Patak pickle pinwheels, crumpets swapped for the flatbread chitoi pitha. Unfortunately, Ahsan's style is prone to cliched platitudes that emphasise the wonderfulness of a clan for whom 'food is the love language which we share'. 'Thank you,' she writes, 'to Aneesa and all the other aunties who pass on their wisdom both in and out of the kitchen.' Ahsan grew up on Enid Blyton, and Winona Ryder's Little Women, and it shows in her relentlessly heartwarming prose. Her characters lack nuance; her jokes fall flat. There's a touch of preachiness to Ahsan, who as a teenager would hide 'lads' mags' such as Zoo (where Jimi Famuwera once worked) 'in the belief that if we could, somehow, limit the availability of this media, women would actually be regarded with a modicum of respect one day'. In some families there is a refrain: Someone should write about how marvellous we are. The Jackfruit Chronicles is exactly the kind of saga that your grandma would bless. Food writer Olia Hercules , from London, must stand by as the landscape and people of her idyllic Ukrainian childhood are demolished. Her parents' home, built 'to retire in, to grow weathered in, alongside the creased riverbank that stretches below' is occupied by the Russian military. However, as she realises in Strong Roots, the war opens up another past, one whose wounds had been covered over during more halcyon days. 'When I was growing up, I never questioned why we talked about certain things in half-whispers,' she writes. 'My grandparents' memories were 'mined' and had to be trodden on lightly for a long time.' The irony is that the tales that Hercules gathers – horrifying, hilarious – might have been discarded were it not for the current terror. She's not alone; hordes of Ukrainians, since the war began, have been scrambling to preserve their heritage. However, such stories come with a cost, as Hercules realises when she prods her grandmother Vera for what is ancient and unendurable. '(F)rom out of her stiff body came a stiff voice ... I understood that her stiffness was a barrier, a barrier against the past, perhaps to shield her from things that she might have never discussed before.' There are some overripe moments. (For example: 'A list of occasions when I see my ancestors' smiles' that includes 'my children's eyes'.) However, Hercules knows how to mix lushness with crisp, unyielding fact; what's more, instead of explaining her characters, she describes them. Her grandmother Vera excitedly gets ready for a 'foto sessiya' with a crinoline blouse and 'huge lacquered hair'. 'I need you to be natural, grandma!' Hercules shrieks, and makes her change. The people in Hercules's book have been maturing inside her for a lifetime, gathering richness. They can be stubborn, quick to anger and vain; she conveys the way they talk over each other, and how their punchlines falter. Hercules's people may be strong, but she has also rendered them so vividly so that they will endure. They are blood, breath and bone – shut your eyes and they resound with exuberant cacophony. Slutty Cheff Slutty Cheff , the anonymous author of Tart, is a few years shy of 30. As her name suggests, she's a horny workaholic in an esteemed London restaurant, and bangs many a dish, on and off the line. She's white, socially privileged and loves her parents; she's at the sweet spot in life when things are on the cusp. In short, you'd hate her if she weren't so winningly self-deprecating. Tart is not strict memoir. As Slutty told British Vogue, 'Stories are based on my stories, and stories of my chef friends,' which makes it all the more entertaining, an updated 18th-century picaresque where the rogue hero is a woman 'who will feed your desire, like a Tesco meal deal'. Plus, although Tart has plenty of fat-and-sugar stoked steam, its author knows that the cardinal rule for both culinary and erotic writing is to stay crisp and dry. She observes, 'The other reason why I don't want people to know about my lover is far more important than gender politics: the man I'm sleeping with has a topknot.' There are darker aspects of Tart, like panic attacks and a sleazy co-worker, and Slutty confesses, 'Whenever I lose the sense of who I am or what I do, or I spin into disassociation or fall into a sense of depression I feel scared and worry that I'll never be happy again. There are two things in my life that are a constant reminder that pleasure exists: food and sex.' Anthony Bourdain. Photograph: Alex Welsh/The New York Times The kitchen, touted by many as an artistic vocation, can also be a form of self-medication, its mania an addictive panacea for people too terrified to stop. Laurie Woolever is 22 when Care and Feeding begins. She has a lot in common with Slutty, except instead of present-day London, she lives in 1996 New York. A blond Ivy League graduate who can cook and write, she will become assistant to the two chefs synonymous with that era's culinary machismo – the not-yet #MeToo'ed, evangelist of Italian cuisine Mario Batali, and Kitchen Confidential author Anthony Bourdain. Much as in Tart, what unfolds is a heady rush of alcohol, food, dirty sex and high-calibre work, proving that whoever said drink and drugs were counterproductive was wrong. Except. Let's just say that we hope Slutty doesn't suffer like Woolever in 20 years. This raw, scalding book is about what happens when one's career is ascendant while one's personal life unravels. Some events are spectacularly badly timed; shortly after Woolever gets sober, her husband leaves her and Bourdain kills himself. Woolever is briskly inventive, like when she describes a lamb tongue's salad as 'intriguing because of the truffles and provocative because of the tongue'. She's deadpan about Ferran Adria, pink limousines and a writer who 'had a revolting Humbert Humbert-ish way with wine descriptors ... bottles were 'sexy babies' and 'flirtatious teens'. Still, an attraction of the book is the two outsized men with whom she was affiliated, and on this Woolever delivers, sometimes reconfiguring their signature swaggers in unexpected ways. About Batali (who concluded a written apology about his misconduct with a recipe for cinnamon rolls) she's gentle – he's an erudite, generous monster who's a surprisingly astute observer of her spiralling behaviour. Regarding Bourdain, whose kindness she paints in many lights, Woolever gives him a remarkable send-off. 'He had,' she states, 'made the colossally stupid, but somehow wholly plausible decision to die of a broken heart.' If only she wasn't so excruciatingly hard on herself. Woolever details every embarrassing incident in her life, and reprints her journal extracts and emails with every blemish – they're broken and sloppy, the sort of thing a vainer writer would want permanently erased. However, much of Care and Feeding makes you crave reckless behaviour, such as that 'woozy punch-in-the-face feeling' of a gin-and-tonic at a Sri Lanka bar. You can't forget the brilliant accomplishments – in kitchens and elsewhere – that were fuelled by the admittedly toxic adrenaline of that time. Compare Woolever and Slutty to the more virtuous recollections of Famurewa, Ahsan, and Hercules; consider that there won't be a Batali autobiography any time soon, and it seems that, at least for now, in the world of food memoir, it will still be the white girls who have the most fun. Chris Newens. Photograph: Sabine Dundure In Moveable Feasts , Chris Newens seeks, in each of Paris's arrondissements, a dish that encapsulates something of the city's soul. Methodical and charming, Newens starts his research the old-fashioned way, by talking to strangers, waylaying Sri Lankan plongeurs on a sleeper train and sniffy haute bourgeoises after church. In the world, Paris is the city most famously defined by its outsiders. As his title suggests, Newens's teenage hero was Ernest Hemingway, and he is caught between the schoolboy fancies that lured him there, and the mercurial, multinational Paris that keeps him. His city hovers between unconventional and stereotype, with diaspora dishes that are also predictably Parisian (bahn-mi in the 13th), croissants and Congolese-style malangwa fish. As a white English man with fluent French, Newens can navigate the homeless in the Bois des Vincennes and a 1993 Saint-Émilion with equanimity. More than Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, Newens recalls another culinary Paris chestnut, George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London. Like Orwell, Newens is at his best when he is observing individuals where they work, like the employees at the smoothly functioning colossus of decent-priced dining, Bouillon République. Many memoirs touch on home, that mysterious place where you belong. A Paris expat like Newens, however, decides to settle in a place where he will forever be foreign. It's not a choice all Paris immigrants make. For the Sri Lankan waiter at La Fontaine de Mars or the Peruvian-American student at the Cordon Bleu, there's a yearning for geographical and emotional permanence, to become an indelible part of the city's history. It is our sincere, if somewhat naive, hope that they will.
Irish Times
4 hours ago
- Irish Times
The Crying of the Wind: Ireland by Ithell Colquhoun – An exquisitely strange British-Celtic artist's travels in Ireland
The Crying of the Wind: Ireland Author : Ithell Colquhoun ISBN-13 : 978-1805331568 Publisher : Pushkin Press Classics Guideline Price : £12.99 Exquisitely strange, British Celtic surrealist artist, literary writer and occultist Ithell Colquhoun's memoir of her travels in Ireland in the first half of the 1950s is now republished as a Pushkin Press Classic. Colquhoun's trove of art, writing and the fruit of a lifetime's passionate research into a vast range of esoteric subjects were nearly lost after she died in Cornwall in 1988, aged 81. Fortunately her work was salvaged by a small group of devotees. The Crying of the Wind, The Living Stones: Cornwall, and the alchemical novel, The Goose of Hermogenes, have been republished by Pushkin to coincide with the UK Tate Gallery's 2025 retrospective of Colquhoun's visual work, which runs until October. Colquhoun's trained eye scans the Irish landscape. She visits prehistoric stone monuments, about whose ritualistic purposes – reflected in the still-living folk traditions of rural people she meets – she speculates evocatively. Colquhoun's erudition comes alive through her extrasensory perception. She was a druid, witch and magician. As with the work of WB Yeats, who she met and admired greatly, Colquhoun's writing is lit from within by an incandescent glow that derives, I feel, from her deep sensing of the numinous everywhere. READ MORE The linguistic beauty Colquhoun generates with her visionary artist's eye, and her ability to describe what are generally unseen worlds, can carry the reader, for example, from the crumbling grandeur of Protestant Ascendancy culture to panoramic vistas of giant spirit beings who live alongside humans in the Irish landscape. Colquhoun describes all-night partying with Dublin's bohemians; hanging out in the studio of painter Jack B Yeats; and being brought to meditate inside Newgrange by the now almost forgotten Irish occult artist, Art O'Murnaghan, at a time when you could let yourself into the ancient mound by borrowing the caretaker's key. The joie-de-vivre of Colquhoun's Cornwall travels is noticeably absent here. Perhaps it was the author's recent divorce, alongside the menace of Catholic theocratic mind control – then reaching fever-pitch – that made the bleak Irish summers and ever-present poverty harder to bear. Nevertheless, the still-existing pagan spirituality of Ireland – the beauty of our skies, our precious extant Gaelic culture and its animistic worldview – seen through the eyes of a genius mystic polymath over 70 years ago, makes this book an enchanting read.
