The one artist Bob Geldof said outdid Queen at Live Aid: “The world goes crazy”
When talking about the greatest rock and roll performances of all time, it always comes back to what happened at Live Aid in 1985. Whether you were a rock and roll fan or not, this was the moment where it felt like pop music could have a positive impact on the world, especially when listening to what bands like U2 could do when they stepped up onstage.
But while history has written up the festival as one of the greatest moments for almost every artist involved, Bob Geldof has a different recollection of what happened that fateful day.
Or, at least, a different perspective. Geldof was already the person bringing all of these superstars together for a good cause, but after all of them congregated in Wembley Stadium and in Philadelphia, it was anyone’s guess what was actually going to happen once everyone hit the stage, and it wasn’t like they didn’t go through their fair share of hangups every once in a while.
There were always going to be moments where things could cut out, but there were also technical foul-ups no one saw coming. Robert Plant never needed to relive the ill-fated Led Zeppelin reunion, and even Bob Dylan had to worry about his strings breaking halfway through his set. But if there’s one thing that everyone remembers to this day, it’s those 20 electric minutes when Queen swept the board and everyone saw the power of rock and roll at its finest.
“The Queen movie has it that the world goes crazy and the phone lines collapse. That’s not true.”
Bob Geldof
This should have been the moment where the Earth stood still, but Geldof thought David Bowie’s performance before Queen was far more captivating, saying, “The Queen movie has it that the world goes crazy and the phone lines collapse. That’s not true. David wanted to go through what songs he was gonna do. I said, ‘Before we start, look at this’, and we put on the CBC thing, and Bowie started to cry. And he just said, ‘However many songs I’m doing, I’m giving up one and introducing this.”
It may have been the moral thing to do, but that’s not what the BBC wanted to hear at the time. Even for something as horrific as George Harrison saw when putting together the Concert for Bangladesh, everyone could at least ignore the carnage and enjoy the concert, but since when was Bowie ever one to pull his punches? He was going to do what he wanted, and if people took him off the airwaves, that was on them.
And the minute he stopped playing ‘Heroes’, Geldof remembered the entire festival going ballistic, saying, “Here’s the youth of the world at the peak of their health. They’re smiling and so in love with that moment, and you look at the screens. It’s fascinating because you can see their faces crumple, and that’s when the phone lines melt. In some places, the phone lines collapsed.”
Because as much as Bowie was known as one of the greatest showmen to ever live, he knew that no amount of strutting onstage could have done justice to the real carnage that was happening. He was an artist in every sense of the word, and those few minutes showing that raw footage helped put things in perspective for what the importance of that day was all about.
Anyone could have been there to boost their egos for doing a good deed for a just cause, but for as long as Queen left the day as the people’s champion, Bowie would always go down in the hearts of those who worked the event. Many people knew that this was one of the most important gigs of the decade, but Bowie never forgot about the people half a world away whom he was singing for.
