The New Zealand Retro Weekly Top 40 Countdown Celebrates 40 Years Since LIVE AID
As part of its regular programme The New Zealand Retro Weekly Top 40 Countdown with Rob Walker will be playing some of the songs that were on the New Zealand charts 40 years ago this weekend, as they were heard direct from the LIVE AID concert at Wembley Stadium in London and JFK Stadium in Philedelphia. Tune in to your locally owned independent radio station as we celebrate the 40th anniversary of the biggest music concert on the planet – LIVE AID!
For the list of nearly 50 radio stations across the nation, as well as overseas stations playing The New Zealand Retro Weekly Top 40 Countdown with Rob Walker see : www.absoundbites.co.nz .
#LiveAid #LiveAid40 #LiveAid1985 #Retro #NZRWT40 #NewZealandRetroTop40 #Throwback #1980s #the80s #80s #80sthrowback #80smusic #the80srule #LocalRadio #LocalRadioStation #IndependentRadio #ListenLocal #LocalRadioMatters #Radio #NewZealandRadio #IndependentRadio #IndependentMedia #IndependentMediaAssociation #IMA
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NZ Herald
27-07-2025
- NZ Herald
40 years after Live Aid, it's still personal for Bob Geldof
Geldof persuaded many of the world's top artists at the time to play for free, including Queen, David Bowie, Madonna, the Who, Elton John, Tina Turner and Paul McCartney. The shows were seen by about 1.5 billion people in more than 150 countries and would go on to raise more than US$140 million ($235m). Stars including George Michael, left; Paul McCartney, fourth from left; and Freddie Mercury, second from right, during the Live Aid Concert at Wembley Stadium in London on July 13, 1985. Photo / Getty Images The concerts followed the success of the Band Aid charity single, Do They Know It's Christmas?, which Geldof had co-written with singer Midge Ure and released the previous year. The song featured a who's who of British music, and raised £8m ($18m). It also inspired Harry Belafonte to organise an American equivalent, We Are the World, which remains one of the bestselling singles in history. Live Aid transformed Geldof into one of the world's best-known and most successful activists. The Band Aid Charitable Trust, a foundation he co-created, is still funding international development projects to alleviate poverty and hunger in Africa. These include supporting maternal health care facilities in Ethiopia and a programme to provide meals for children. To mark the Live Aid anniversary, the BBC and CNN co-produced a documentary series, Live Aid: When Rock 'n' Roll Took On the World. It also covers Band Aid and Live 8, concerts that Geldof organised in 2005 that helped pressure the world's richest countries to cut the debt owed by the poorest countries and increase aid spending. A medical and food distribution centre in Ethiopia in November 1984 during what the BBC called a 'biblical famine.' Photo / Finn Frandsen / Polphoto / AFP Geldof, 73, is currently on tour for another anniversary – celebrating 50 years since the founding of the Boomtown Rats – and spoke in a video interview from Novi Sad, Serbia, where the band performed last week. This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity. Q: Tell me about that day in 1984 when you saw the BBC report. 'I was anxious at the time. I don't think my band had made a great record, and we weren't getting in the charts. A measure of how well we were not doing was I was home at 6 o'clock: Pop singers should not be doing 9 to 5. 'But everyone in Britain came home and watched the 6 o'clock news. The BBC gave this story about famine in Africa about eight minutes – the reporter went to the epicentre of the famine in Korem, Ethiopia, and sent this devastating piece of journalism. The objective truth and the subjective rage of what he was telling us about was evident, and certainly struck me. 'We were riveted by the prurience and the horror of it. This other world was suddenly thrown at us. I very much remember those images, and if you force me to articulate them again, I start crying again. Those images are the things that my mind will not allow me to obliterate.' Q: Yet you revert to those images when you want people to understand the horror of what motivated you in the first place. A: I suppose it's been the animus through the years. I can lobby and write policy, but when push comes to shove, it's only the end object that animates me to act. It can come to a head in a personal way. In Montreal last November, I was staying at a posh hotel. My wife ordered breakfast. The guy arrived and asked if he could say hello to her husband. He came into the room in an ill-fitting suit, pushing the trolley. He was a small guy and obviously Ethiopian. Geldof and the singer Midge Ure in London in 1984. They wrote the single Do They Know It's Christmas? together. Photo / Getty Images He said, 'Can I shake your hand?' He then stood bolt upright – he had prepared this – and made a speech at me. He didn't know who his parents were, he had been in Korem, and said he was raised on Band Aid food in a Band Aid orphanage, and he got to Paris to study catering and he was now here. I asked if he had a family and he said yeah, he had met an Ethiopian girl and he showed me a picture of her and his two cute kids, 8 and 9. Then he suddenly rushed at me and hugged me, and laid his head on my chest and said, 'Thank you for my sons, thank you for my life.' Obviously, Live Aid and Band Aid were the work of thousands of people. But you know, it worked. Q: But there is a difference between being enraged and actually doing something. A: What I've learned is that it is no use walking around singing, We Shall Overcome. Because you won't. Singing the song isn't enough. Protest songs are only ever protest songs. Music can be a call to arms, but music itself changes nothing. It won't go further unless you are determined to act upon it. The bands at Live Aid were the Pied Pipers, and the audience gathered around the electronic hearth of television and radio. The symbolism of it all carried through to 20 years of lobbying to change policy. 'Singing the song isn't enough,' Geldof said. 'It won't go further unless you are determined to act upon it.' Photo / Chris Hoare, The New York Times Q: You saw music as a platform to do things. Could Live Aid happen today? A: I don't think it's possible now. Society has changed. The web is an isolating technology. It knows what you are, it drives you, it gives you what it thinks you want, and as you get jaded it gives you more extreme versions of that. Now, music is free and you get the news that you want to see. The web is an echo chamber of your own prejudices, so you only hear the music that it thinks you like. It's a silo of the self. So I don't think music can survive being the spine of the culture as it was. Q: Bohemian Rhapsody, the 2018 film about singer Freddie Mercury, suggests that Queen's Live Aid performance was the moment when the donations started flowing in. A: The movie isn't right. Queen were completely, utterly brilliant. But the telephone lines collapsed after David Bowie performed. I was given the outtakes of a report that the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation couldn't show, because it was just so appalling, the visual images. The editor had cut the film in Addis Ababa to the tune of Drive, the Cars song, and it's worse than the BBC report. Harvey Goldsmith, the concert promoter, and I had gone to see David about what songs he would sing. But before we started talking about the songs, I said, 'Look at this thing,' and I put it on. David Bowie during the Live Aid concert at Wembley in 1985. Donations started flowing in after his performance. Photo / Getty Images David was crying and said he would cut a song from his set to show the CBC report instead. It's an extraordinary moment during the concert, because at the end of Heroes, which the crowd were all singing, he quietly introduces the clip and asks people to send their money in. It was like a slap in the face. Bowie brought the house down. That was the key moment. Q: How do you respond to criticism that you and Live Aid are examples of a 'white saviour' complex? You have said it simply isn't relevant when you are dealing with an emergency or disaster. A: There is nothing to argue. It's nonsense, like any dogma. It's like Catholicism that says you are born with original sin. Or Freudianism. It's theory and notional. It's not even worth entertaining. It doesn't exist. Q: You have always been pragmatic with your activism, and you've dealt with politicians of all stripes. How do you feel about President Donald Trump and Elon Musk, and their decision to gut USAID, which worked in many of the areas and causes that you have fought for? 'We're in a radically different world now. It's the argument between nationalism and internationalism. 'What is profoundly shocking is the cackling glee with which the Trump-Vance-Musk triumvirate went about declaring war on the weakest and most vulnerable people of our planet. America was always the most generous by far of all the countries. 'Why would great America do that, while the richest man on the planet cackles that we're going to feed USAID into the wood chipper? It is grotesque, it is a disgrace to the country.' Musk said that the great weakness of Western civilisation is empathy. You fool. Empathy is the glue of humanity. It is the basis of civilisation. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. Written by: Ravi Mattu Photographs by: Chris Hoare ©2025 THE NEW YORK TIMES
Otago Daily Times
14-07-2025
- Otago Daily Times
Rock stars reunite for Live Aid's 40th anniversary
Sir Bob Geldof of The Boomtown Rats performs during the gala performance after party. Musicians who performed at Live Aid, the transatlantic concert that raised millions for famine relief in Ethiopia, have reunited in London to mark the event's 40th anniversary, attending a special performance of the musical Just For One Day. Queen guitarist Sir Brian May. Photo: Reuters Among the stars gathered at Shaftesbury Theatre on Sunday were Live Aid organisers Sir Bob Geldof and Midge Ure, Queen guitarist Sir Brian May, musician Nik Kershaw and actor Vanessa Williams. On that day in 1985, some of the biggest names in music came together for the televised international charity show, held simultaneously at London's Wembley Stadium and the John F. Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia. An estimated 1.5 billion people globally watched Live Aid via live satellite broadcasts. The event raised about $US100 million ($NZ167 million) and spawned similar events all over the world for decades afterwards. Irish rocker and activist Geldof told Reuters that Live Aid was still important because it showed the power of collaborative action. "And today in the age of the death of kindness, which [US President Donald] Trump, [Vice President J.D.] Vance and [Elon] Musk have ushered in, it probably resonates all the more strongly," Geldof said. David Bowie performing at the Live Aid concert at Wembley Stadium in 1985. The musicians attended a performance of Just For One Day: The Live Aid Musical, a behind-the-scenes stage musical featuring songs from Sunday's attendees as well as Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Madonna, Sir Elton John and Sir Paul McCartney. The musical, which had a run at London's Old Vic in 2024, transferred to the Shaftesbury Theatre in London's West End in May. It is produced with the permission of the Band Aid Charitable Trust, which gets 10% from the sales of all tickets. Queen's Freddie Mercury and Brian May on stage at Wembley. "It made me very emotional at the time. Even thinking about it now makes me emotional," May told Reuters, referring to Live Aid in 1985. Queen's performance that day at Wembley Stadium is widely regarded as a landmark concert in rock music history. "There has never been a day like that in my life," May said.
Otago Daily Times
11-07-2025
- Otago Daily Times
Achievements answer Live Aid critics
When Bob Geldof recruited Bono for a charity concert, he thrust global inequality into the spotlight. Forty years on, the pair discuss the legacy of Live Aid with Angus Macqueen. "He has a rage in him that has made him, I think, the greatest conversationalist I've ever met. He's turned expletives into poetry around our kitchen table. I don't believe any of my activism would have happened without his inspiration." So says Bono about Bob Geldof. "He wants to give the world a great big hug, and I want to punch its lights out." So says Bob Geldof about Bono. I knew little about Geldof — beyond having joined the nation in watching the Live Aid concert in 1985 — when I was invited to join him for a meeting with the BBC's head of content, Charlotte Moore, last year, alongside the renowned documentary-maker Norma Percy, to discuss plans for marking the 40th anniversary. Geldof steamrollered the occasion with stories of being on Air Force One with George HW Bush, driving Italian prime minister Romano Prodi into a hotel bathroom to make a decision on debt relief, and visiting the Elysee palace with Francois Mitterrand, persuading the top-secret French president to allow spy satellites to broadcast the Live Aid concert to Africa. Such stories led to the commission of a 40th anniversary series on Live Aid and Live 8. The scale of the 1985 Live Aid concert is hard to comprehend. With virtually no warning, the BBC cleared the schedule for an insane dual gig, bouncing from Wembley in London to JFK stadium in Philadelphia over 16 hours. The claim, though how anyone could prove it, is that the line-up of superstars including McCartney, Bowie, Queen, Jagger, Turner, Dylan and a young Madonna, reached 84% of the world's TV sets. In an age of cash, cheques and postal orders, more than £100m was raised. When I began talking about Live Aid to others, I ran into a huge generational divide. Most who were adults in the 1980s retain a rose-tinted memory of a time when people came together to do something for the famine in Ethiopia. But those aged 40 and under responded with either total ignorance or profound cynicism. Wasn't the money wasted or misused? Weren't the concerts just an exercise in self-promotion for a declining rock star, in the case of Geldof, and in yet more dull sanctimonious celebrity moralising, in the case of Bono? Often added is a layer of ideology casting Geldof and Bono as "white saviours", with attitudes that embody everything that is wrong about the relationship between the global north and south. Witness the storm raised by Ed Sheeran and Fuse ODG around the re-release of Do They Know It's Christmas? last November. Geldof and Bono met through music in the clubs of Dublin in the 1970s. "I'm Irish. Bob Geldof is Irish," Bono said. "We would consider ourselves partners [with Africans] from the beginning. It is not a patronising or even paternalistic relationship that we have with our African peers, because we're Irish. We have the folk memory of famine." There is a hint of truth to such romantic exceptionalism, but it rarely convinces critics. What convinced me was the sheer hard work both of them have put in since. Tony Blair's officials, along with their EU counterparts, were impressed to find that Geldof knew all the statistics when confronting them with the iniquities of the quotas that stymie Africa's trade with the rest of the world, from bananas to chocolate. Bono spent weeks in the vaults of the World Bank in Washington in order to argue debt figures on the floor of Condoleezza Rice's office in the White House. Many will know the mythologised story of how Geldof was inspired to act after watching a BBC news report about a "biblical famine" in Ethiopia, during which a young British nurse was seen literally picking out which children to save. But it is worth considering again. How many of us have watched horrors on our TVs, and simply kept on sitting on our sofas? Geldof did something. Forty years later, witnessing him break down when remembering his first visit to the famine area of Ethiopia, I had no doubt as to how that decision transformed his life. Geldof's mix of charm, calculation, rudeness, passion and an intelligence that cannot stomach evasion, drove him through the offices of presidents and prime ministers, the diaries of music superstars, and the lives of millions of people around the world. Twice. He is surprisingly modest when he admits that he didn't like Queen before their Wembley performance, or when he explains he had to negotiate with Madonna by letter. He knows that his mission has given him access to superstars that his own music has not. But when he thinks he is right, he is a bull; when he doesn't like something, he tells you. And doesn't stop telling you. Very loudly. As Bono put it: "It's not a question of persuasion. He's just impossible to argue with. Bob Geldof is what justice looks like when it runs out of patience." Geldof is aware of the criticism around white saviourism; the current questioning of the very concept of aid and charity. "I will not have the ACTUAL empirical history examined or critiqued through an arbitrary and irrational structuralist undergrad theoretical lens, no matter how groovy a 28-year-old imagines it to be. Structuralists, Foucault, Derrida, Lacan and all those other tossers hold that reality is a semiotic construct. That it does not exist as we believe it. Tell that to the starving. Not that those c***s have ever gone without so much as a cornflake," he wrote to me in a message. He goes on to insist that postmodernism, irony and relativism are all impediments to action, and excuses for inaction. His answer is to list concrete achievements: sums raised, hospitals built, lives saved. Things done. That might seem rude or insulting, but watch him confront Margaret Thatcher in 1984 over Band Aid's VAT charges, or answer complex questions about the misuse of aid by the Ethiopian authorities in 1985, and you see his political acuity. Geldof's imagination is unbounded. He knew the 1985 Live Aid had to be the biggest concert ever and broadcast all over the world. In 2005, when cajoled into attempting a repeat, he insisted that eight simultaneous events must be held in each of the G8 countries, for the people to challenge their leaders. Once in passing, Geldof told me of a project he had dreamed up in 1989 to take on climate change: he would train to be an astronaut and orchestrate a 24-hour programme from every part of our fragile planet while aboard the International Space Station. When Nasa did not answer his calls, he rang the Russians. He was too tall. Where Geldof is right in your face, Bono is all strategy and planning. Where Geldof charges out front like a mad general, Bono builds a team around himself, his lobbying "band" as he calls them. The Live Aid concert inspired Bono and his wife to work with an aid agency in Ethiopia at the end of 1985, without fanfare. He and Geldof began what Bono calls the journey from charity to justice, understanding that only governments can truly address the iniquities of the relationship between the different countries of Africa and the global north. For Bono, these goals superseded ideology. In 2001, he appealed to the "enemy", US president George W Bush, in what Bush's chief of staff, Joshua Bolten, described to me as the "greatest lobbying exercise" he has ever seen. Bush was widely despised, but Bono, secure in his religious belief, appealed not only to Bush's conscience but to some of the most conservative figures in the Senate. He persuaded them that aid to Africa was not just a religious imperative, but in the US's deepest interests. One result was Pepfar, which over the past 20 years has seen different administrations put more than $US100 billion into providing HIV medicine across the continent. As Bush told me, in a rare interview clearly aimed at the current incumbent of the White House: "About 27 million people now live who would have died. And the fundamental question for Americans was whether that was in our national interest. I decided it was. It would not have happened without Bono." Bono's anger is intense as he describes how Trump and Musk are laying waste to that legacy, and USAID. "A hammer has come down from hell, and it is going to cause hell," he said. "Elon Musk can treat USAID like a company that he's just bought, where his tactics are always to just fire everybody, dismiss everybody, and rehire the absolutely necessary. There are millions of people who are going to lose their lives because of this act of vandalism." His lobbying band are still fighting to save what they can — including the vaccination campaigns that have almost wiped out polio. — The Observer
