“It’s twelve noon in London, seven AM in Philadelphia, and around the world it’s time for: Live Aid ….”
Live Aid in the FFK check:
To this day it is the benchmark for all charity concerts: Live Aid. On July 13, 1985, Bob Geldof and Midge Ure organized events at London’s Wembley Stadium and Philadelphia’s JFK Stadium; At the simultaneous concerts, which lasted a total of 16 hours, a previously unseen number of stars gathered to call for donations for hunger relief in Ethiopia. Almost two billion people in 150 countries watched.
🌇View pictures from “Live Aid 1985: Dylan, Queen, U2, Bowie, Jagger – the photos” here now
Queen, U2, Bob Dylan, Madonna, Mick Jagger, Paul McCartney, David Bowie, Sting, the Beach Boys, Tina Turner, The Who, Led Zeppelin, George Michael, even Paul Weller and Elvis Costello… almost everyone who was born in 1985 (still ) had a big name – with the exception of the notorious truants Michael Jackson, Springsteen and Prince – were there.
Phil Collins even boarded the Concorde after his performance in London so that he could sit down at the piano on time in Philadelphia and, after the British “Against All Odds (Take A Look At Me Now)”, also an American “In The Air Tonight”. play. The technology of the time made it possible – the lightning-fast Concorde no longer exists today. Thanks to the year 1985 and the associated poorer communications technology, we were spared the worst: a duet between Bowie and Jagger controlled via satellite transmission. The two wanted to perform their Zappelphilipp cover version of “Dancing in the Streets” as an intercontinental sung piece, which did not work due to the transmission rate of image and sound and therefore had to be rejected as an idea in advance.
Telephone, no internet
The dates that were coordinated during both concerts, the performances, announcements, and that only with telephone and satellite lines: that is hardly imaginable in the Internet age. And the donations were even collected via BBC telephone lines.
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So Phil Collins flew across the pond. But other performances have also gone down in the history of live music. The more memorable moments clearly took place in London. Many fans and critics praise Queen’s mini set of all things. A very elaborately rehearsed quasi-medley of six songs in 20 minutes, which lacks spontaneity and unfortunately doesn’t give you the feeling of being at a concert with many friends with unexpected live pairings (more like a Freddie Mercury ceremony in… Time lapse). Queen had rehearsed for their tough 20 minutes; After their perfectionist Live Aid performance and thus the best advertising for themselves, they were on everyone’s lips again.
David Bowie and U2 trumped everyone. Bowie, dressed in an elephant gray blazer, opened his set quite daringly with the anti-television song “TVC 15” and transformed it from passive-aggressive pop into a party anthem. Worked. But it was above all “Heroes”, which has been suitable for every stadium situation since then, and with its dramatic, defiant build-up from the middle of the song, Bowie captivated his audience. U2 did something similar, and most of the flags were visible in the crowd during their performance. And with the angry “Sunday Bloody Sunday” and a much longer than planned “Bad” – the band had to forego the third song, “Pride” because Bono wanted to jump into the audience again – sparked an unexpected burst of energy. That afternoon it became clear that U2 would soon play an even bigger role thanks to their ability to communicate with the crowd. The subsequent Dire Straits had no chance.
Live Aid in Philadelphia had a somewhat less spectacular cast, but offered the funnier anecdotes. Mick Jagger, for example, didn’t want to perform with the Rolling Stones because he could also imagine having his own career with his first solo album, “She’s The Boss.” For the solo piece “Just Another Night” and “State Of Shock” he brought in Tina Turner. Jagger’s Stones colleagues Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood, on the other hand, had the great misfortune of having to play the quasi-final – the last performance before the “USA For Africa” final for all musicians – with Bob Dylan.
To this day, there are different versions of what and why the three looked so bad, played so terribly and sweated so profusely; Broken guitars, broken strings, Wood had to play air guitar for a short time, which is hard to imagine. The bad sound, maybe dope, an arrhythmic Richards constantly on the verge of breaking out… their three-song set is an unintentionally funny lesson in how poorly three stars can harmonize together.
If you look closely at the hidden object picture on stage during the last Philadelphia song of the evening, “We Are The World”, you will also recognize a completely exhausted Keith, who sits down on the monitor box with his back to the audience in order to finally rest the other hundred musicians sway arm in arm with a view of the audience. Richard’s cool-delivered smile immediately freezes him when a steward asks the hunched over Stones man to please move back into the swaying circle, because there’s no giving up.
And then Live Aid was over.
Current estimates suggest that around 150 million British pounds in donations (today’s equivalent: around 175 million euros) were raised through Live Aid. Criticism of the events was primarily directed at the line-up planners. Andy Kershaw from the BBC argued that African bands in particular should have been asked to take part in the concerts. Instead, Geldof and colleagues presented the “classic old rock aristocracy.” In fact, Run DMC were the only artists who used rap to represent a musical style that was more novel than the mix of rock, soul and folk that was otherwise represented in London and Philadelphia.
Live 8
And from Live Aid became Live 8: 20 years after the spectacular benefit concerts in London and Philadelphia, Bob Geldof organized another music event on July 2, 2005 to draw attention to the famine in Africa.
The demand: “Make Poverty History” was addressed to the G8 member states (hence the word play with the eight), whose government representatives would meet in Gleneagles (Scotland) from July 6th to 8th. Debt relief and development aid for Africa were to be negotiated in Gleneagles; Geldof and his current co-organizer, U2 singer Bono, hoped to use the concerts to put pressure on politicians. At the end, the G8 heads of state were given a petition with more than 24 million signatures. Unlike Live Aid, Live 8 was not considered an event to collect donations, but votes. Geldof: “We don’t want your money, we want your name!”
Around 170 bands and artists performed in eleven locations – London, Paris, Rome, Berlin, Philadelphia, Barrie/Toronto, Chiba, Johannesburg, Moscow, Cornwall, Edinburgh – on four continents, including 21 who had also performed at Live Aid in 1985 had been there.