Remembering Live Aid 13 July 1985: The Greatest Show On Earth

Remembering Live Aid 13July 1985

The Greatest Show On Earth

Andrew Wild

Sonicbond Publishing Limited

www.sonicbondpublishing.co.uk

Email: [email protected]

First Published in the United Kingdom 2024

First Published in the United States 2024

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data:

A Catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright Andrew Wild 2024

ISBN 978-1-78952-328-7

The right of Andrew Wild to be identified

as the author of this work has been asserted by him

in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission in writing from Sonicbond Publishing Limited

Contents

Social Media

Introduction

1. Prologue: Do They Know It’s Christmas?

2. Coldstream Guards

3. Status Quo

4. Style Council

5. Boomtown Rats

6. Adam Ant

7. INXS

8. Ultravox

9. Japanese Live Aid

10. Spandau Ballet

11. Bernard Watson

12. Joan Baez

13. Elvis Costello

14. The Hooters

15. Austrian Live Aid

16. Nik Kershaw

17. The Four Tops

18. BB King

19. Billy Ocean

20. Sade

21. Black Sabbath

22. Yugoslavian Live Aid

23. Run DMC

24. Sting and Phil Collins

25. Rick Springfield

26. REO Speedwagon

27. Howard Jones

28. Russian Live Aid

29. Bryan Ferry

30. Crosby, Stills and Nash

31. German Live Aid

32. Judas Priest

33. Paul Young with Alison Moyet

34. Bryan Adams

35. U2

36. The Beach Boys

37. Dire Straits with Sting

38. George Thorogood

39. Queen

40. Intermission

41. Simple Minds

42. David Bowie

43. Drive

44. Pretenders

45. The Who

46. Santana

47. Norwegian Live Aid

48. Elton John

49. Ashford ad Simpson

50. Kool and The Gang

51. Madonna

52. Mercury and May

53. Paul McCartney

54. Band Aid

55. Tom Petty

56. Kenny Loggins

57. The Cards

58. Neil Young

59. The Power Station

60. Thompson Twins

61. Eric Clapton

62. Phil Collins

63. Led Zeppelin

64. CSNY

65. Duran Duran

66. Cliff Richard

67. Patti Labelle

68. Hall and Oates

69. Mick Jagger with Tina Turner

70. Bob Dylan and Friends

71. USA For Africa

Epilogue

Bibliography

Social Media

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Thank you Nick Jackson

Introduction

On Saturday 13 July 1985, three weeks past my 19th birthday, I settled in front of the television in our small semi-detached house in Stockport. It was just before noon in London, 7 am in Philadelphia, and around the world, it was time for Live Aid. Sixteen hours later, I was still there, having watched the entire BBC broadcast from end to end (with a small gap during George Thorogood’s set in the early evening to fetch my tea). I also taped around three hours of the BBC Radio 1 broadcast onto two C90 cassettes: as I recall, I snagged sets from Dire Straits, The Who, Santana, Freddie Mercury And Brian May, Paul McCartney, Band Aid, Neil Young, Eric Clapton, Led Zeppelin, Patti LaBelle, Mick Jagger and Bob Dylan. Not so far away, my future wife and her sisters were doing much the same – watching, taping and making indelible memories.

Years later, I found a 17xCD bootleg set of every available audio recording from the London and Philadelphia shows – there was significant overlap in performances on the day, and the first three hours from Philadelphia were not broadcast in the UK at all, so even though I’d sat through the entire broadcast, what I’d seen was far from complete. This bootleg filled in many of the gaps. Much of the video footage from both concerts is available on YouTube.

This book revisits the seventy-plus artists and close to 200 songs that made up Live Aid. How much of it do you remember? For my generation, 13 July 1985 was a landmark day. It was ‘The Greatest Show On Earth’.

Andrew Wild

Rainow, Cheshire, 2024

Chapter 1

Prologue: Do They Know It’s Christmas?

It’s Tuesday, 23 October 1984. Images of hundreds of thousands of people starving to death in Ethiopia are shown on the UK’s BBC TV news bulletins. Michael Buerk described it as ‘a biblical famine in the 20th century’ and ‘the closest thing to hell on Earth’. Buerk in the Guardian, 2004:

I was based in Johannesburg at the time and was the BBC’s correspondent in Africa. The rains that should have come in around August to Ethiopia had failed again for the sixth season running and it tipped over from being a crisis to a catastrophe. People suddenly realised they were going to die and this huge mass migration started. It tipped very quickly. We flew and then drove up there and the roads were just littered with dying people. It was extraordinary; it was just on such a huge scale.

Buerk noted that at Korem, there were 40,000-45,000 people, and in Makele, there were another 80,000-90,000. He remembered that they grouped along the road that led north from Addis, where they thought relief would get to them.

It’s difficult to express the inadequacy I felt. You take refuge in the technicalities of filming, finding sequences, working out the logistics and so on. There were two films, two pieces that finally aired. I knew they wanted about three minutes, but I cut eight and thought, fuck ‘em. In those days as a foreign correspondent, communications being what they were, I tended to work on the basis that they got what they were given. I knew it was a very powerful film.

Irish musician Bob Geldof, the outspoken and fiercely intelligent singer with The Boomtown Rats, saw the broadcast at home in London. He had spent the day promoting the band’s upcoming single ‘Dave’, the third single from their latest album In The Long Grass, which was six months old and a decided flop. He recalled later that he was resigned to the decline of a band he’d led for nine years. He went home and switched on the television. The news report was of famine in Ethiopia. He wrote, later:

I saw something that placed my worries in a ghastly new perspective. From the first seconds, it was clear that this was a horror on a monumental scale. The pictures were of people who were so shrunken by starvation that they looked like beings from another planet. Their arms and legs were as thin as sticks, their bodies spindly. Swollen veins and huge, blankly staring eyes protruded from their shrivelled heads. The camera wandered amidst them like a mesmerised observer, occasionally dwelling on one person so that he looked directly at me, sitting in my comfortable living room surrounded by the fripperies of modern living, which we were pleased to regard as necessities. Their eyes looked into mine.

Unable to sleep, Geldof mused on how he might be able to help.

To allow it to continue would be tantamount to murder. I would send some money; I would send more money. But that was not enough. What else could I do? I was only a pop singer. And, by now, not a very successful pop singer. I could not help the tottering man to carry his burden. All I could do was make records that no one bought. But I would do that, I would give all the profits of the next Rats record to Oxfam. What good would that do? It would be a pitiful amount. But it would be more than I could raise by simply dipping into my shrunken bank account. Maybe some people would buy it just because the profits were for Oxfam. Yet, that was still not enough. I fell into a fitful sleep.

The next day, Geldof’s partner, the broadcaster Paula Yates, had been in Newcastle filming an episode of The Tube with Ultravox’s Midge Ure. ‘After the show, I dropped into Paula’s dressing room for a natter.’

Yates was chatting on the phone with Geldof. She handed Ure the phone and Geldof asked him if he’d seen the TV reporty about the famine in Ethiopia. Ure confessed that he hadn’t. Geldof explained about how he wanted to do something about it and asked Ure to help. Ure agreed and they agreed to meet up a few days later at Langan’s Brasserie in Mayfair.

Ure wrote:

Over the weekend, I made a point of watching the reports from Ethiopia. They were all over the box, so I couldn’t miss it. I found it horrific that we should be seeing images like that in this day and age, but I also couldn’t escape the feeling that anything I did would be nothing more than an empty gesture. At Langan’s, Bob and I talked around a bunch of bizarre schemes before coming to the obvious conclusion that the only thing we could do was make a record. The quickest option – covering somebody else’s song like ‘White Christmas’ – was out of the question because almost half of the monies earned by a record go to the writer. There we were, two songwriters sitting at the same table arguing over which old chestnut we could cover when, eventually, we realised that what we had to do was to write and record a new song and that we only had a few weeks left before Christmas. Initially, we calculated that if we came up with something, invited our friends to sing on it and managed to get a hit, we could raise £100,000. I told him, ‘You are a songwriter; just write a song.’ I was his backstop, his credibility; once I’d agreed to write with him, he could tell people, ‘Midge and I are writing the song together.’

Ure went home and started work on what would become the ‘feed the world’ chorus of ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’. Geldof, for his part, phoned Sting and Simon Le Bon, who said yes, then headed towards the Picasso bar in Chelsea to look for well-known musicians. On the way, he bumped into Gary Kemp of Spandau Ballet. Kemp said:

I was in an antique store [Antiquarius] on the King’s Road. Geldof saw me and came in. He sucked the air out of the place and took over, as he does. He said, ‘Did you see the news?’ He was clearly very moved. ‘Maybe if we got a few people together, yourselves, Duran and some others, would you be interested in making a record?’ I said yeah, sure and that was it.

Reassured, Geldof opened his address book and started to make calls. ‘I called Virgin records to get the number for Boy George’, he wrote. ‘I rang ZTT for Frankie Goes To Hollywood. I got hold of numbers for Paul Young, Paul Weller of The Style Council and Phil Oakey of The Human League.’ He bumped into Francis Rossi of Status Quo in the offices of their mutual record company. And, needing the kernel of a song, he reworked an unfinished Boomtown Rats track called ‘It’s My World’, and thus, the verses of ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ were in place. Geldof and Ure later worked together on the middle eight and the ‘let them know it’s Christmas time’ refrain. There is no chorus. One can argue that the lyrics are patronising, and to a degree, they are, but they’re simple, catchy and memorable.

Geldof and Ure wanted Trevor Horn to produce the recording sessions, but Horn was unable to commit to such a tight schedule. Instead, Horn donated his Sarm West Studios in Notting Hill, London, for recording sessions. Geldof and Ure were given 24 hours to record and mix the single. The date: Sunday 25 November 1984. ‘Trevor would have taken six weeks to produce it’, Ure said, who elected to produce the single himself. ‘I enjoy the pressure of a deadline and I’m good at dealing with artists.’

The basic track was recorded by Ure in his home studio in Chiswick, with