Bob Geldof says another Live Aid event is ‘unlikely’ because of social media
The singer was speaking at a launch event at Wembley Stadium for Just For One Day, a musical about the charity event.
Singer Bob Geldof has said another Live Aid-style event is “unlikely” because of social media.
The 73-year-old, who organised the original 1985 event alongside singer Midge Ure, told the PA news agency he doubted a similar event could take place in the 2020s, “even though your brain is filled with the horror of Gaza or the horror of Ukraine”.
The Boomtown Rats frontman said: “I think it’s very much of its time, we didn’t even expect this to be a thing.
“From my point of view, rock and roll turned out to be almost a 50-year pop, which ended, conveniently for us, with the summing up at Live Aid, then that was subsumed by social media, so whatever’s going to happen now will happen through social media.
“Unfortunately, social media seems to be a sort of isolating type medium.
“So could the same thing happen again? Unlikely, in my view unfortunately, when it was monomedia, when you had just essentially two stations in the UK, everyone saw the same thing, which we didn’t realise, we saw the newscast, we wrote a song, we thought we’d raise like £100,000.
“Suddenly it becomes the focus of all that rage and disgust and shame, and that has lasted for 40 years, much to our dismay.
“But you can change things, you really can actually change things, not him (Ure), not me, but the individual isn’t powerless, and collectively, you really can change things.
“And in today’s world of danger and fear, and political inadequacy, it stands still as a lesson, nothing to do with Midge and Bob, but just as something where people decided yeah, this is our thing, and we’re staying with it.”
Geldof was speaking at a Wembley Stadium launch event for Just For One Day, a musical, which tells the story of the Live Aid concerts in the national football stadium in London and Philadelphia in the US, on July 13 1985, which were organised by Geldof and Ure to raise money for the Ethiopian famine.
Speaking about the musical, Geldof told PA: “It’s amazing that both of us are alive, frankly.”But we set out as quickly as we could, I called him (Ure), he was on a rock show, and he said, ‘yeah, let’s do something’.
“We literally cobbled this song together as quickly as we could, and 40 years later, there’s musicals, there’s celebrations, there’s documentaries all geared towards something that happened here 40 years ago.
“So it’s really odd for us, is it gratifying? No, because can you believe there are starving people in the 21st century, it was unnecessary then, it’s totally unnecessary now.
“But the problem is, do people have the bandwidth? They’re so exhausted with the horror of Gaza and the terror of Ukraine, and the American political situation that it’s hard to draw attention to those who through no fault of their own are dying right now.”
Ure, 71, added: “We’ve done the Band Aid song, 345 different times, different genres, different variations of whoever the current artists are.
“And this as a musical was something way beyond what we could possibly do, we’re not very talented, and it takes a lot of talent for people to put this together.”
Just For One Day will return at London’s Shaftesbury Theatre on May 15, with 10% of all proceeds being donated to the Band Aid Charitable Trust, after it previously ran at the Old Vic last year.
