Gareth O'Callaghan: Live Aid captured the imagination while causing a lot of controversy
Some 75,000 tickets for Wembley sold out within days, much like the 90,000 that had gone on sale in late June for the Philadelphia concert at JFK Stadium.
Tottenham Court Road was no stranger to bomb scares and security alerts in 1985. Cordoned-off streets in central London were common on busy shopping days.
However, shopping and sightseeing clearly weren’t on the city’s agenda that weekend 40 years ago, as I strolled along its deserted footpaths towards the Tube station.
Normal weekend activities had been postponed. In the sweltering 30C heat, it was a day for barbeques and garden parties, and being with family and friends. After months of planning, Live Aid had come to town.
Preparations had started in early January. Now the countdown was complete, with all eyes on Wembley Stadium. It’s long been suggested it was Boy George’s idea. So overcome by the experience of recording 'Do They Know It’s Christmas' months earlier, he told Bob Geldof shortly after the session they should seriously consider organising a benefit concert.
Despite concerns from the highest ranks of Scotland Yard, not even the terrorists had an appetite for an opportunistic strike that day. In the words of Nelson Mandela, “music has a potency that defies politics”.
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Tickets for the Wembley gig were priced at £5, with an additional charity donation of £20, back in a time when you took your chance and queued for a day before tickets went on sale at record shops and at the stadium box office. Online event ticketing was still 14 years away.
Some 75,000 tickets sold out within days, much like the 90,000 that had gone on sale in late June for the Philadelphia concert at JFK Stadium.
Margaret Thatcher rather wisely decided to forego her invitation to the concert, following her refusal to refund VAT charged on the Band Aid single the previous December, even though the Irish government agreed to do so.
One Labour MP, Alf Morris, challenged her to refund any tax she might also have been considering from the concert’s proceeds. “You cannot praise the Good Samaritan and then mug him to the tune of 15% of his aid,” he said. In his own unique way, Geldof stood up to Thatcher. In a rare U-turn, she refunded the money.
I was 24 when Live Aid was beamed into the small flat I shared with two work colleagues on the outskirts of London. The 13in Mitsubishi television set — no bigger than a microwave — sat on a stack of books. My job was to tweak the ‘rabbit ears’ antenna every so often to improve the grainy screen quality. Between Wembley and Philadelphia, that small television delivered almost 16 hours of classic songs from rock and pop’s top table, until a drunken expat fell over the books and smashed the screen.
Like thousands of other stations around the world, RTÉ broadcast live feeds from both concerts while anchoring their own coverage and fundraising. Of the estimated £150m raised for famine relief in Ethiopia, £7m came from Ireland, which donated more per capita than any other country.
In the rock and roll hierarchy of momentous events, it’s up there at the top. But the lasting impact of Live Aid has become a much greater source of controversy. Despite the altruism, there are those who still question the motives of the concert and the indulgences of a bunch of wealthy celebrities — most of them white — who each gave roughly 15 minutes’ worth of stage time to save Africa. Bob Geldof has spent 40 years rejecting accusations of being a ‘white saviour’ — a term attributed to white people helping non-white people for self-serving purposes, including admiration from others. Live Aid had another problem — diversity.
After both concerts, organisers were lambasted for not having more black artists on the bill. “It became this anti-colonial diatribe,” Midge Ure wrote in his autobiography, . “You whites, telling us poor Black guys what to do.” That was despite “every major black artist on the Billboard 200 chart and R&B chart being invited", according to legendary concert promoter Bill Graham; most of whom, including Michael Jackson, Diana Ross, and Stevie Wonder, declined. However, others, including Dionne Warwick, said they had never been contacted.
Annual drought has always been Ethiopia’s legacy, dating back thousands of years. Some are so bad, they cause widespread death and disease — like the one in 1984, captured so vividly by BBC’s Michael Buerk, filmed by cameraman Mohamed Amin, when he talked about a “biblical famine … the closest thing to Hell on Earth”.
Those brief minutes of news coverage led to the most acclaimed humanitarian fundraiser of all time. However, it was also a case of more genocide less nature that was responsible for doing much of the killing. Within a year, allegations were surfacing that some of the money raised was bolstering the coffers of Mengistu Haile Mariam, the dictator responsible for Ethiopia’s starving millions. Migration and starvation were his modus operandi. His efforts to move indigenous tribes into resettlement camps resulted in genocide, while he now allegedly had a source of funding to buy Soviet weapons in his war against rebels. Several relief agencies begged Geldof to withhold the charitable money until a reliable framework could be established to ensure the funding would reach those suffering most.
In 2010, following a report from Martin Plaut, the BBC World Service’s Africa Editor, that some of the Live Aid cash had been used to buy weapons rather than food, Geldof claimed that not a shred of evidence had been produced to show that any of the charity’s money had been diverted. Many were left asking if Live Aid had, as the July 1986 edition of magazine stated, “exacerbated the already terrible humanitarian crisis”.
Understandably, Geldof was furious at the allegations. In 1990, I met him in Dublin’s Shelbourne Hotel for an interview. I was nervous because you never knew how his mood would dictate the flow. But this was a different man sitting in front of me that day. To say he’d survived the five years since Live Aid unscathed would be untrue. I had seen him interviewed in 1985, but that day was different.
“I don’t want to talk about Live Aid,” he told me straight up. My first impression was that it didn’t leave us with much else to talk about. I had known for four years about the allegations of fraudulent use of charitable money by Mengistu, and wanted to discuss it; but that conversation wasn’t going to happen. 1985 belonged to a disconnected world — one without social media and satellite news.
Deciphering the truth quickly was not as precise as it is now. Awful things were happening that we weren’t being told about. The British government was well aware of a dangerous famine in Ethiopia as far back as 1982 but chose not to do anything about it. Two years later, it took an Irishman to make a difference. How many lives he saved will never be known. There will always be dictators wherever humanity is easily overthrown, where the wealthiest profit while the poorest perish. Look at what Trump is doing to his own country’s humanitarian aid.
“The Achilles’ heel of humanity is its hubris,” Bob Geldof once said. Too many people look the other way; whatever his critics might think of him, thankfully he didn’t.
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