Who will be the next Bob Geldof? That’s like saying who will be the next Beatles. Or the next Abba. And the answer is: nobody. Geldof was (and is) smart, opinionated, big-mouthed, scary, sweary, self-confident and most of the big stars in 1985 could not say no to him when he popped the question; “Live Aid – are you in or out?”. But that was then. Geldof was known to most people in the UK, partly because he had been a pop-star and partly because he was living with a very popular TV-presenter; Paula Yates. They were celebrities and fodder for the tabloids. In fact, Paula was better known and more popular than Bob.
The BBC have put together two film-length documentaries about Live Aid which I can warmly recommend, and both are available on YouTube (Live Aid – Against All Odds). It starts out with Band Aid, “Do they know it’s Christmas”, written by Geldof and Midge Ure from Ultravox and produced by Ure. The song became a huge hit, generated cash for Ethiopia and is of course still played every Christmas. But just a few months later Geldof got the idea to follow up Band Aid with Live Aid, a concert to be shared between London and an arena in the USA, and to be broadcast over the whole world. This they managed to put together in an amazingly short period of time, including booking many of the biggest artists of the day. And it generated even more cash for aid to Africa.
The whole world didn’t stand still for Live Aid, but in fact a good portion of it did. Wembley Stadium in London and John F. Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia hosted together about 160 000 people on the day and more than 1.5 billion people watched it live on TV in 100 countries. The numbers probably don’t mean much to people used to seeing those numbers on Spotify or YouTube every day, but the whole thing was organized and promoted in just a few months. It was an incredible feat and an event of that size would probably take a year or more today.
Live Aid would be technically much easier today but culturally impossible. Thirty-three years after Live Aid, the world is a different place and there’s no longer a music community around which everybody could gather. There’s no one forum which attracts everybody, like TV and radio did before the internet took over. We have YouTube of course, but we all watch different things – there’s no concensus. All the artists that appeared on Live Aid were very much aware of each other, many of them had met previously and the audience knew them all too, no matter what the genre. Today, a Spotify or YouTube star with a couple of million listeners globally can be completely unknown to the general public, whereas back then the artists had all had hits and the public knew them all.
Even worse is that the event that triggered both Band Aid and Live Aid, famine in Ethiopia, is happening again, this time in Yemen. And it’s hardly the responsibility of a bunch of pop stars to fix it. Put simply, we’re all responsible and the world is once again standing still. Governments don’t seem to care much and some care less than others. And who puts the governments in place? We do, in democratic countries, by voting for politician’s policies. It would have been good to see demonstrations against famine and children dying rather than for equality which took place last weekend, but that was the right priority. If women had already been equal in every way and if the world wasn’t led mostly by men, the famine in Yemen probably wouldn’t even exist.