Forty years after Live Aid, the co-author of Bob Geldof’s biography asks: did it work?
Bob Geldof speaks on stage at the start of the Live Aid concert at Wembley Stadium
ALAMY/AP, JOE SCHABER
Commentary on Live Aid and the Make Poverty History experience has tended to cluster around two polar extremes: critical dismissal and uncritical celebration.
Live Aid: The Definitive 40-Year Story
PAUL VALLELY
(NEW MODERN, 590 PP, £30)
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Where were you on 13 July 1985? If you’re over 50, the chances are you were watching, listening to, or hearing about, Live Aid – the Wembley concert organised by Bob Geldof to raise funds for the famine relief in Ethiopia. Fast forward a couple of decades and lower the age bar, and you might recall Live 8, a string of con certs convened by Geldof and Bono, lead singer of U2, ahead of the 2005 Gleneagles G8 summit. This was aimed not at raising funds for charity, but at pressing leaders of the world’s richest countries to bend the arc of justice by writing off Third World debt, increasing aid and reforming world trade.
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