LIVE AID 1985

Now I was never a fan of 'Queen' all that pomp and bombast and camp posturing but here Freddie is on fire and this never fails to raise a smile - Radio Gaga Radio Goo Goo indeed . . . . . and we all loved Live Aid and felt that we were at least TRYING to do SOMETHING!

On this day in music history: July 13, 1985 - The “Live Aid” concert is broadcast live via satellite worldwide. Organized by Bob Geldof, the two concerts held at Wembley Stadium in London and JFK Stadium in Philadelphia, consists of over 50 acts performing to over 172,000 fans (at the individual venues) and a TV viewing audience of 1.9 billion people. The event raises over $300 million for Ethiopian famine relief at the time of the original broadcast. An abridged edition of the historic concerts, featuring ten of the sixteen hours worth of performances originally broadcast, is released as a four disc DVD box set in November of 2004, eight months shy of the events 20th anniversary. The entire concert is not released due to video tapes of certain performances having gone missing over the years, with ABC (one the original US broadcast carriers) having erased their broadcast tapes of the event (at Bob Geldof’s request). However MTV did preserve their tapes as well as the BBC (though some performances were also lost). Other performers such as Led Zeppelin and Santana ask to have their performances omitted, feeling they are subpar. In lieu of their performances appearing on the box set, they donate money to the Band Aid Trust instead.


with thanks to Jeff Harris at the peerless 'Behind The Grooves'