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<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\nThe BBC have put\ntogether two film-length documentaries about Live Aid which I can warmly\nrecommend, and both are available on\nYouTube (Live Aid \u2013 Against All Odds). It starts out with Band Aid, \u201cDo they\nknow it\u2019s Christmas\u201d, written by Geldof and Midge Ure from Ultravox and\nproduced by Ure. The song became a huge hit, generated cash for Ethiopia and is\nof course still played every Christmas. But just a few months later Geldof got\nthe idea to follow up Band Aid with Live Aid, a concert to be shared between\nLondon and an arena in the USA, and to be broadcast over the whole world. This\nthey managed to put together in an amazingly short period of time, including\nbooking many of the biggest artists of the day. And it generated even more cash\nfor aid to Africa. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The whole world didn\u2019t\nstand still for Live Aid, but in fact a good portion of it did. Wembley Stadium\nin London and John F. Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia hosted together about\n160 000 people on the day and more\nthan 1.5 billion people watched it live on TV in 100 countries. The numbers\nprobably don\u2019t mean much to people used to seeing those numbers on Spotify or\nYouTube every day, but the whole thing was organized and promoted in just a few\nmonths. It was an incredible feat and an event of that size would probably take\na year or more today. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019s no longer a music community around which everybody could gather. There\u2019s 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 \u2013 there\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019s hardly the responsibility of a bunch of pop stars to fix it. Put simply, we\u2019re all responsible and the world is once again standing still. Governments don\u2019t 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\u2019s 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\u2019t led mostly by men, the famine in Yemen probably wouldn\u2019t even exist. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Who will be the next Bob Geldof? That\u2019s 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; \u201cLive … <\/p>\n