Live Aid was a multi-venue rock music concert held on July 13, 1985. The event was organised by Bob Geldof, Midge Ure, Harvey Goldsmith and the Band Aid Trust, in order to raise funds for famine relief in Ethiopia. Billed as a "global jukebox", the main sites for the event were Wembley Stadium, London, attended by 72,000 people, and JFK Stadium, Philadelphia, attended by about 90,000 people, with some acts performing at other venues such as Sydney and Moscow. It was one of the largest scale satellite link-ups and TV broadcasts of all time -- an estimated 1.5 billion viewers in 100 countries watched the live broadcast.

The concert was conceived as a follow-up to another Geldof/Ure project, the successful charity single "Do They Know It's Christmas?" performed by a collection of British and Irish music acts billed as "Band Aid" and released the previous winter.

The concert grew in scope as more acts were added on both sides of the Atlantic. As a charity fundraiser, the concert far exceeded its goals: on a television programme in 2001 one of the organisers stated that while initially it had been hoped that Live Aid would raise £1 million ($1.64 million), the final figure was £150 million (approx. $245.4 million) for famine relief. Partly in recognition of the Live Aid effort, Geldof received an honorary knighthood. Music promoter Harvey Goldsmith was also instrumental in bringing Geldof's and Ure's plans to fruition.

Collaborative effort

The concert was started in 12:00 (GMT) in Wembley (UK). It continued at JFK Stadium (US) starting at 13:51 (8:51 AM Eastern time). The UK's Wembley performances ended at 22:00. The US's JFK performances and whole concert ended at 04:05 (11:05 PM Eastern time). Thus the concert continued for 16 hours, but since many artists' performances were conducted simultaneously in Wembley and JFK the total concert's length was much longer.

The concert was the most ambitious international satellite television venture that had ever been attempted at the time.

In Europe, the feed was supplied by the BBC. BBC's broadcast was opened by Richard Skinner co-hosted by Andy Kershaw and included numerous interviews and chatters in between the various acts. The BBC's TV feed was mono, but the "BBC Radio 1" feed was simulcast in stereo. Due to the constant activities in both London and Philadelphia, the BBC producers omitted the Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young reunion from their broadcast. The BBC did, however, supply a "clean" feed to various TV channels in Europe.

ABC was largely responsible for the U.S. broadcast (although ABC themselves telecast only the final three hours of the concert from Philadelphia, hosted by Dick Clark, with the rest shown in syndication). An entirely separate and simultaneous U.S. feed was provided for cable viewers by MTV. The MTV broadcast was presented in stereo. While the BBC telecast was run commercial-free (it is a public channel), both the MTV and ABC broadcasts included advertisements and interviews. As a result, many songs were omitted due to the commercial breaks as these songs were played during such times.

The ABC Radio network broadcast the domestic radio feed of the concert on the day, and later broadcast many of the acts that were missing from the original live radio broadcast.

At one point midway through the concert Billy Connolly announced he had just been informed that 95% of the television sets in the world were tuned to the event.

No one concert before had brought together so many famous performers from the past and present, whose names are shown below (under Live Aid performers). However, some of the artists who had been announced earlier did not appear at the last minute, including Tears For Fears, Julian Lennon and Cat Stevens (who wrote a song for the Live Aid concert that he never got to perform--had he done so, he would have made his first public concert appearance since converting to Islam and changing his name to Yusuf Islam), while Prince provided a clip of 4 The Tears In Your Eyes.

It was the original intention for Mick Jagger to perform an intercontinental duet from the U.S. with David Bowie in London, but problems of synchronisation made it impossible -- instead, Jagger and Bowie created a video clip for the song they would have performed, a cover of Dancing In The Street. Jagger still performed with Tina Turner live at the Philadelphia portion of the concert.

Each of the two main portions of the concert ended with their particular continental all-star anti-hunger anthems, with Band Aid's Do They Know It's Christmas closing the UK concert, and USA for Africa's We Are The World closing the US concert (and thus the day's proceedings).

Since the concert, bootleg videos and CDs have circulated widely. The concert was never supposed to have been released commercially, but in November 2004 Warner Music Group released a 4 disc DVD edition of the concert. The success of Live Aid inspired Roger Waters' song "The Tide is Turning" and Queen's song "One Vision."

Memorable moments at JFK Stadium

When Bob Dylan broke a guitar string, Ron Wood took off his own guitar and gave it to Dylan. Wood was left standing on stage guitarless. After shrugging to the audience, he played air guitar, even mimicking The Who's Pete Townshend by swinging his arm in wide circles, until a stagehand brought him a replacement.

The JFK portion included reunions of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, and members of Led Zeppelin (although they were not officially announced by their group name from the stage, they were announced as Zeppelin on air by ABC host Dick Clark).

Teddy Pendergrass made his first public appearance since his near-fatal car accident which paralyzed him for life. Pendergrass, along with Ashford & Simpson, performed "Reach Out And Touch".

The transatlantic broadcast from Wembley Stadium suffered technical problems and failed during The Who's performance of their song "My Generation," immediately after Roger Daltrey sang "Why don't you all f-fade away."

At one point during her set, Joan Baez announced to the assembled crowd (and the viewing audience) that "this is your Woodstock"

Memorable moments at Wembley Stadium

Status Quo opened with "Rocking All Over The World"

During The Boomtown Rats set Bob Geldof lifts his arm and pauses for an inordinate amount of time. The line from Mondays. 'And the lesson today is how to die', tales on a whole new meaning.

Queen played better and more tightly than ever, and the antics of lead singer Freddie Mercury got the entire Wembley crowd clapping in unison to "Radio Ga-Ga" and singing along, word-for-word, to "We Will Rock You" and "We Are The Champions."

Another moment that garnered a huge crowd response was when David Bowie performed "Heroes" and dedicated it to his young son, as well as "all our children, and the children of the world."

U2's performance established them as a pre-eminent live group for the first time - something for which they would eventually become superstars.

Concerts organisers have subsequently said that they were particularly keen to ensure that at least one Beatle, ideally Paul McCartney, took part in the concert as they felt having an "elder statesman" from British music would give it greater legitimacy in the eyes of the political leaders whose opinions were trying to shape. McCartney agreed to perform and has said that it was "the management" - his children - that persuaded him to take part. In the event he was the last performer (aside from the Band Aid finale) to take to the stage and one of the few to be beset by technical difficulties. His microphone was turned off for the first two minutes of his piano performance of Let It Be making it difficult for television viewers, and impossible for those in the stadium to hear him.

Raising money

Throughout the concerts viewers were urged to donate money to the Live Aid cause. Three hundred phone lines were manned by the BBC in order that members of the public could make donations using their credit card. The phone number and an address that viewers could send cheques to were repeated every twenty minutes. Nearly seven hours into the concert in London Bob Geldof enquired how much money had been raised. He was told £1.2 million. He is said to have been sorely disappointed by the amount and marched to the BBC commentary position. Pumped up further by a performance by Queen that he later called "absolutely amazing", Geldof gave a famous interview. Many now recall that Geldof said "Just give us the fucking money." However this is not true. He did say "People are dying NOW. Give us the money NOW. Give me the money now." And later when trying to impress on the BBC TV presenter the importance of his plea, "Fuck the address, just give the phone, here's the number...". After the outburst, giving increased to £300 per second. Later in the evening, following David Bowie's set, a video shot by CBC was shown to the audiences in London and Philadelphia as well as on televisions around the world, showing starving and diseased Ethiopian children set to the song "Drive" by the The Cars. The rate of giving was faster in the immediate aftermath of the moving video.

As Geldof mentioned during the concert, the Republic of Ireland (Éire) gave the most donations per capita, despite being in the throes of a serious economic depression at the time. The single largest donation came from the ruling family of Dubai. They donated £1m in a phone conversation with Bob Geldof.

The next day news reports stated that between £40 and £50 million had been raised. Now it is estimated that around £150mn has been raised for famine relief as a direct result of the concerts.

Live Aid performers

(in order of appearance, times given are British Summer Times and indicate the start time of the performance. Key: W - London Wembley Stadium , JFK - Philadelphia JFK Stadium):

Live Aid recording &releases

When organiser Bob Geldof was persuading artists to take part in the concert, he promised them that it would be a one-off event, never to be seen again. That was the reason why the concert was never recorded in its complete original form, and only secondary TV broadcasts were recorded. Following Geldof's request, ABC even erased its own broadcast tapes. However, before the syndicated/ABC footage was erased, copies of it were donated to the Smithsonian Institution and now have been presumed lost. MTV decided to keep recordings of its broadcast and recently located more than 100 Live Aid tapes in its archives, but many songs in these tapes were cut short by MTV's ad breaks and presenters (according to BBC). BBC also decided to keep its broadcast recordings, but many performances from the US were not shown on the BBC and recordings of these performances are missing.

Unofficial recordings

Because the "Live Aid" broadcast was watched by billions of people, most of the footage was recorded on home consumer VCRs all around the world in various qualities. Many of these recordings were in mono, because most of the home VCRs at that time were mono recorders and also because the European BBC broadcast was in mono (the US MTV broadcast was stereo). These recordings started to circulate among collectors 20 years ago and in recent years have also appeared on the internet in file sharing networks. Since the official "Live Aid" DVD release includes only partial footage of this event, unofficial distribution sources continue to stay the one and only source of complete recordings of this important historical music event.

Official Live Aid DVD

An official 4-DVD set of the Live Aid concerts was released on November 8, 2004. It contains 10-hour partial footage of the 16-hour length concert. The DVD was produced by Geldof's company, Woodcharm Ltd., and distributed by Warner Music Group.

The decision to finally release it was taken by Bob Geldof nearly 20 years after the original concerts, after he found a number of pirate copies of the concert on the Internet (see full story here). There has been controversy over the DVD release because a decision had been taken for a substantial number of tracks not to be included in this edited version.

The most complete footage that exists is from the BBC, and it was the main source of the DVD. During production on the official DVD, MTV lent Woodcharm Ltd. their B-roll and alternate camera footage; this was an additional source of the U.S. footage that appears on the official DVD.

Working from the original BBC and MTV footage, judicious decisions were made on which acts would be included and which ones would not (for example, Rick Springfield, The Four Tops, The Hooters, and Power Station are among those acts that were left off the DVD). Many of the artists' songs that were performed were also omitted. For example Madonna performed 3 solo songs in the concert, but only 2 were included on DVD - "Love Makes the World Go 'Round" was omitted.

Two performers were left off at their own request - Led Zeppelin and Santana. The rock band Led Zeppelin defended their decision not to be included on the grounds that their performance was "sub-standard," but to lend their support Jimmy Page and Robert Plant have pledged to donate proceeds from an upcoming Led Zeppelin DVD release to the campaign, and John Paul Jones has pledged proceeds from his current American tour with Mutual Admiration Society.

The British Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown decided the VAT collected on the DVD will be given back to the charity, which will raise an extra £5 for every DVD sold. 

Bob, in his own words

Broadcast on Thursday 21st October 1999
BBC World Service - My Century

My name is Bob Geldof. I have a terrible cold. I'm a musician. And in 1984, I was watching a news broadcast about a famine that was occurring in Ethiopia. And I felt I had to do something about it. And I got a lot of musician friends together and recorded a song called "Do They Know It's Christmas?" And we called the group "Band-Aid" and we raised money for the famine victims in Ethiopia. But subsequently I realised that that would not be enough to do all we wanted to do. So I organised a concert. And it was called "Live-Aid". The idea of Live-Aid came about because I was in Sudan. And there were stories of the emergency food aid being held up at the docks of Port Sudan. So when I went there, I was told that the main reason for the hold-up in the food was that a cartel, a trucking cartel was operating in the Port of Sudan. So I just figured that the only way to break the cartel was to put up some opposition to it. So I returned to Britain, and set about organising the Live-Aid concert. And with the monies that were raised from the tickets of that, we bought a fleet of trucks which in effect broke up the cartel in Port Sudan. My idea that the biggest bands in the world would play one concert in two continents, simultaneously. So we got Wembley Stadium in London and JFK Stadium in Philadelphia. And when the band was on in Britain, that would be the band that would be on the world TV feed; and then the band would come on in Philadelphia. We'd flip back and forwards - so that, in effect, the vast bulk of the global audience would be watching one concert. And suddenly it was time for me and my band to go on stage. And the noise of the crowd was physical. And I was doing a song that I'd written a long time ago, called "I Don't Like Mondays" - which people certainly in Britain knew. And there was a line of that which was: "The lesson today is how to die". And I hadn't chosen that song because of that line. But lots of things took on a significance that day that they otherwise wouldn't have. And I got to that line and I suddenly stopped. I pulled up sharp. I stopped dead, you know. I stopped singing the song. And the line just lay hanging in the air over Wembley Stadium, and presumably over the billion and a half people watching on television. And the crowd started going mad. The noise rose to a even higher intensity of emotion. And for me personally it was a cathartic moment. I'd had a weirdo life. And all the seemingly not understandable parts of my life, the paths that it had taken, all seemed to make absolute sense. It had all sort of arrived at this point and this was the reason for it. And people who were important in my life were all in that stadium - like my dad, and so-and-so and so-and-so. And I felt very calm. And I wanted to remember that moment of stillness. So slowly I moved my eyes from my stage right, all the way round, slowly round to the back, round to the stage left and all the vast number of people in front of me. And I took a sort of mental snap, that I would carry with me, you know. And then I sort of broke the spell, and we continued with the song. And then I was off. And that was my Live-Aid moment. 
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LINKS

	Extensive Unofficial Live Aid fan site
	Live Aid, The Greatest Show on Earth Unofficial Fan Site