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New York Post
13-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Post
Bono reveals his 1 big regret from 1985 Live Aid performance: ‘I can't look back'
The mullet's not for everyone. In the new documentary 'Live Aid: When Rock 'n' Roll Took on the World' documentary, Bono admitted that he regrets his hair choice during U2's performance at Live Aid in 1985. 'I can't look back at this moment with two eyes because it was such a bad hair day,' Bono said. Advertisement 8 Bono performs at Live Aid 1985. Redferns 'Honestly, it's one of the most famous moments of your life and your activism, you've got a mullet,' the Irish rocker added. The charity concert was held simultaneously at Wembley Stadium in London and John F. Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia on July 13, 1985 to raise money for famine relief in Ethiopia. Advertisement 8 Adam Clayton and Bono perform live onstage at Live Aid in July 1985. Redferns 8 Bono performs with other musical acts during the finale of Live Aid. Getty Images 8 Live Aid organizer Bob Geldof onstage with Bono. Redferns Around 1.9 billion people from 150 countries — nearly 40 percent of the world population — tuned into the global event. Advertisement Performers included U2, Freddie Mercury, Elton John, The Who, David Bowie, Paul Young, Sting, Phil Collins, Paul McCartney, the Beach Boys, Madonna, Neil Young, Eric Clapton, Mick Jagger, Tina Turner, Bob Dylan and more. During their set, U2 performed 'Sunday Bloody Sunday' and 'Bad.' Bono also sang in a group rendition of 'Do They Know It's Christmas?' 8 Bono poses during a photocall for the film 'Bono: Stories of Surrender' at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. AFP via Getty Images Bono previously reflected on his 1980s mullet in his 2022 memoir 'Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story: Bono.' Advertisement 'As for the show itself, influential though it was in the arc of our band, I confess that I find it excruciating to watch,' he wrote, per The Guardian. 'It's a little humbling that during one of the greatest moments of your life, you're having a bad hair day.' 8 Bono performing at Live Aid at Wembley Stadium in London. Mirrorpix via Getty Images '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,' the 'With Or Without You' singer said. '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.' 8 Bono performing during Live Aid in July 1985. Redferns In a 2012 interview, Bono said: 'I have an erase button on the mullet hairdo.' 'Many lay claim to the mullet. I'm trying to think of the guy who invented it,' he jokingly added. 8 Bono performs during the U2 concert in Nashville in May 2018. Getty Images Advertisement 'Live Aid: When Rock 'n' Roll Took On the World' is a four-part documentary that 'tells the definitive story of how two rockstars inspired the largest global music events in history.' The doc features interviews with other musical acts including Sting, Patti LaBelle, Phil Collins and Lionel Richie.
RTÉ News
12-07-2025
- Entertainment
- RTÉ News
Live Aid at 40: Geldof, Queen and everything in between
Two venues, two billion viewers and, as pomp rockers Queen, who pretty much stole the whole show, would say - one vision. On the 13 July 1985 what still remains the biggest concert in history took place in Wembley Stadium in London and John F Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia - Live Aid, the global jukebox which just for one day united the world in an effort to help the starving peoples of Ethiopia and Eritrea. This weekend marks the 40th anniversary of the event and it really was a day when the world rocked out and united in a common goal. The eighties was a cynical decade of rampant financial deregulation, an era when "greed is good" trumped sixties idealism and seventies socialism. Today, we are even more jaded and pessimistic and looking back at this four decade remove, it is hard not to wonder at the bloody-minded naivety of Live Aid all those years ago. But somehow, despite the enormous technological and logistical challenges, it worked. More than 75 acts played London and Philly on the day, billions watched at home, egos were kept in check and the short sets guaranteed crowd-pleasing greatest hits packages from some of the biggest acts in the world. Even they felt like they were part of something bigger. In 2024 terms, $370 million was raised, with Ireland donating £7 million, more per capita than any other country in the world. And, of course, the whole thing was a very Irish affair. Dun Laoghaire boy Bob Geldof made it happen and it was also the day that U2 were propelled onto a higher plane with their spinetingling afternoon performance. They played Sunday Bloody Sunday and a very extended Bad that wandered off into snatches of Satellite of Love, Ruby Tuesday, Sympathy for the Devil and Walk on the Wild Side. And it wasn't just the song that wandered off and took a walk on the wild side: Bono, much to the chagrin of his bandmates, took off on another one of his then frequent peregrinations and climbed off stage and plucked a girl from the crowd for a slow set in a moment that seemed to crystallise the Live Aid dream. Bono's fellow Dubliner Geldof also provided another striking and frankly chilling moment during the early afternoon set from his band The Boomtown Rats. By 1985, the one time hit makers were pretty much a spent force but a jolt of electricity shot through Wembley when Geldof stood alone on stage and delivered the key line from I Don't Like Mondays - "and the message today is how to die". But it was Queen's 21-minute set that stole the whole day and is now recognised as one of the greatest live rock performances of all time. With front man Freddie Mercury commanding the whole of Wembley, the band played six songs, including Bohemian Rhapsody, Radio Ga Ga, We Will Rock You, and We Are the Champions, and quite simply mesmerised both the audience in the stadium and at home. It is generally agreed that the show in John F Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love, just wasn't as good, with criticism and indeed anger focussing on Bob Dylan's utterly weird (imagine!) late evening performance. Dylan, who was already having a strange eighties, invited Rolling Stones Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood to join him for acoustic takes on Blowing in The Wind, The Ballad of Hollis Brown and When the Ship Comes in. However, it was a clumsy comment he made from the stage that people remember the most. In halting tones, he said, "I hope that some of the money that's raised for the people in Africa, maybe they can just take a little bit of it, maybe one or two million, maybe, and use it, say, to pay the mortgages on some of the farms that the farmers here owe to the banks." He had a very good point but his timing was all wrong and back in London, the other Bob was furious. However, Dylan got his wish and just two months later, the inaugural Farm Aid concert took place in Champaign, Illinois. As to Live Aid's legacy, some modern aid workers insist that the event helped put humanitarian issues at the centre of foreign policy for many countries. Call it soft power or just plain having an actual conscience. Critics at the time contended that Live Aid let governments and NGOs off the hook even though Geldof has since spent his life cajoling, haranguing and goading governments and NGOs into action. As for its impact on pop and rock music itself, Geldof and his collaborator, Midge Ure of Ultravox, toyed with the idea of calling the original Band Aid project The Bloody Do Gooders and Live Aid certainly gave pop stars a new outlook. A year after the event, U2, Sting, Bryan Adams and Peter Gabriel took off on the six-date 'A Conspiracy of Hope' tour to increase awareness of human rights and to mark Amnesty International's 25th anniversary. Also in 1986, British anarcho-punks Chumbawamba released an album entitled Pictures of Starving Children Sell Records. Of course, it wasn't the first time pop and rock got a conscience. Back in the sixties, peace and love and understanding was where it was at punk had its own crusading spirit but did Live Aid squander rock's right to be obnoxious (an article of faith Geldof held dear)? Forty years later, it remains one of the biggest events in music history and Geldof is justifiably proud of what was an extraordinary achievement. So where were you? Me? I watched the whole thing on RTÉ in a barn in Cootehill, Co Cavan (don't ask) on a battered old black and white TV we'd hooked up to a makeshift aerial fashioned from some cable and a coat hanger.
Spectator
02-07-2025
- Politics
- Spectator
Tim Davie shouldn't quit over Glastonbury
There probably never has been a time when a governing party much liked its MPs. If you are on a mission, as governments imagine they are, you are always impatient when your own side raises objections. But it is only recently that governments have seemed positively affronted by the idea that their MPs should have a say. This was encapsulated by Sir Keir Starmer when he dismissed Labour's backbench revolt over welfare cuts as 'noises off'. Off what, exactly? Legislators have the sole right to legislate and that includes the right to refuse legislation. Those, like Rachael Maskell, who parade their consciences may be tiresome, but there is no way of governing this country except through parliament (though people like Lord Hermer are striving mightily to alter this). Prime ministers are oddly blind to the ultimate consequence, which is that their MPs get rid of them. Sir Keir's blindness led to his capitulation on Monday night, turning his gigantic majority into his potentially fatal problem. It is always confusing for the BBC to decide what to ban, cut or edit. In 1972, in the wake of Bloody Sunday, it banned Paul McCartney's rather tame song 'Give Ireland back to the Irish' ('Great Britain, you are tremendous/And nobody knows like me/ But really, what are you doin'/ In the land across the sea?') but allowed John Lennon's 'Sunday Bloody Sunday' which attacked 'You Anglo pigs and Scotties/ Sent to colonise the North', complained about 'the concentration camps' (unspecified) in Northern Ireland and regretted that although 'the cries of 13 martyrs filled the free Derry air', 'not a soldier boy was bleeding/ When they nailed the coffin lids'. If you do not have your own moral compass, you will be guided only by levels of public outrage and will find these hard to predict. In the case of Bob Vylan, the story is about management of coverage, not endorsement, of dreadful views. It does not exhibit the monstrous anti-Israel bias daily apparent in BBC documentaries, news reports, BBC Verify, BBC Arabic, Jeremy Bowen etc. It is more a lack of due diligence. I doubt the resignation of Tim Davie would produce visible improvement. He is actually the first D-G even to admit and pursue the anti-Semitism problem. More shocking is the way the Glastonbury crowd (and therefore, unthinkingly, the BBC) rolls with this type of thing. If – unimaginable, I know – an extreme-right popstar had appeared and announced that he hated 'Zionists' and that Israeli soldiers should die, he would have been howled down. But the left has so normalised Islamist extremism that the overwhelmingly white, middle-class establishment audience has no sense of its weirdness. In a passage not widely reported, Bob Vylan announced to the Glastoholics, 'We are not pacifist punks here. We are the violent punks.' Some of them cheered. Was that a tattoo of a guillotine that I saw on his right arm? Does Glastonbury have to suffer the fate of the Manchester Arena before they understand? Ex-prime ministers are sparing in their public interventions. So far as I can see, Rishi Sunak had made only one Commons speech (as opposed to asking questions) since leaving office – on Rachel Reeves's first Budget. Last week, however, he made his second, in Westminster Hall. It began: 'I last spoke on this subject in this very place back in 2016. A lot has changed in the last nine years – notably, ten chief secretaries to the Treasury, seven chancellors and, indeed, five prime ministers – but one thing that has not changed is my view on grouse shooting.' From that good start, Mr Sunak went on to argue that the sport 'is a part of our local social fabric, and… one of the world's great conservation success stories'. He criticised the tendency of 'some conservationists… to act as though farmers and gamekeepers are somehow trespassing on Britain's landscape, but without their hands repairing our dry-stone walls or their dairy cows keeping the fields lush, the rural beauty of our countryside would soon fade. Heather moorland… is rarer than rainforest, and 75 per cent of it is found right here in Britain. It is a national treasure.' The fanatic Chris Packham, who was attending the debate, was seen to hold his head in his hands as he listened. I hope this oration marks the start of Mr Sunak's comeback. Charm is easy to recognise but notoriously hard to describe. Sandy Gall, who has just died aged 97, had it. When he and the tipsy Reggie Bosanquet co-presented ITN News in the 1970s, charm was visible nightly on the nation's screens. It had something to do with being at ease, a lack of self-importance and the sense that the pair were often repressing laughter. Sandy retained these qualities in many dangerous situations covering wars for more than half a century, and into old age. In 2010, when he was 82, we accompanied him to Afghanistan. It was supposed to be a holiday, plus a visit to the charity which he had established to give prosthetic limbs to children injured by the war when he first covered Afghanistan, hidden in Russian-occupied territory, in the 1980s. Sandy's two rules for later journeys there were that he should never have security – it just makes one a target, he said – and that he should always carry a bottle of whisky, which was illegal. It being high summer, he had advised us not to bring waterproofs, but when we flew in a light aircraft to see Bamiyan and the mountainside which held the colossal Buddhas smashed in their niches by the Taliban, we found the place flooded. The airport was on a plateau. Our hotel was visible below, surrounded by water. Undismayed, Sandy ordered ten donkeys to carry us through the inundation and breakfast to eat until these could be found. By the time we had finished the breakfast, the waters had sufficiently receded for the donkeys to be laid off. He was a dear man, neither broken by the horrors of war, nor puffed up by his courage in the face of them – a true reporter.
Wales Online
24-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Wales Online
U2 guitarist The Edge hails ‘monumental day' as he becomes Irish citizen
U2 guitarist The Edge hails 'monumental day' as he becomes Irish citizen David Howell Evans, 63, was born in Essex in England to Welsh parents, but his family moved to Ireland when he was just a one-year-old. U2's Bono and The Edge (Image: PA Archive/PA Images ) U2 veteran The Edge has described a "monumental day" after becoming an Irish citizen. David Howell Evans, 63, was born in Essex in England to Welsh parents, but his family moved to Ireland when he was just a one-year-old. His Irish citizenship was conferred at a ceremony in Killarney, Co Kerry on Monday. Some 7,500 people will officially become Irish citizens across Monday and Tuesday. He described an "amazingly joyful event". "For all of us, a monumental day," he told RTE, wearing the distinctive hat he is known for, as well as an Irish flag badge on the lapel of his jacket. Article continues below "I'm a little tardy on the paperwork – I've been living in Ireland since I was one but the time was right and I couldn't be more proud of my country for all that it represents and all it's doing. "It's showing real leadership right now in the world and this couldn't have come at a better moment for me." The Edge, a guitarist in U2, has been involved with the band since its formation in Dublin in the late 1970s, going on to win scores of music awards. U2 is also noted for speaking out with songs such as Sunday Bloody Sunday about the shooting of unarmed protesters in Londonderry in 1972 by British soldiers, New Year's Day which became associated with the Polish Solidarity movement and Pride (In The Name Of Love) in tribute to Martin Luther King Jr. They also strongly supported efforts to secure peace in Northern Ireland with the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement in 1998. The band played Sunday Bloody Sunday last month with a call to "stop war" at the Ivors award ceremony. Article continues below The performance came as the group became the first Irish songwriters to be awarded an academy fellowship at the 70th year of the awards ceremony, hosted at London's Grosvenor House.
Metro
24-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Metro
U2's The Edge, 63, becomes Irish citizen after 62 years
A member of U2 has finally become an Irish citizen 62 years after moving there. One of the best-selling bands in the world, U2 was formed in 1976 while the members were attending Mount Temple Comprehensive School in Dublin. The line-up comprises frontman Bono, guitarist the Edge, bassists Adam Clayton and drummer Larry Mullen Jr. The group – whose biggest hits have included singles like Sunday Bloody Sunday, With Or Without You and Beautiful Day – quickly became known for their politically and socially minded Irish anthems, as well as their activism off the stage. Despite being one of Ireland's most successful bands globally, it turns out the Edge (real name David Howell Evans) wasn't actually a citizen. But this week the musician confirmed he'd finally got around to applying to officially become Irish. The Edge, 63, was born in Barkin, Essex, the second child of Welsh parents Garvin and Gwenda Evans. Soon after Evans was born his father, who was an engineer, was offered a promotion which took the family to Dublin. Now, after 62 years living in Ireland, Evans has been granted Irish citizenship. 'I'm a little tardy with the paperwork,' he told reporters after a ceremony in Killarney, County Kerry on Monday. 'I've been living in Ireland now since I was one year old. But the time is right. And I couldn't be more proud of my country for all that it represents and all that it is doing.' Despite living in Ireland for most of his life, Evans explained why it took him so long to apply for citizenship. 'Honestly, there were many moments in the past when I could have done it with just the form to be filled out, but I'm happy it's now. It feels more significant and meaningful,' he said. Alana Anderson, Metro's Deputy Entertainment Editor: 'Like thousands of others, I applied for my Irish citizenship shortly after Brexit, so expected a long wait for my new passport to arrive. The process was slightly grueling, having never met my Irish grandfather, who died before I was born, digging out the birth and marriage certificates I needed for the foreign birth register was tedious to say the least. Due to my dual citizenship with Canada, my application was also frozen until I provided even more information about my previous immigration status. I feel incredibly fortunate to now have my citizenship, but the admin involved is a task in itself. I would highly recommend having your documents in order before starting the application for a smoother experience!' Pierra Willix, Senior Entertainment Reporter: 'I was lucky enough to be able to apply for citizenship for several different European countries through my grandparents, but with the Irish passport now being the strongest in the world, it was the obvious choice (and it was one of the countries I felt the closest connection with). After some of my cousins had a fairly straightforward (and quick) experience applying to get onto the Foreign Birth Registry and getting their passport soon after that, I had a more difficult time, mainly due to applying post-Brexit and then having my application repeatedly delayed during the pandemic. Despite having to wait much longer than anticipated, I am extremely grateful to now hold Irish citizenship, which has enabled me to move from Australia to the UK without any worries about visas.' Wearing an Irish tricolour clip, Evans also swore an oath of loyalty and fidelity to the Irish state with hundreds of other newly created citizens at the ceremony. 'I have always felt Irish. Ireland will always be home to me, and I'm so grateful for that,' he shared. 'It couldn't come at a better moment for me, so I am just so happy to be at this point to be in even deeper connection with my homeland.' Evans has previously spoken about using two different accents when growing up in the Irish capital. More Trending At home he would use a Welsh accent, while he'd use an Irish one when outside. 'The reason for this dual identity was mainly to be understood by my peers but also to be accepted,' he once explained. Over the years U2 has spoken out on issues including the shooting of unarmed protesters in Londonderry in 1972 by British soldiers with their 1983 song Sunday Bloody Sunday. They also threw their support behind efforts to secure peace in Northern Ireland with the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement in 1998. Got a story? If you've got a celebrity story, video or pictures get in touch with the entertainment team by emailing us celebtips@ calling 020 3615 2145 or by visiting our Submit Stuff page – we'd love to hear from you. MORE: Bad Company star Mick Ralphs dies aged 81 as bandmates pay tribute MORE: All the rumoured secret sets at Glastonbury 2025 from Pulp to Lewis Capaldi MORE: Surfing on the north coast of Ireland, I learned an important life lesson
