Achievements answer Live Aid critics

Otago Daily Times

11-07-2025

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