Forty years on, it remains a worldwide musical event without parallel. Starring a who’s who of rock and pop, it reached an audience of nearly 2 billion people across 150 nations – at the time, nearly 4 in every 10 people on Earth.
Yet while music lovers have been celebrating the anniversary of the 1985 Live Aid concert this week, it is not the music that explains its lasting resonance.
At a time when the United States and other wealthy countries are cutting back on foreign aid, and many citizens are focused on national rather than world problems, it is the way that Live Aid came to pass, and its political impact, that make it still so relevant in today’s world.
Why We Wrote This
Forty years ago, the Live Aid megaconcert prompted people around the world, and governments, to give generously to help people starving in Ethiopia. Would it have the same effect today?
It all began with a single, searing BBC TV report in October 1984 from a drought-stricken plain in northern Ethiopia.
“A biblical famine, now, in the 20th century,” it began, as the camera panned to take in nearly 40,000 hunger-wracked men, women, children, and infants.
The report, by my friend and colleague Michael Buerk, ran for nearly eight minutes.
It detailed the plight of the hungry, many also fleeing separatist violence, and the inability of aid workers to bring enough food to help more than a very few of them.
Many who watched it on the main nightly news in Britain could not have found Ethiopia on the map.
But that didn’t matter.
The images of fellow humans in such dire need touched millions in Britain, and in dozens of other countries where the report was shown in the days that followed.
Among those touched was an Irish pop star named Bob Geldof, who was especially moved by an interview Michael did with a young English nurse working with the Red Cross in Ethiopia. She described the agonizing ordeal of having to go from child to child and select the few who could be saved.
Within weeks, Mr. Geldof had formed a group called Band Aid and recorded a single called “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” to raise funds for famine relief in Ethiopia. He had hoped to collect tens of thousands of pounds. But the song raced to No. 1, raising over $10 million.
The Live Aid concert on July 13, 1985, was on an exponentially larger scale. It comprised two concerts, in fact – 16 hours of music, in London’s Wembley Stadium and in John F. Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia.
Nearly everyone who was anyone performed: Paul McCartney and Elton John; Mick Jagger and Tina Turner; Bob Dylan and Freddie Mercury; The Beach Boys and a reunited Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. Madonna, too, a few days short of her 27th birthday.
It ultimately raised around $170 million, one third of that from phone calls on the day, as individual donors inundated switchboards at the BBC and other world broadcasters.
Yet what was critical – and still matters in today’s inward-looking world – is that the concert itself was just one aspect of the wider impact of Michael Buerk’s report.
Its immediate strength was in the powerful human connection it awakened. Without that, the Band Aid single and Live Aid would never have happened.
But the report, and the worldwide response it sparked, also pushed the plight of the hungry in Ethiopia – and the needs of millions of others in the developing world – onto the agendas of political leaders.
In Britain, the change was especially dramatic. The government had been aware of the worsening effects of drought and crop failure in Ethiopia for two years. But only after the BBC report aired did the authorities act, spearheading an international airlift.
As Michael himself has reflected, aid workers’ ability to save more and more people required both: first and foremost the human connection, but also action by governments.
Today, many governments’ priorities seem to be shifting in the opposite direction.
U.S. President Donald Trump has dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development, branding USAID employees “radical lunatics” and sharply cutting back programs providing more than 40% of all humanitarian aid worldwide.
Britain, too, has reduced its overseas aid budget, focusing – like other developed countries – more on domestic economic and national security priorities.
Forty years ago, the human connection, and the burst of individual commitments and generosity, awakened by a single news report prodded governments to rethink their actions.
That reaction seems unlikely today, if only because the media environment has changed beyond recognition.
In 1984, Michael Buerk’s report led the nightly BBC news. Nearly everyone in Britain watched it. Now, millions get their information from their favorite internet sites, often colored by the gladiatorial nature of political debate.
Still, the human connection, and the urge to help, do survive.
They come to the fore at times of shared challenge or natural disaster, as the Monitor seeks to highlight.
But the echoes of Live Aid inevitably prompt a deeper question. Can such fellow feeling reach beyond our immediate surroundings to encompass suffering among more distant people, who neither look, nor live, like us?
Citizens and voters worldwide will determine whether the global mood shifts again.
For now, as Bob Dylan sang to the Live Aid audience on July 13, 1985, the answer is blowin’ in the wind …
