40 years on, was Live Aid all for nothing? Or can we still be heroes?

A young girl is packing to go to university. She’s going to study history and the course goes up to the 1980s. Her mum produces a book about the great Live Aid concert she attended in 1985. The girl is not interested. But then Bob Geldof walks onto the stage at the start of the West End musical Just For One Day and the cast belt out David Bowie’s “We can be heroes… ”

Over 40 years ago nearly two billion people watched that concert on television. It was the biggest collective event in human history. It wasn’t just a concert. It was an event which changed the mantra of the era – from “greed is good” to “compassion is hip”. Live Aid shifted the political centre of gravity for decades by fusing the worlds of pop and politics. 

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It began when Bob Geldof, horrified by scenes of famine in Ethiopia on the BBC news, brought together Britain’s top pop stars to make a record to raise money for the starving. In doing so, he let something loose in the psyche of the world. Record companies and high-street retailers waived their profits to maximise the amount it raised. Women in the record factory stuck on the labels without pay. Lorry drivers delivered it for free. 

Pop stars in the US produced “We Are the World” – which became the most commercially successful charity single of all time. It gave Geldof the idea of joining the two groups together in a live transatlantic concert linked through the innovation of satellite technology.

Live Aid raised £140 million. I was The Times’ correspondent in Ethiopia at the time. After reading my reports, Geldof asked me to travel across Africa with him to decide how to spend it. But on that journey Geldof was shocked to discover that Africa was being forced to pay the same amount as he had raised every week to Western banks in interest on dodgy loans made during the Cold War.

The revelation set him on a 20-year journey from charity to justice, from fundraising to lobbying politicians to change the unfair relationship between rich and poor nations. In 2005, after campaigning through Drop the Debt, Jubilee 2000 and Make Poverty History, he took Live Aid’s vast audience and turned it into the biggest political lobby for change the world had ever seen: Live 8. 

Read more:

• Whatever happened to Make Poverty History?
• Midge Ure: ‘Music kept me away from gangs’
• My hiatus from work led to some new ideas around poverty prevention

Through eight simultaneous concerts all round the world, Live 8 pressurised the prime ministers and presidents of the eight most powerful nations to wipe away debt and double aid at the G8 summit at Gleneagles. Live Aid raised millions but Live 8 pushed billions towards improving the lot of the poorest people on the planet.

The story of the 40-year journey – from Band Aid to the work which still goes on today – is told in Live Aid – The Definitive 40-Year Story. It is a story of pop, politics, poverty and power. It is filled with wild indignation, furious swearing and a refusal to acknowledge normal political constraints. Politicians were insulted, pop stars had their arms twisted, popes and presidents were cajoled, billionaires were sweet-talked, rules were broken, laws were changed – and millions of lives were saved as a result. I was alongside Geldof through all four decades, so the book is filled with eye-witness accounts of his encounters with top rock stars and major politicians. Many of these tales have never been told before.

But this is not the story of one man. It is the story of a movement. Millions of ordinary people played their part in bringing change. Live Aid did not capture the zeitgeist of the late 80s; it created it. Twenty years on, Live 8 empowered another generation to press for political change outside the normal democratic process. 

Was it all for nothing? Today we live today in a meaner world. Compassion is out of fashion. Governments are cutting aid to the world’s poor. There are wars in Ukraine and Gaza. Defence spending is up. Donald Trump’s shout of “America First” now echoes throughout other nations too.

But think again. In the 1980s, just before Live Aid, military spending was being cranked up in the Cold War. Margaret Thatcher was at war – abroad with Argentina and at home with the miners. Like Ronald Reagan in the US, she was cutting spending on education, housing and welfare for the poor while slashing taxes for the wealthy. City of London yuppy traders grew richer while steelworkers lost their jobs.

Yet when Geldof launched his plea for a new generosity, he found that millions of ordinary people rallied behind him. It can happen again. The journey from Live Aid to Live 8 offers a template for the next generation. It is not a story about then but about now. We can be heroes.

Live Aid: The Definitive 40-Year Story is out now (New Modern, £30).

You can buy it from the Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support Big Issue and independent bookshops.

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