Latest news with #BandAid
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
Bob Geldof shouts 'shut up' on Sky News in a desperate plea for Gaza babies
Sir Bob Geldof has declared that footage of malnourished youngsters in Gaza "enrages" him whilst criticising the UK Government for lack of action. The Band Aid founder accused Israeli authorities of "lying" as they claimed "no famine caused by Israel". "They're dangling food in front of starving, panicked, exhausted mothers," he stated. During a passionate Sky News discussion, an incensed Sir Bob questioned how Britain could develop a cutting-edge supercomputer earlier this month whilst infants in Gaza were forced to survive on mere spoonfuls of salt and minimal water. He declared: "Shut up. What have we become that we can do this miracle and perpetuate this agony?". READ MORE: Multiple bodies found in Cornwall woods, crime commissioner confirms READ MORE: Woman barred from Spoons says 'I'm not far-right - I care about this country' He also criticised the UK administration, stating they had achieved "not enough". Sir Bob proposed that acknowledging Palestinian statehood - something Keir Starmer faces mounting pressure to pursue - wouldn't alter the humanitarian crisis. He urged Labour parliamentarians to cease their correspondence campaigns for recognition, describing such efforts as "virtue signalling" currently, concluding: "Enough. Guys, focus on the issue to hand.", reports the Mirror. The political activist emphasised that the most crucial issue is to prevent starving mothers and infants from being exploited as "instruments of war". Regarding the Israel-Hamas conflict, he expressed his disinterest in the statements from both parties, stating: "I'm really not interested in what either of these sides are saying. When you target infants and children, when their wounds are no longer capable of healing, when breastfeeding mothers can no longer do this, then everything goes out the window." He also addressed criticism of Israelis, some of whom were protesting against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's actions in Gaza, suggesting they should take direct action by delivering aid themselves. Sir Bob urged: "What's unfair is what's happening to these babies.... What's unfair is that one hour from the hunger, people are sitting down to their unthreatened dinners to turn on the next Netflix show. "So if Israelis want to protest, get in your cars. This is very bold stuff, I know, sorry about that. Get in your car, stuff your cars full of food and drive through that border and let your own army stop you." In efforts to provide assistance, the UK is collaborating with Jordan to facilitate airdrops into Gaza. Treasury minister James Murray commented on the situation, acknowledging the need for action: "We need to be doing everything we possibly can to help." However, he conceded that there are significant limitations and disadvantages associated with airdrop methods of delivering aid. Meanwhile, the Prime Minister faces mounting pressure to officially recognise Palestine, especially following French President Emmanuel Macron's declaration that France would do so come September. A cross-party group of 221 MPs, including members from Labour, the Conservatives, Liberal Democrats, SNP, Greens, Plaid Cymru, SDLP and independents, have penned a letter urging the Government to take action at an upcoming UN meeting. The majority of signatories, with 131 being Labour MPs, are pushing for a significant move. Mr Murray commented on Sunday: "As a Government, we're committed to the recognition of Palestine, but we need to work with international partners and we need to use that moment to galvanise change. It needs to be part of a pathway to peace." He further noted: "140 countries have already recognised Palestine. The suffering is still continuing." On the other hand, Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has maintained her stance in support of Israel despite distressing images emerging from Gaza. She remarked: "War is a difficult situation and what I see when I see Israel is a country that is trying to defend itself, mostly from Iran and a lot of its proxies, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis. I think they are in a very difficult situation." She expressed concern over the prolonged conflict, saying: "What worries me is that the length of time that this war has been going on is making it very difficult for the people in the Palestinian territories and also for Israel. We need to bring things to an end."
NZ Herald
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- 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
Irish Times
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Bob Geldof: ‘I never read about myself. I can't stand the stupid f**king things I say'
Bob Geldof has yet to sit down to Live Aid at 40 , the BBC's gripping and expletive-filled account of how he wrangled some of the world's biggest pop stars into appearing at the era-defining 1985 charity concerts at Wembley in London and in Philadelphia . 'I never watch anything that I'm in. I never read anything about myself. I can't stand the stupid f**king things I say. I can't stand looking at my crap hair and all that sort of stuff. But I know about it and the response has been amazing. I was in Britain on the 'anniversary day',' he says, referring to Live Aid's 40th 'birthday' on July 13th. 'Even calling it the 'anniversary day' is weird to me.' Live Aid at 40 portrayed Geldof in a largely laudatory light. There were quibbles about the lyrics of the 1984 Band Aid single, Do They Know It's Christmas? Ethiopian politicians were offended by the song's title, explaining that, with their rich history of Christianity, they were perfectly aware of the birth of Jesus. [ Live Aid at 40: Bob Geldof emerges from this less sanitised version of events seeming somehow more admirable Opens in new window ] But the film's wider message was that Geldof had done something extraordinary by cajoling music's brightest lights – most famously Freddie Mercury and Queen – into coming together to raise millions for the victims of the Ethiopian Famine. He is pleased the documentary was well received, and that the anniversary hoopla has refocused attention on the plight of so many in Africa today. 'The nicest thing I read was that the greatest achievement of Live Aid was, in this world of indifference, [it] put poverty in Africa back on the agenda 40 years later.' READ MORE Geldof (73) has a reputation as a garrulous interviewer and someone prone to going off on a tangent. However, he is chatty and considered when talking to The Irish Times ahead of a performance next weekend by his group the Boomtown Rats in Co Waterford. It's possible we've caught him at a good moment. He's out on the road, leading the band on a 50th anniversary tour and playing to packed houses (a new compilation record, The First 50 Years: Songs of Boomtown Glory, follows in September). Though Live Aid and his campaigning have arguably eclipsed the Boomtown Rats' melodic punk pop, music is still his first love – and on stage, he burns with the same anger that has been a defining quality of his band since they played their debut concert on the campus of Bolton Street Institute of Technology in 1975. His rage came from his experience as a young man coming of age in the near-theocracy that was 1970s Ireland. He wasn't the only one to bristle under the dead hand of the Church – but he spoke out about it where others refused to. That need to lash out was the driving force behind the Boomtown Rats' first single, Rat Trap – inspired by his experience working in an abattoir in Dublin and observing how Catholicism and a life of narrowed horizons had beaten down and hollowed out his colleagues. He was only getting started. He and his band were more or less blacklisted from Ireland after Geldof went on The Late Late Show in 1977 and denounced 'medieval-minded clerics and corrupt politicians'. He also had a go at some nuns heckling from the audience – telling them they had 'an easy life with no material worries in return for which they gave themselves body and soul to the church'. The appearance caused a furore – even the unflappable Gay Byrne looked shocked. The Boomtown Rats would not play again in Ireland until 1980. It was a price he was happy to pay – a point he made clear in the 2020 documentary Citizens of Boomtown, released along with a well-reviewed comeback album of the same name. Bob Geldof: 'I have more or less the exact same opinion as everybody else on the disgrace, the horror of Palestine.' Photograph: Chris Hoare/New York Times Geldof performs with The Boomtown Rats at Leixlip Castle in 1980. Photograph: Paddy Whelan 'There was certainly a focused anger with me,' he says today. 'Perhaps less so with some of the others [in the band]. An inchoate undetermined rage was definitely the fuel. If there was this society that was just stuck, and there didn't seem to be any way that it could unstick itself, we would just go – along with hundreds and thousands of others. But in our going we articulated, I think, that rage – either literally in the songs or in the sound we made.' Decades on, a new generation of Irish musicians has taken up the baton – most prominently the Belfast-Derry rap trio Kneecap and Dublin/Mayo indie band Fontaines DC, who have advocated fiercely on behalf of Gaza. Does he see something of himself and the Boomtown Rats in those artists? [ Citizens of Boomtown: 'Bob Geldof drove me out of my f***ing mind' Opens in new window ] 'As I said, rock'n roll is essentially an articulation of the hitherto inexpressible. If there's something bothering you and you're inherently musical it will find its way. And it is something that seems to catch the zeitgeist. That's why these things become popular. The attitude of Fontaines and Kneecap ... there's a direct line back to Little Richard. It's corny and obvious but it's true.' The distinction, he believes, is that music is no longer at the centre of the culture of protest. It isn't that bands today care any less than their predecessors or that their fans are any less invested. But society no longer looks to music for answers in the way it once did. 'The difference is that ... this is contentious, but why not? I think that rock'n'roll as the spine of the culture was a 50-year phenomenon,' he says. 'In my lifetime rock'n roll was the arbiter of the social dialogue. The role of music has been taken by social media. Pop was our social media.' Everything changed in the early 21st century, he believes. The internet assumed dominance, and music became just another art form rather than a lightning rod for dissent and challenging the status quo. Bob Geldof and Darren Beale of The Boomtown Rats on stage at the Exit Festival in Novi Sad, Serbia, earlier this month. Photograph:'The year 2004 was when Google first made a profit. And 2004 was when this new thing appeared called Facebook. From that point on [music reverted to being] like music in the 1920s, '30s, '40s. Brilliant artists, brilliant writers, wonderful music. Fantastic songs. 'That doesn't mean music has lost all meaning. Just that it is no longer a pillar of social protest. You will always remember the feeling when you first kissed a girl, first kissed a boy. That will always be there,' he continues. '[But] it's been taken over by social media. Social media will take what a band has to say and amplify it. But then again social media is not a broad technology, it is an isolationist technology. So it has less impact. And while these bands make great music and they are fantastic bands, I'm not sure it will have the resonances that pop once had.' Geldof grew up in Dún Laoghaire, Dublin. His mother died of a brain haemorrhage when he was seven, and he was raised by his father, who managed restaurants around Dublin. The singer later attributed what The Irish Times once described as his 'premature independence' and habit of pushing back against the status quo to the absence of a mother and his father's long working hours. Having left Ireland and taken on various jobs in Cambridgeshire and Canada, he returned home and founded the Boomtown Rats in 1975. After one of their early gigs, a woman walked up and asked if she could sleep with him – an exchange he had never imagined possible in 1970s Ireland. At that moment, he understood that being a rock star could change his life. Relocating to London, the band had huge success with singles such as I Don't Like Mondays. The country myself and the Rats left was a very closed society, which ultimately led to a highly degenerate political body — Bob Geldof Geldof entered a relationship with TV presenter Paula Yates . They had three daughters and eventually tied the knot, though the marriage fell apart after Yates embarked on an affair with Michael Hutchence of INXS, with whom she had another daughter. Hutchence died by suicide in 1997. Yates suffered a fatal heroin overdose in 2000. In April 2014 there was further tragedy when Geldof and Yates's 25-year-old daughter Peaches died , also of a drug overdose. In a statement, Geldof said the family was 'beyond pain'. Geldof is widely admired, but he is not above criticism. After Live Aid, he was accused of encouraging a White Saviour attitude towards Africa. The naysayers have included Ed Sheeran who said last year that his vocals were added to a new remix of Do They Know It's Christmas? without his permission. His contribution was taken from a 2014 version of the song, and Sheeran said that, were he asked to participate today, he would decline. He quoted an Instagram post by singer Fuse ODG, who said undertakings such as Live Aid 'perpetuate damaging stereotypes that stifle Africa's economic growth, tourism and investment, ultimately … destroying its dignity, pride and identity'. Geldof and Paula Yates in 1979. Photograph: Keystone/Getty Images Live Aid: Geldof and fellow musicians on stage at Wembley in 1985. Photograph: BBC/Brook Lapping/Mirrorpix/Getty Geldof, along with his contemporary Bono, has also been attacked for staying 'quiet' about Gaza. Last year, singer Mary Coughlan said: 'We all saved the world when Bob and Bono were talking about saving the world, and I couldn't understand what was different about this situation in Gaza. Why would they would be so quiet about it?' 'Well of course I have opinions, like anybody,' he says of Gaza, adding that, as a trustee of the Band Aid Charitable Trust, his work with Africa is his primary focus. 'Whether I like it or not, I am associated with Africa. I've spent 40 years … Every day, I wake to at least 10 Band Aid emails about the latest situation. [The charity is] still building hospitals or … dealing with children Sudan. Or dealing with the ruined bodies of gang-raped women … And trying to give them some semblance of a future life. That's what I wake to every morning and have done for 40 years,' says Geldof. 'So you'll forgive me when I speak I stay focused on that where I know from whence I speak. I can literally do something about that. I have obviously more or less the exact same opinion as everybody else on the disgrace, the horror of Palestine. And, as you know, the answer to the issue of Palestine – it's not as if it's unresolvable. It is a two-state solution. And one way or the other that will ultimately occur. ' He points out that in 1984, nobody was taking a public stand about the famine in Ethiopia. He was the first musician with a platform to do so. Today, there is a chorus of voices about Gaza. 'There was an opportunity to give a focus point,' he said of Live Aid. 'There are plenty of focus points with regard to Palestine. But nothing is going to happen there until the wanton killing is stopped.' What about the argument that Ireland and Britain have flipped positions since Geldof was an angry young man? Once hidebound by religion, the Republic has blossomed into a poster child for progressive values – or so we like to tell ourselves. Meanwhile it has become voguish to paint post-Brexit UK as a wasteland of hollowed-out town centres and red-faced men in Wetherspoons complaining about refugees. [ The unsung Irishman behind Live Aid. Not Bono, not Bob, but Paddy Opens in new window ] 'I'd be wary of the starting point with regards to Britain ... It's a dynamic and creative country. Regardless of what you think, it's still the seventh biggest economy on the planet. In Ireland's case, it is transformative. I come back to what I always thought the country could be. That is not to say I don't know very well indeed the contemporary issues. I follow it rigorously and avidly. My family are in Ireland. I'm back all the time. I follow the politics etc. Having said that, the country myself and the Rats left [was] a very closed society, which ultimately led to a highly degenerate political body.' Bono makes an interesting point in the Live Aid documentary about he and Geldof, being Irish, having a folk memory of the Famine. Geldof wasn't aware of Bono's comments – as he says, he didn't watch the series. But he does wonder if being Irish did help put a fire under him. In one scene in the BBC film, he browbeats Margaret Thatcher into essentially removing VAT from Do They Know It's Christmas? He looks her straight in the eyes and talks without fear or deference – something it's hard to imagine even the most ardent English punk rocker doing. [ Live Aid spurred me into becoming a GOAL volunteer on the ground in Africa Opens in new window ] 'One of my pet theories is that punk is largely the product of the first generation of the Windrush people [ie migrants to Britain from the Caribbean] and the first generation of the 1950s mass migration out of Ireland. I don't think it's an accident you had Elvis Costello, Shane MacGowan, George O'Dowd [aka Boy George], Johnny Lydon, Morrissey, Johnny Marr, the Gallagher brothers. A very antsy attitude. Then you had the actual Irish like us. Some of us were friends some of us weren't – rivals or whatever. I always got on really well with Johnny. We always seemed to get on well with each other. Did it make a difference with Live Aid? I don't think anyone was surprised it came out of the Irish community.' The Boomtown Rats play All Together Now at Curraghmore Estate, Co Waterford, over the August bank holiday weekend. The First 50 Years: Songs of Boomtown Glory is released September 19th
The Herald Scotland
18-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
Stop this insidious propaganda that Queen was Live Aid's best band
At the time I thought Hall and Oates were the best performers on the day (mostly because they were joined by David Ruffin and Eddie Kendricks of The Temptations). Watching the concert again on BBC Two on Saturday night George Michael's performance of Elton John's Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me seemed to me head and shoulders above everything else on the day (and I'm as allergic to Elton John as I am to Queen). One wonders what might have happened if Wham! had played a full set. Freddie Mercury, lead singer with the rock group Queen, during the Live Aid concert (Image: PA) But as it is the legend goes that Queen were the standouts and I suppose there must be something to it. 'There's a reason why people still talk about the Queen performance or the U2 performance,' Midge Ure - who, along with Bob Geldof of the Boomtown Rats instigated the whole Band Aid/Live Aid thing - told Dermot O'Leary on Radio 2 on Saturday morning. 'They were standout moments. They will go down in history … If you want to play in front of a lot of people this is how you do it.' And the thing is, he added, on the day Queen's singer Freddie Mercury didn't feel that great. But, Ure suggested, he responded to the audience. 'It was like watching Clark Kent turn into Superman.' I guess Ure knows what he's talking about. His band Ultravox played Wembley that day too. But unlike Queen and U2, he said, 'we looked like rabbits in the headlights up there. It was just alien to stand in front of 80,000 people with a potential television audience of 2 billion. That's just petrifying.' Midge Ure during the Live Aid concert (Image: PA Archive/PA Images) Perhaps that's because, as he explained to Patrick Kielty over on 5 Live later in the morning, the band went onstage without a soundcheck. Because of the cutting-edge tech they used, they normally needed five hours to make sure everything was working. Ure has always come across as one of pop's good guys; someone who never let a modicum of success go to his head. And he's a practised raconteur. Talking to Kielty about the making of the Band Aid record he admitted that on the day of the recording neither he nor Bob Geldof were sure anyone would turn up. 'There's Bob and I standing outside an empty studio on a cold, wet Sunday morning surrounded by cameras and microphones and we had no idea who was going to turn up because we'd spoken directly to the artists. Not an adult. Not somebody who might write down where and when they were required. 'So, yeah, there's just Bob and I standing there and Bob leans over to me and says to me 'if it's just the Boomtown Rats and Ultravox we're …' Well, he didn't repeat the expletive, but he probably didn't need to. " You can imagine … But they all turned up.' Read more As for Live Aid itself, Ure recalled being in the green room before things kicked off. 'You could see the bands all clique together. The New Romantics were in one corner and the rock guys were in another corner and the moment Status Quo kicked off you looked around the room and all the heads were nodding.' Talking about Live Aid must have become second nature to Ure over the years. But he shows no signs of getting bored of it and, better than that, he remains amused and amusing on the chaos of the whole thing. My favourite story was probably the one he told O'Leary about meeting Freddie Mercury at the Wembley Arena, which was acting as the backstage area for the Stadium during Live Aid. It was the only time he ever met Queen's frontman. 'I'm walking down the hallway of the arena and I see Freddie sitting perched on the edge of a fountain,' Ure recalled. 'And he spies me and he calls me over. 'Darling, darling, come here.' So I'm chatting to Freddie and he says, 'You're that lovely boy from the Boomtown Rats, aren't you?'' Listen Out For: Screenshot, Radio 4, July 22, 11am Just a quick shout for Mark Kermode and Ellen E Jones's film show which this week tackles Scotland on screen. And so Frankie Boyle talks Trainspotting, Kayleigh Donaldson tackles Bill Forsyth and Brian Cox gets to speak about the greatest ever Scottish film, I Know Where I'm Going.
Montreal Gazette
15-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Montreal Gazette
Forty years later, a chance encounter in Montreal made Live Aid ‘worth it' for Bob Geldof
News Bob Geldof was visiting Montreal last fall when he met a man who thanked him not only for Live Aid, but credited him for saving his life. The co-founder of the 1985 benefit concerts recounted the touching interaction in a recent interview ahead of the historic event's 40th anniversary. Live Aid, which was held simultaneously in London and Philadelphia, raised millions of dollars for famine relief in Ethiopia. The 16-hour, star-studded fundraiser included sets from Queen, David Bowie and U2. 'Last November in Montreal, my wife ordered breakfast. She got a call saying 'Is it all right, I'm not your normal waiter guy, can I come and say hello to your husband?'' Geldof told CNN. View this post on Instagram A post shared by CNN Original Series (@cnnorigseries) The worker greeted him before standing up straight and saying 'I wanted to thank you very much.' He detailed how Band Aid, the charity group founded by the Irish singer-songwriter, helped him as a young boy in Ethiopia. 'He said 'I had no idea who my parents are,'' Geldof said. 'He said 'They died, but someone put me in a Band Aid hospital and Band Aid paid to make me better. And then I was brought up in a Band Aid orphanage. 'And he said 'I made my way to Paris and I studied catering' and he said 'And I came here.'' Geldof congratulated him and asked more about his life, including whether he is married and has a family. The worker said he was married to an Ethiopian woman and showed parts of his life on his phone. The man paused when he put his phone back in his pocket, Geldof said. 'And then he just ran forward and clutched me,' Geldof said. It wasn't quite a hug, but Geldof said the man buried his head in his chest, saying 'Thank you for my sons. Thank you for my life.' 'So even if it was for that guy, just that guy, if it was just for him, 40 years — worth it,' Geldof said. This story was originally published July 15, 2025 at 1:18 PM.
