Remembering Live Aid 40 Years Later

Tens of thousands watched the Live Aid concerts in person

You know you're getting old when it's the 40th anniversary of the Live Aid concert.

40 years!

When I was a kid and I didn't want to finish the food on my plate, my mom would ask if we should take those leftovers and send them to the starving children in Africa.

Geldof organised the ambitious live concert

And several years later sadly the children were still starving in Africa, Ethiopia to be exact.

But Bob Geldof wanted to do something about it after seeing the news footage of children with bloated stomachs, too weak to swat the flies swarming them.

He and Midge Ure of Ultravox wrote Do They Know It's Christmas? and the song quickly became a hit. I went out and bought the single in a record store downtown. It was probably one of the first times I contributed to a fundraiser like that.

A few months later Geldof together with musicians to organise Live Aid, and not just have a massive concert at Wembley Stadium, but also at John F. Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia on the same day. Phil Collins had the distinction of performing at both concerts -- he traveled via British Airways Concorde to New York and then via chopper to get to Philly.

Jagger and Tina Turner performed together

I remember being a teenager and watching bits of the concerts on TV in the living room in the summer heat, thrilled to see all these musicians like Madonna, Duran Duran, The Rolling Stones, David Bowie, and U2 performing together, mixing genres and styles. 

Not only was it a logistical challenge but technical too for TV networks to broadcast live from two different cities at the time using 13 military satellites. Apparently there was no plan B in case the live broadcast failed. Now live broadcasts in various cities are done all the time, but back then it was only for a few minutes for a news story.

Around 1.5 billion people watched over 70 artists and bands performed over 16 hours of live music from London and Philadelphia. 

In the end Live Aid raised US$127 million ($370 million in 2024) for famine relief. It demonstrated that individuals could indeed make a difference, even if us kids couldn't vote yet. 

Madonna on stage in Philadelphia

Ure was asked recently if he thought something like Live Aid could be done again today. He seemed to think people had too many distractions.

"Technically, you could organise it easier, but these days you have so many distractions. Forty years ago, music was the be all and end all. You didn't have smartphones. You didn't have the internet. You didn't have 24-hour anything at all.

"There were no distractions. You had no video games. You had none of that stuff. So, you could focus."

But isn't it cool we're still talking about it, 40 years later?