Originally published by L.S. Media On Friday 16th July 2010.
This last week saw the 25th anniversary of the world’s first global concert, a celebration of all things music which was born out of, what was then called Ethiopia’s modern day biblical famine. This event was a concerted effort to bring more attention to the country’s plight and to help right a terrible wrong.
I won’t go into the politics of the time, it takes a person more clever and more learned than I to ever attempt to explain how the cradle of humanity had come to the point of almost complete and utter devastation and destruction, a country seemingly so far away that it barely touched the consciousness of the British Public.
I was 14 at that moment of history that was Live Aid. I was 13 when journalist Michael Burke reported from Ethiopia of the horrors he had witnessed firsthand, the sheer wasting away of humanity that he saw wherever he looked. Like many 13 year olds I didn’t really comprehend or understand what was happening in that far off, remote land. I duly bought the Band Aid single and over the coming months eagerly awaited the concert as it was announced, a one day spectacular that would cover more countries than I could ever dream of visiting and places I could only see on a map of the world that I kept on my bedroom wall.
I had fought like mad with my father over being able to watch it on television (I would never have been allowed to go, it’s only in the last couple of years that he has learned that when I said I was a scout camp I had in fact been on the back of a motorbike on my way to see a favoured band of my acquaintance play at venue many miles away).
As a music fan there was no way I was missing out on this global gig, a one of chance to see some of the bands that I ached to catch live, The Boomtown Rats, David Bowie, Phil Collins (O.K. he wasn’t playing with Genesis but still..Phil Collins) and of course Queen! Some of the bands playing that day I didn’t know, some I didn’t care for and there were singers and groups who weren’t on the bill who I thought should have been.
At 14, I understood the gig, the complexities of getting all these bands in one place to play for a massed audience but I still didn’t really understand what it was for, I honestly didn’t understand.
I had come from a big city (Birmingham) to live in a small market town in rural Oxfordshire a few years before. Arrogantly I thought myself slightly sophisticated; after all I went to Guernsey every year to spend time with my Nan. I had been travelling on trains all my life; I knew all the stops between Bicester to Birmingham and all stops down to the coast where I could board a Sealink Ferry which would take me to the scenic and quietness of the Channel Islands and yet, I still didn’t understand.
July 13th arrived in a blaze of sunshine and as was my daily want at the time, I was up before six, washed in cold water, dressed and downstairs before the clock had time to chime merrily and give me the starting order to go and do my paper round. I remember cursing vividly at my bike which had developed a slow puncture during the night, a reckless skid, showing off that whatever the cooler kids from my school could do on their new B.M.X’s I could do on an old Rayleigh racing bike.
I walked into Bicester town, a couple of miles, listening to my favourite band’s new album on my walkman and still cursing the bike that made me walk the distance into town and the round thereafter.
An hour and half later I was back home, bags of crisps, sandwiches made by the dozen and enough Coca-Cola to float an aid ship, all by the side of my bed where I would lie down and watch heroes strut and play their chosen instruments with a desire that I could never hope to emulate.
As time ticked ever closer to twelve o’clock and Richard Skinner introducing that now memorable moment, I tucked into a second sandwich and I still didn’t understand.
Status Quo came on stage, Francis Rossi and Rick Parfitt! I wowed silently (little did I know that just a few years later I would be serving them both room service whilst I worked in the hotel trade). They played “Rocking All over the World” and the day was begun.
Other acts came and went, Adam and the Ants who I adored but was either misguided or judged wrongly on the day, the youthful Howard Jones, Dire Straits, who at the time had excited half my year at school with their phenomenal Brothers in Arms and off course the Thin White Duke himself David Bowie who bowled me over with his generosity of allowing a video made by an American news company and with a back ground track that was “Drive” by the Cars to be played instead of doing one last song.
At that moment I got it, I was 14 and I was stupid, as Dire Straits had said “We are Brothers in Arms”, not the nuclear arms race I had envisaged, no something more real and much more frightening if we screwed it up. As I watched the film whilst sat on the end of my bed, surrounded by posters long since discarded, I fell apart. The tune that I had thought was to do with the idea of depression and mental anguish came to mean to millions of people round the world something much more than that. It represented what we had done wrong as a species to one of our own.
The blossoming love of music that had taken over my life at a very young age began to take a firm grip and I realised at that moment, words are empty unless accompanied by a tune that the whole world can hum together.
The concert didn’t feel the same after that, sure there were huge highlights, The Who for example (even with a B.B.C technical fault), but nothing sticks in my mind more as a 14 year old rock fan as the sight of a packed out Wembley Stadium reacting to Bob Geldof scream “And the lesson today is how to die” and the generosity of one musician who changed the course of that day forever.
Now 25 years later what have we learned? The television companies have realised how to make true Global events, the media have learned even more how to spin, twist and manipulate a story (for bad or good, not for me to say), musicians, actors, artists and the ordinary person in the street realise they have a voice and an opinion and a tool with the internet to make their leaders (of any persuasion) listen and a World Wide Web which means we can keep up with important and the so called trivial events and make it known that it effects everybody.
However what I also see is the hunger, despair and despondency, not just on the streets of Britain, but in Egypt, Washington D. C, anywhere in the world and I wonder sometimes if, to be honest, we actually understood it all.
Ian D. Hall