Freddie seduced the planet… but Live Aid was so much bigger than Queen | UK | News

The past changes every time we retell it. Narrative meanders according to who does the telling. If you buy the version portrayed in the 2018 feature film Bohemian Rhapsody, Bob Geldof’s global jukebox was a triumph for Queen to the exclusion of all others. If you were at Wembley Stadium four decades ago today on July 13, 1985, as I was, or if you watched the concert on television, you’ll remember a day of musical exuberance the likes of which the world had never seen.

You may recall that Freddie Mercury and his band were the loudest, the most dominant, but that Bowie stole the show; that Duran Duran’s Simon le Bon sang a bum note that still reverberates; that Bono and U2 crossed the rubicon and became superstars. You may have read and absorbed all that was later revealed, but you gave Sir Bob the benefit of the doubt because he did something, got off his backside, raised all those millions of pounds and actually saved lives. It wasn’t nothing.

Maybe you haven’t cared to think too much about what was really going on. Perhaps your memory replays Jagger and Bowie dancing in the street instead.

You might wince at the recollection of the sound going down on The Who; of the mic failing McCartney during the first two minutes of his first live performance since the murder of John Lennon five years earlier; or at Phil Collins catching the Concorde to drum for a reunited Led Zeppelin, not entirely successfully.

Or you may have forgotten those things. Forty years is 40 years. The memories fade So was Live Aid as era-defining as they say it was? Was it all it was cracked up to be?

Its legend has been reinterpreted so often since it was staged that its reality is almost lost to the scrapings of time. But we should force ourselves. The global jukebox was never the cosy fairy story it appeared to be. Not even the music industry, for whom the event spelled unprecedented publicity, lived happily ever after. Thanks to Live Aid’s resurrection of largely spent heritage acts that would go on to hog the limelight, as many still do today, an abundance of thrilling new-generation artists struggled and often failed to get a foothold in the business.

Watched live by 72,000 people at Wembley Stadium and a further 90,000 at John F. Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia, Live Aid had an estimated television audience of 1.5 billion across 110 countries. While it raised both awareness and much-needed funds, it stands accused of having allowed money to be misdirected, of having reinforced the white Western saviour message, and even for having patronised the entire African continent.

It triggered a Save Africa industry that revived the spectre of colonialism and empire and is reckoned to have done more for the profile of the performing artists than it did to solve the humanitarian crisis. Because the millions raised did not lead to lasting positive change.

It could, it was claimed, be regarded as a ‘Band Aid solution’: a temporary remedy to an immediate problem that did not tackle the root or ongoing causes of poverty and famine. It was further claimed that the famine was man-made.

Government aircraft had apparently napalmed rebel farms. In a region long blighted by drought, 1984’s famine was, it was insisted, more political than an act of God. Ethiopia’s brutal dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam was accused of having used Live Aid funds to purchase weapons from Russia. Ethiopia was, at that time, the third poorest country on Earth. How come it suddenly had the largest, best-kitted army in Africa?

Live Aid’s organisers were also accused of helping to perpetuate a holocaust against Eritrean independence fighters. Geldof was begged not to release any money until a reliable infrastructure to get aid directly to those who needed it was firmly in place.

He released regardless, even joking about supping with the devil. Mengistu, now 88, defected to Zimbabwe in May 1991. His government is held responsible for the deaths of up to two million Ethiopians. Most of them died during the 1983-1985 famine. In absentia, he was found guilty of genocide.

Knowing all this, would we be better off distancing ourselves from the memory, re-assessing Live Aid as an unfortunate accessory to man’s inhumanity to man and despatching it back to the misspent, less-informed past where it belongs?

I’d say not. And I say that because of the music. For its own sake, the music deserves to be celebrated as the element that brought the world together in a common cause as had never been done before. If horrific famine was the prompt, music was the reason for Live Aid. And it was a no-brainer. What else has the ability to stir emotions and minds, individually as well as collectively, and to galvanise the masses as it did?

Music, we know, enriches life by contributing to the phenomenon of human flourishing. It enhances shared experiences, encourages solidarity and promotes life-affirming commonality.

As a valuable binding force across social, cultural and political differences, it is unmatched. Plus, whether we like it or not, the rock superstar is the last great compelling figure of our times.

So today I will re-live without shame my personal memories of Live Aid.

Of driving from Roehampton to Wembley in the boot of the Who’s bassist John Entwistle’s convertible Rolls Royce with his Irish wolfhound, the aptly-named Fits Perfectly. (I stayed with John and his wife, Maxene, at their place the night before the gig. There were a lot of us to fit in the car, and the only place they could fit me, the smallest, was in the boot with Fits!).

Of Elton John cooking a barbecue in a smelly corner of the backstage area, because he didn’t fancy the pop-up Hard Rock Café’s burgers and fries. Of photographer David Bailey’s makeshift studio. Of egos checked at the door. Of the niggles and frostiness among certain band members, as well as all that camaraderie and love.

Standing there watching the artists who played Wembley – Status Quo, Dire Straits, George Michael, Sting, Alison Moyet, the Style Council, Ultravox, Spandau Ballet – so many other supreme performers flooded back into my mind. Alex Harvey, the great glam rocker of the Sensational Alex Harvey Band. Ian Dury and the Blockheads, the Rolling Stones, Syd Barrett of Pink Floyd, Ziggy and the Spiders. I saw, and maybe you saw, Freddie Mercury match them all.

What he displayed that day was instinctive star quality. He conjured and commanded the thrill as to the manner born. It was as if he had studied and absorbed the best-kept secrets of every definitive artist who had gone before him.

He seduced the planet that day. There is a tendency to look back on Live Aid and to see it as more than it was. A global gig staged against all technical odds, it was, for the punters, essentially no more than a great day out. That it earned huge sums for the starving masses seemed almost incidental at the time.

We may not want to, but we know better now.