How can someone not in the UK stream this?.....
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 3:52 AM on July 8 [4 favorites]

To reiterate, I'm note a "Live Aid booster" and my posting this should not be so construed. I post it on the anniversary of what is undeniably an Important Cultural Moment.

(If you don't understand why I feel the need to post this comment, welcome to Metafilter, noob.)
posted by deeker at 3:53 AM on July 8 [1 favorite]

EmpressCallipygos: "How can someone not in the UK stream this?....."

Yeah, I know. Another of my recent posts was to an iPlayer series as well and I'm aware that iPlayer is notoriously difficult to stream outside the UK.

If anyone has figured out how to spoof iPlayer, it would be great to hear.
posted by deeker at 3:56 AM on July 8 [1 favorite]

This would indicate it's available on Apple TV too, but perhaps only in the UK
posted by chavenet at 4:17 AM on July 8

Contributing something to counteract my derail now....

I remember a lot of people at the time telling those of us who were younger that this was our generation's Woodstock. And when you're 15-16-17-whatever, you believe that - that all people need to do is wake up and pay attention and then they will magically realize The Right Thing To Do, and just do it.

....And then life teaches you different as you get older.

But maybe one of the things that life teaches you is that this still isn't enough of a reason to not try. Maybe you haven't magically fixed everything, but you've at least been part of the effort to push back, and maybe it isn't fixing a worldwide solution but it's done something to the small part of the world you're in, and that's not pointless.

...I do note that Live Aid gave birth to a bunch of other Mega Concerts To Fix Things soon after - and one, Farm Aid, even got its start at Live Aid, when Bob Dylan used a moment of his own set to call attention to USA family farms that were being screwed over. Farm Aid has been occurring annually ever since.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 4:33 AM on July 8 [13 favorites]

Geldof made a complete fucking hash of the thing despite being warned by multiple aid agencies not to hand the money over to the government.

Laughable lack of black artists, sidelined as usual. I bought the Live Aid DVD years ago to watch the Queen set but the whole thing birthed mostly terrible fundraisers to completely nonsensical things like, “Make Poverty History”.
posted by bookbook at 5:46 AM on July 8 [3 favorites]

I remember a lot of people at the time telling those of us who were younger that this was our generation's Woodstock.

Joan Baez opened the Philadelphia concert by saying that.
posted by dnash at 5:48 AM on July 8 [2 favorites]

Joan Baez opened the Philadelphia concert by saying that.

I know, she was one of the people I was thinking of....
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 5:58 AM on July 8

Before Live Aid ,there was the Concert for Bangladesh Way back in 1971, with Dylan performing as well
posted by yyz at 6:24 AM on July 8 [6 favorites]

I got up at 5am to watch this thing and watched all day. And I was such a big fan of Geldof and even his band, The Boomtown Rats. Until it became clear how the "aid" may have made the world a little worse, the way it was handled. Ugh.
posted by Glinn at 6:28 AM on July 8 [3 favorites]

I see a lot of criticism of the way Band Aid handled the money but little in the way of evidence to back it up. Here is Geldof's response to some of the criticism:


There IS endemic hunger due to the unforgiving soil conditions. Water IS scarce save for a scattering of unreliable wells. Rain IS increasingly unreliable. Climate change affects the poorest first and worst. War exacerbates these conditions. Xmas IS celebrated throughout Ethiopia according to their own calendar i.e. two weeks after our holiday. Religious and other traditional ceremonies were abandoned throughout 1984-1986 and more recently in the same areas for more or less the same awful reasons. These are not “colonial tropes” they are empirical facts. It is in fact your correspondent’s piece that is the cliched trope. The same argument has been made many times over the years and elicits the same wearisome response. Are you certain it isn’t some ChatGPT scam thing?

This little pop song has kept hundreds of thousands if not millions of people alive. In fact just today Band Aid has given hundreds of thousands of pounds to help those running from the mass slaughter in Sudan and enough cash to feed a further 8,000 children in the same affected areas of Ethiopia as 1984. Those exhausted women who weren’t raped and killed and their panicked children and any male over 10 who survived the massacres and those 8,000 Tigrayan children will sleep safer, warmer and cared for tonight because of that miraculous little record. We wish that it were other but it isn’t. “Colonial tropes” my arse.

posted by night_train at 6:34 AM on July 8 [10 favorites]

Wikipedia:

On July 13, 1985, the Hooters were the opening band at the Philadelphia benefit concert, gaining international recognition for the first time. Geldof said that he did not see the Hooters as a high-profile band suitable for Live Aid but that the band was forced on him by Bill Graham, promoter of Live Aid in the U.S. Geldof let his feelings be known during an interview for Rolling Stone saying: "Who the fuck are the Hooters?"

Whoever they are, they’re doing a gig tonight on a 45th anniversary tour of Germany. And “And We Danced” has held up a lot better than “I Don’t Like Mondays”, if you ask me.
posted by Lemkin at 6:39 AM on July 8 [9 favorites]

As for Queen, at the time, I thought they were like The Tubes: one step away from a novelty act. Seeing the audience totally in to the fascist overhead clap thing during “Radio Gaga” was an eye opener.

I also thought they were Sun City scabs. As did Daryl Hall, who was interviewed backstage and sounded pretty salty about it.
posted by Lemkin at 6:44 AM on July 8 [1 favorite]

The documentary includes interviews with those lovable humanitarians Condoleezza Rice, George W Bush and Tony Blair.
posted by Omon Ra at 6:57 AM on July 8 [4 favorites]

On the day of the concert, one of my Scottish cousins turned up out of the blue with two tickets and wanted me to go with het. It sounded awful, so I refused and she ended up going with a neighbour's daughter by, while I stayed at home and played with some rabbits. No regrets on missing it.
posted by Fuchsoid at 7:09 AM on July 8 [2 favorites]

The BBC iPlayer is behind a paywall even in the UK, you can however watch the original show on YouTube.
posted by Lanark at 7:33 AM on July 8 [3 favorites]

Live Aid remains the best example I can think of for how to leverage a modest level of fame to the max. In terms of being exposed to the news of famine in Ethiopia -Geldof occupied one of the lowest rungs on the ladder of fame and influence of celebrities who must have been aware of the news. He would have met various people in recording studios and TV show Green rooms -enough clout to appear on Saturday morning TV but nothing at all predestined him as being the one to climb on a soapbox and beg/flatter/hussle and shame the event into existence.

I was 17 - no longer 16- and had finished school just the day before. As an insufferable NME reader, I considered myself far too sophisticated to be taken in by all the pop razzmatazz - although I did have to admit that Queen and U2 were …quite good :-)
posted by rongorongo at 8:09 AM on July 8 [3 favorites]

I've always enjoyed the great John Wesley Harding's deliciously cynical song about Live Aid, "July 13th 1985." In fact, I can't ever think of Live Aid without hearing this song in my head.
posted by Dr. Wu at 8:46 AM on July 8 [2 favorites]

The night of Live Aid I was at R.E.M. at the Commodore night club in Vancouver. It's still one of the best gigs I have ever seen, with the band roaring through a bunch of garage classics like Wild Thing and Louie Louie as an encore. Live Aid and that gig are inextricably linked in my mind. That's my main memory of Live Aid, that and just something about the whole thing giving me mild skeeves, which in hindsight seemed on point and also part of my sliding into indie underground punk culture and not trusting the mainstream in the '80s in so many ways. A turning point in my 20 year old life at that point.
posted by Phlegmco(tm) at 10:12 AM on July 8 [5 favorites]

Looks like CNN will also air the doc per 48 Hills.
posted by The Ardship of Cambry at 10:45 AM on July 8 [1 favorite]

The night of Live Aid I was at R.E.M. at the Commodore night club in Vancouver.

and thus one of the mysteries of my life is solved -- why I don't remember Live-Aid as well as most people seem to, particularly all the American stuff. Because I was at that Commodore show and, typical of my 1980s manoeuvres, high on LSD. And yes, it was a very strong REM performance; certainly better than their previous visit to Vancouver when they played longer, but not really as good... for whatever reason. Maybe it was the acid. No, it was the performance. They kicked things off with a deep dive into Gravity's Pull and thus they had me.

As for Live Aid, I recall watching some of the stuff from London (very early morning TV out here on the West Coast) and thinking it was mostly okay. U2 and Queen, of course, got all the raves but I remember thinking Style Council were pretty damned strong, and Sade's take on Why Can't We Live Together pretty much winning the day for me.
posted by philip-random at 11:14 AM on July 8 [6 favorites]

All other considerations aside, Queen's performance, and the crowd response, is still one of the most incredible live sets I have ever witnessed.

And there probably will be snow in Africa this Christmastime, at least in the Tanzanian-Kenyan highlands.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 12:02 PM on July 8

I was 8 and don't remember much about it. I do remember it was a HUGE phenomenon though.

My main memory is the parody SNL did: Musicians for Free Range Chickens (this was much later, of course, in the 90s).

"Tell the children, to tell the world, to tell the chickens that we are on our way..."

Also I have a sour taste in my mouth about Geldof, and I only think it's residual distaste for this? Like culturally it's in the atmosphere?

Oh and of course Dead Kennedy's mockery A Commercial (USA FOR SOUTH AFRICA!)
posted by symbioid at 12:02 PM on July 8 [1 favorite]

I see a lot of criticism of the way Band Aid handled the money

An article from Spin:

Most damningly, Keating reported that Geldof was warned, repeatedly, from the outset by several relief agencies in the field about Mengistu, who was dismantling tribes, mercilessly conducting resettlement marches on which 100,000 people died, and butchering helpless people. According to Medicins Sans Frontiers, who begged Geldof to not release the money until there was a reliable infrastructure to get it to victims, he simply ignored them, instead famously saying: “I’ll shake hands with the Devil on my left and on my right to get to the people we are meant to help.”

...our report, in July 1986, shocked the world. That is not an overstatement. It comprehensively exposed the fraudulent use of the charitable money by unmistakably the world’s most brutal dictator, and the naive, hubris-drenched, unwitting complicity of Live Aid and Geldof.
posted by Glinn at 12:54 PM on July 8 [1 favorite]

But they already made the perfect documentary about Live Aid back in 2018... [youtube]
posted by mzanatta at 12:58 PM on July 8

I remember-amidst all the star studded lineup announcements- there being rumours of a Beetles reunion. John’s death aside, there were good reasons to think that very unlikely. I found this Reddit thread about “Beetles reunion candidate events” interesting.
posted by rongorongo at 1:20 PM on July 8

Beatles the band, not the Beetles insect.
posted by Liquidwolf at 1:43 PM on July 8

Proving that while Phil Collins might have been a good enough drummer to play with Brian Eno, he wasn't good enough to play with Led Zeppelin.
posted by Lemkin at 1:58 PM on July 8 [1 favorite]

I was 13 at the time. For me it was one of the major cultural events of my teenage years, everyone at school was talking about it.
posted by robertc at 2:05 PM on July 8 [1 favorite]

good != style
posted by j_curiouser at 4:13 PM on July 8

Anything published by Spin, who was aggressively platforming Celia Farber and Peter Duesberg at that time, makes me want a secondary source. The only thing I found in my very casual search results is the BBC apologizing for a column from 2010 that made similar claims. I'm completely open to the idea that this was an ill-conceived and executed venture, but the sources I'm seeing are a little thin.
posted by 99_ at 4:27 PM on July 8

I lived in England in 1984-1985, and remember the excitement and hope (and cynicism) when "Do They Know It's Christmas" happened/was released. I also remember a teeny little note in The Daily Telegraph at the end of the year that said in 1984, imports of whiskey (from Scotland?) to Ethiopia had increased. To me that was a warning about a problem long in place that a song couldn't fix.

I remember being excited about Live Aid, and watching it on TV. But I knew somebody in Ethiopia was sipping whiskey and laughing.
posted by datawrangler at 4:36 PM on July 8

The only thing I found in my very casual search results is the BBC apologizing for a column from 2010 that made similar claims.

from the wiki:

>>> In 1986, Spin published a so-called exposé on Live Aid's actions in Ethiopia. It claimed that Geldof deliberately ignored warnings from Médecins Sans Frontières, who had complained directly to Geldof even before Live Aid, about the role of the Ethiopian government under Derg leader Mengistu Haile Mariam in causing the famine and that by working with Mengistu directly, much of the relief funds intended for victims were in fact siphoned off to purchase arms from the Soviet Union, thereby exacerbating the situation.[80] Geldof responded by deriding both the article and Médecins Sans Frontières, who had been expelled from the country, and reportedly saying, "I'll shake hands with the Devil on my left and on my right to get to the people we are meant to help."[80][81]

In 2010, the BBC World Service claimed that some aid funds were siphoned off to buy arms for the Tigrayan People's Liberation Front,[82] who battled at the time against the Derg. The BBC did not claim that Band Aid funds were involved but played the Band Aid single to introduce the report. Other BBC programmes then repeated the World Service allegation and added an explicit reference to Band Aid. The Band Aid Trust complained to the BBC Editorial Complaints Unit regarding the specific allegations in the BBC World Service documentary, and the later repetitions, and their complaint was upheld.[83] The BBC later issued an apology before every television and radio news bulletin to the Trust and acknowledged there was no evidence money had been diverted,[9] while the British Ambassador to Ethiopia at the time, Brian Barder, issued a detailed rebuttal of the BBC claims,[84] making clear that "the diversion of aid related only to the tiny proportion that was supplied by some NGOs to rebel-held areas" and was not an allegation about the bulk of emergency aid to Ethiopia during the famine.[10] <<<
posted by philip-random at 4:42 PM on July 8

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