Live Aid 40 years on: the last hurrah of the white Anglo-Saxon world
Bob Geldof performing at Live Aid, with the original 1985 concert poster
As rows break out over the management of Glastonbury it is worth recalling that 40 Years ago, in July 1985, the world’s greatest rock concert filled Wembley Stadium and a football stadium in Philadelphia. Live Aid raised more than $100 million for famine relief in Ethiopia where a civil war had raged for decades. In parallel fighters for the independence of Eritrea fought to establish their state free of Ethiopian control.
A young Irish singer, Bob Geldof, who could talk the hind leg off the proverbial donkey, managed to charm and hustle a number of far more famous rock musicians – Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger, David Bowie, Sting and Bob Dylan to perform one after the other to the giant audiences in Wembley and Philiadelphia
Prince (now King) Charles and his then wife Diana presided over the event. The then Prince of Wales dressed in a Savile Row suit and tie. Awareness of suitable attire for a rock concert had not then penetrated the royal world, still badly out of touch with Britain.
Now the BBC has produced a fascinating documentary on all the behind scene manoeuvres to create the two giant concerts and raise the money. It is made by the legendary geopolitical documentary maker, Norma Percy, who has won awards for getting principals in Moscow, Washington, London, Belgrade, the Middle East to tell their history in their own words.
This 40th anniversary documentary makes for compelling viewing on the world of rock stars and the impact they and their music had on the baby boomer generation. It was that generation — also known as the 1968 generation — who left universities all over the world and proceeded to dismantle Soviet colonialism in Europe, establish rights for women, end apartheid, remove military rulers in Latin America and march for 1001 good causes. Now in their eighth decade, they have lived to see Trump as president, Russia invading Europe, and China waiting to pick up the pieces, as democracies eat themselves alive thanks to the stupidities of both the Left and the Right.
The Norma Percy documentary is quite gripping but as it went on, in the well-edited way of all her work, what it really showed was the last gasp of a 1980s world that has disappeared forever. It was a testament to the white Anglo-Saxon world which had been running the show for more than two centuries. The stars on the stages were almost exclusively white. The presenters who announced each act were white. The royalty were white. The clipped voices of BBC news presenters announcing how much money had been raised belonged to white women.
The BBC and other reporters whose TV crews shot news clips of horrifying pictures of starving-to-death African children, like Michael Buerk and Jonathan Dimbleby, were white. Behind the scenes the impresarios and concert promoters who put on the show, the PR experts who secured the attendance of the future King Charles, were all white.
Two white politicians, Tony Blair and George W Bush, get an outing, though without a mention of their own wars in impoverished nations. It is a Bob Geldof show. He appears as a changeling, evolving from the cheeky Irish singer of 1985 to the elderly white-haired episcopal figure of today. He pontificates, using the “f” word in every sentence, on all the faults of the world’s rulers live on stage after a showing of the documentary at BAFTA on Piccadilly.
The fans in Wembley and Philadelphia were practically all white. I worked and lived on the continent in the 1980s and no-one in France or Germany took much notice of LiveAid. It was an outing for the US-UK “special relationship”.
The two English-speaking countries had never taken much interest in the cultures and languages and politics of nations south of the Rio Grande or across the Channel. Like 19th century Victorians, they were moved by the plight of starving Africans and produced a mountain of charitable donations. But they had no idea how to encourage change in the politics of Africa.
Now that era seems more like 100, not 40, years ago. Despite the obsessions of some right-wingers in politics and the intellectual world, Britain is no longer composed of “White British”. The King’s father, Prince Philip, was an immigrant asylum seeker fleeing the Nazis. Black or Asian TV and radio presenters, all British born, were not allowed on our screens by the BBC in the early 1980s. Today it is quite different.
Live Aid was a moment in British history. But its Anglo-Saxon whiteness isn’t coming back.
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