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Live Aid: pop's Big Bang moment
00:34:26
David Hepworth reveals what it was like to present the BBC's coverage of a music extravaganza that ushered in a new age of entertainment
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- [00:00]
Narrator
The summer is heating up with Marvel Studios. The Fantastic Four.
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David Hepworth
Light em up Johnny.
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Narrator
On July 25th.
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David Hepworth
Time to save the planet. What's the plan? Trust me, I hate that plan. It's a bad plan.
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Spencer Mizzen
Come on.
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David Hepworth
That's a stupid plan.
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Narrator
Prepare for Fantastic.
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Bob Geldof
We will face this together as a family.
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Narrator
Marvel Studios The Fantastic Four first steps only in Peter's July 25th Rate PG13 Some material may be inappropriate for children under 13. Get tickets now.
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Bob Geldof
Your body relax and let go of whatever you're carrying today.
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Bob Geldof
And breathe.
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Podcast Host
Welcome to the History Extra podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. It may be hard to believe for those of you who can remember it happening, but this month marks the 40th anniversary of the iconic music extravaganza that was Live Aid. David Hepworth co presented the BBC's coverage of the event, a role that gave him a ringside seat at Queen's celebrated performance and led to a sweary encounter with Bob Geldof here in Conversation with Spencer Mizzen, David serves up his main recollections of the day and reveals why he believes that after 13th July 1985, the world of entertainment would never be the same again.
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Spencer Mizzen
So, David, you kick off your latest book, Hope I Get Old Before I Die, with the observation that Live Aid was an event almost as close to the end of the Second World War as it is to the present day, which is pretty mind blowing. But when you arrived at Wembley Stadium on the morning of 13th of July 1985, did you have any idea that we'd still be talking about this concert 40 years later that would kind of come to be regarded as this great cultural milestone in post war history?
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David Hepworth
No, I certainly didn't think we'd be talking about it all these years later. I think I knew it was going to be a bit of a success, but I didn't know it was going to resound in the way that it did. I think we'd grown accustomed since Bob Geldof did the Band Aid record at the end of the previous year, to the fact that this was going to turn out to be more successful than initially predicted. But no, I didn't think it was going to reverberate in the same way. In fact, oddly enough, and this is something that I think the President finds it hard to get its head around, is that you could take part in events like live aid in 1985 without being in any way aware of how it was landing in the outside world, because he obviously didn't have mobile phones and all the means of monitoring feedback in real time that we have nowadays. So I didn't realize how big it had been. I think my first realization of how big it had been is when I got home at 4 o' clock in the morning and my wife said, well, that was something, wasn't it? Because she'd had the kind of standard response of somebody sitting in the home during the day, which was people ringing up and saying, are you watching this? And you know, you really ought to be watching this, and so forth. And you obviously had no sense of that when you were in Wembley Stadium at the time. You just thought it was just 70,000 people, or however many it was. You know, the ripples were not evident to you until afterwards.
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Spencer Mizzen
And you also mentioned in the book that you were interviewing Viv Richards, sort of the cricket legend the following day, and even he mentioned that his team would find it really difficult to concentrate on events on the cricket pitch because they were all sort of like wondering what was going on at Wembley at the time.
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David Hepworth
He even told me I was interviewing him at Lord the following day for a little series. The BBC had the time and he said he'd had batsmen who were trying to get out in order to get back to the dressing room. I think that may have been slight exaggeration, but it was indicative that it had, it had even penetrated the generally closed world of professional sports. People who tend to live in their own reality.
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Spencer Mizzen
So why do you think that is? Why did you think it landed in such an extraordinary way with people who perhaps wouldn't traditionally be glued to their TVs watching a pop concert?
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David Hepworth
Well, there weren't many live pop concerts in those days. You know, nowadays we're completely used to a weekend of Glastonbury or whatever it is. It was a novelty at the time. It was a novelty because it was absolutely star studded. But it was also run like a 1960s package tour in the sense that you had three numbers and you were off. Which is an approach that has a lot to be said for it, let me tell you. Cause within three numbers people can't manage to be boring. And so they were generally doing the greatest hits, you know. And that's immensely appealing to a wide audience of people who are not necessarily knee deep in the minutiae of what's going on in popular music. I also think that the element of the day that gets underestimated in retrospect is the fact that the sun shone. You know, that was my main memory of turning up to Wembley that morning. It was absolute blue sky. I mean, it clouded over a little bit later on, but it didn't rain or anything. And so it looked fabulous, you know, when people turned it on, on the television. It's a very heartwarming idea, isn't it? You know, it's like looking at a cricket match when the sun's shining, it looks, you know, more than twice as appealing. And so lots of people looked at Queen or U2 or Elton John or whatever. Their gray sits against this blue sky in front of this smiling audience, don't forget, very different audience from the average gig. And they, they were very, they were open minded. They, the people had gone along to see lots of things, not just to see their favorite. And so lots of people looked at this picture on their television and thought, I fancy some of this, you know, I, I'd like to take part in this next time this thing is available. And so what I wrote about in my book is, I think it's the beginning of what I call the age of spectacle in terms of popular music. Because don't forget, at that point, playing live in the outdoors was quite a rare thing really. Not many people did it. And we now live in a world where absolutely everybody does it and everybody does, you know, five nights at the Tottenham Hotspur stadium at eye watering sums of money paid for tickets. We're just completely used to that. Well, that is the world that, oddly enough, was ushered in by Live Aid and unintentional.
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Spencer Mizzen
Can you tell me a little bit more about that? Because I was gonna ask you about your observation that Live Aid kind of ushered in a new era for entertainment. I mean, tell us about this age of spectacle. I mean, why did Live Aid do that?
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David Hepworth
Well, because it suddenly made taking part in a celebration of live music seem really appealing to a massively wide audience. You know, it was a bit of a similar thing to what happened with football with the Premier League. You know, football, you had pre Premier League football was, oh, you take your life in your hands if you go to football. Whereas now it's a leisure option for absolutely everybody. Well, so is the live popular music experience, and it never used to be. I'm not saying Live Aid did this on its own, but I think it played an important role in switching people's views about these things. And so I always have the feeling that before Live Aid, the people who went to big rock concerts were people in gray coats who could queue up all night at Earl's Court and kept abreast of the tour dates in the Melody Maker post Live Aid. The people who go to big shows are your neighbors, your kids, teachers, you know, they're normal people. They're people who live down the average suburban street. Now part of that's demographic because, you know, don't forget that if you take the audience for popular music in the 60s and 70s was people between the ages of 13 and 35. That's what it was. It is not anymore. It's absolutely everybody. And Live O was a part of that process of broadening the audience beyond what you might call youth culture. It became everybody's culture. And it was the great kind of coming out of popular music as the main driving force of popular entertainment. I think it made people aware of just how famous and kind of loved the likes of David Bowie and Queen Elton John were. And it elevated them to a status that they've grown used to in the years ever since, you know, that we now expect our venerable rock stars to be knighted or whatever is the equivalent overseas. We didn't before then at all.
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Spencer Mizzen
I mean, that's the interesting thing about Live Aid, isn't it? Because Y is seen as this great trailblazing event, one that signaled the dawn of a new era. It was actually a really good day for what we, like now called the old fogies, wasn't it? Like the people you've mentioned there, Queen, Elton John, David Bowie, you could argue it was them. They benefited from Live Aid as much as any anything else. Why do you think Live Aid proved so fruitful for the old guard?
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David Hepworth
Well, I suppose if you're playing for a broad audience in terms of age range, it helps to have loads of hits rather than just have two. And so if you're a queen, you can go on stage and do a medley of your hits and it'll take a while. The same thing won't apply to, I don't know, Howard Jones in 1985, because they. I mean, it was a conscious move on the part of Bob Geldof, that the original Band Aid single had been done by his peers, who were kind of Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet, and they were younger groups, whereas he knew if he was going to do a big concert that was going to be screened in the United States, he had to get the likes of the who and he had to get members of the Rolling Stones individually, if not collectively. And he had to get Bob Dylan and these people, because that was what was going to encourage Americans to turn on the televisions. What I don't think he estimated was just how popular they will prove to be with absolutely everybody. Popular music used to be incredibly age conscious. And so if you're over 35, you're old fogies or, you know, old less respectful terms. And what happened after Live Aid, and has continued to happen ever since, is that the older acts are no longer dismissed in that fashion. They're more likely to be venerated. They're more likely to be. The attitude of younger people to older pop stars nowadays is they're legends. They don't quite know why they're legends, but they've got the idea that they're legends. Because don't forget that the means of consumption of recorded popular music nowadays means that younger people have access to a far wider range of it than was ever the case before. And they dabble in it, but they have no center of chronology about it at all. Popular music has become loose from its story of origin. You know, whereas I remember, the events I write about in my books tend to be stuff that I remember as it happened. I'm aware of the fact that younger people might know the music and have no idea whether Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young came before the Sex Pistols or Madonna or whatever. Because it doesn't matter to them, because it's all there all the time, permanently. That was a thing that happened around about the same time as Live Aid.
- [14:41]
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- [15:16]
David Hepworth
When you.
- [15:17]
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- [15:47]
Bob Geldof
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- [16:16]
Spencer Mizzen
Mentioned Queen's performance a couple of times already, and that's obviously widely regarded as an iconic half an hour in the history of live rock music. I mean, as you were there on the day, what do you personally remember of their performance?
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David Hepworth
Well, I was very much in the desoline and Perspex box that people may remember was suspended from the eaves of the old Wembley Stadium. And it's from there that Des Lyneham and Jimmy Hill used to pontificate. And so you felt a bit cut off from it, but you were looking at the audience rather than looking at the performers. And what Queen correctly learned from their experience of playing big shows, and they played big shows in South America, I think particularly was that it's all about the audience. It's all about Giving the audience something to do, making the audience feel that they're part of the performance. And that is what Ferry Mercury did to, you know, a very high standard on the day. And he also, interestingly, enlisted the cameraman, the BBC cameraman who was on stage with him, you know, with a very, very heavy handheld camera of the kind that nobody could lift nowadays, I would think. And, you know, he was directing the camera to the audience as they put their hands above their heads and clapped to Radio Gaga or whatever. So he very self consciously made them part of the performance. And so if people are doing that, they're guaranteeing it's a success, you know. And as I say, you've got to keep coming back to this fact that the audience were uniquely, kind of accepting audience. They were out for a good time, you know, they paid the. What seemed to be very expensive ticket price at the time of pound 25. They'd taken a deep breath and paid it because the thought, well, at least half the money's going to charity, whereas nowadays £25 wouldn't buy you a hamburger at most of these shows. So that was what came over to me in my Perspex box, as I say, slung under the eaves of Wembley Stadium. I wasn't in the thick of the mosh, you know. But the artists had very different experiences. Bono from U2 famously went off the stage to commune with the audience, for reasons nobody is still very clear about, and because the stage was so high that when he went down, he was invisible to the other members of U2. And so they just had to keep playing, no idea what was going on at all. And when they went off stage, they didn't speak to each other. They were so furious with how badly it appeared to have gone for them. And then it was only when, you know, that later they saw the TV pictures that they turned out to be heroes of the day. Apparently, heroes was a word that was bandied around a lot in the wake of Live Aid. They were on newspaper headlines and so forth. It was the David Bowie song and all that kind of thing. And I always think it was a change in our perception of rock stars or the public's perception of rock stars, that they'd always been seen as kind of charismatic but disreputable, and now they were seen as charismatic but virtuous, which is kind of really odd because, you know, while I would never seek in any way to diminish the devotion to the cause of the likes of Bob Geldof and Midgior, you know, who went above and beyond, back in those days and continue to do it to this day. Let this be noted, you know, for most of the artists taking place, no pop star ever has unmixed motives, not ever. Everything is always going on at the same time. It's career, it's ego, it's artistic, it's, you know, altruistic. It's. I don't want to be left out. It's all those things going on at the same time. And so people might have had to divert tours and things like that, but the people, you know, the people crossest about Live Aid are the ones who didn't do it, who had the opportunity to do it and didn't, and then spent the next 10 years kind of apologizing and explaining why they didn't do it. Because it was the ultimate party you didn't want to be, you know, you didn't want to miss. People realize that in the week or so after it, you know.
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Spencer Mizzen
Let's talk a little bit more about Bob Geldoff, then, because you've written a feature for BBC History magazine on the 40th anniversary of Live. Aidan, you write in the feature that you, Percy, were instrumental in one of the biggest swears, as you call it, in the history of broadcasting. I mean, that obviously emanated from your, I think, quite famous interview with Bob Geldof on the day. Can you tell us what are your memories of that incident?
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David Hepworth
Well, I. You've got to go back to the day before when we were. All the presenters were gathered in Johnny Beerling's office at Radio One. He was the controller of Radio One at the time. It was made very clear to us that the BBC did not wish to have this scene as a telethon, because, understandably, if it was seen as a telethon, the Director General would be besieged the following day by Oxfam, everybody. And so the appeals, where there were appeals, were done in a very particular fashion. You know, the captions came up in this order. That it started with the address where you could cite. This gives you an idea of how different the world of fundraising was. You wrote a check, you posted it off to the appeal, or you could go to your local post office and you could make a donation there, or. And here they're getting into the world of science fiction. You could pick up your phone and actually give your credit card if you're that rash. That was the world in 1985. So Bob Geldof was with me in the. In the dazzling and perspective box, and he wanted to push fundraising And I said, okay, well, let's have the address. And he said, fuck the address. And all I remember thinking is, oh, that's quite something, because it's 1985. You know, that kind of language is probably used all the time now. It wasn't in 1985. And all I could think of was, oh, I do hope my mother is not watching this, because your mother was inevitably watching it, as everybody else was. And it was Bob Geldof's kind of provocative behavior, meeting the rather, you know, the rather slow methods of television in general and the BBC in particular back in those days. Of course, the funny thing is, it's a classic example of the myth has gone halfway around the world before the truth has got its trousers on that. You know, I've been told by people all, but I've been told by cab drivers all over the world that what he actually said was, give us your fucking money. Well, he never said that at all. You know, I know what he said. I was sitting there. But it no doubt added to the myth of the whole thing. So I'm sure when Bob Geldof swore, he was very aware that it would do him a lot of good and do the appeal a lot of good. And it undoubtedly did, even though people misremember what was actually said. But I don't.
- [24:18]
Spencer Mizzen
You also write that Live Aid benefited from a can do attitude of which Margaret Thatcher may have been proud or would have at least applauded. What do you mean by that?
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David Hepworth
Well, I think it's again forgotten that the acts like Bob Geldof and, you know, Spando Belli and Duran Duran and those acts that came along in the late 70s and came along out of punk, and a lot of punk was people were doing things for themselves because nobody else would do them. Now, that had never happened in the 60s and the early 70s. You know, nobody went off and made their own records. Well, come the late 70s, they did. And you suddenly got a bunch of movers and shakers like Bob Geldoff and Elvis Costello and Ian Dorey. They were very can do people. They took charge of things. They didn't wait to be told what their manager thought was a good idea. They were active individuals. And so Bob Geldof's response to the TV news report was only the most dramatic example of that. You know, I'm going to make a record and I'm going to personally ring up a load of other people and get them to do it. I'm not going to get my manager to do it. I'm gonna work the phones myself. And that's how that whole thing happened. So there was a certain amount of get your finger out and do something about it, don't just complain about it. That it would have found favor in loads of quarters, I'm sure.
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Spencer Mizzen
How do you think Live Aid changed the British public's relationship with the idea of giving to charity?
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David Hepworth
Well, charity used to be, I'm old enough to remember that you would go past shops and there would be a kind of plaster collecting box and you contributed to charity in small denominations at the urging of elderly ladies standing outside tube stations on what were called flag days, when you were given a pin in exchange for which you were given 50p or whatever. Post Live Aid, it became large festivals where we all felt the same thing at the same time on a large scale and enjoyed getting involved and we enjoyed the scale of it. And we expect all charitable donations to be at the urging of famous person. Pretty much always. That seems to be what's changed, you know, and it still goes on. BBC, Children in Need and I'm not in any way impugning these things, you know, they've adopted the tactics of, of mass media, whereas they didn't do in the past. It was, as I say, elderly ladies, flag days, collecting books, people rattling tins. It became credit cards, it became pick up your phone, it became make a slightly bigger gesture than anybody else has made. There's a certain amount of ostentatious giving about it. I know people who worked for charities nowadays and let me tell you, they're every bit as hard nosed as all the people I know who work for media organizations, because they have to be, because it's an immensely competitive business. They're dealing on a different scale from the way they're dealt in it in the past. And I think Liveo was a huge turning point in that. So going back to Johnny Billings, hope that Live Aid would not be seen as a telethon. I think you'd have to say he didn't get his wish, really, because it was seen as a telethon. And it led to other telethons in the years subsequent to that. It became part of our increasing obsession with stars and with famous people, on our veneration of famous people, which goes on to this day on a greater scale than ever before.
- [28:56]
Spencer Mizzen
And you've also written that one of the most, for you, one of the most poignant moments of the day is when you were sat behind the perspective screen, I think, with Billy Connolly. And the BBC played the song Drive by the Cars. Oh, right, yeah, yeah, tell us about that. What happened there?
- [29:13]
David Hepworth
Well, it was classic. Somebody told my. In my ear just introduced this. It's bit of footage put together by cbc, it's the Canadian broadcaster. And next thing I knew, I'm looking at this harrowing footage of starving children cut to bizarrely drive by the cars, which seems, on the face of it, just the oddest juxtaposition of sound and pictures you can possibly imagine. But in that way that pop music has, it kind of worked. And apparently donations were at the height in the wake of that bit of footage. And I was sitting there with Billy Connolly and Pamela Stevenson, who were equally unprepared for it. They were just weeping as it was going on. When you're doing TV broadcasts like that, there is no TV broadcast like that, because it kept saying in your ear, oh, you're now broadcasting to the largest TV audience ever assembled on the planet. To which you think, well, how the hell do you know? And you also think, well, that doesn't help. It doesn't help to know that whatsoever. So there you are, perspective box. Billy Connolly, Pamela Stevenson looking at a monitor, starving children, the cars looking down at 80,000 people in the. In the crowd. And you. You're just thinking, this is weird. This is strange.
- [30:55]
Spencer Mizzen
So, finally, David, looking back from a distance of 40 years at live Aid. I mean, when you think of that day, what's your chief emotion? What images come to mind the most? When you look back on that day at Wembley in July 1985, I think.
- [31:10]
David Hepworth
Of the blue sky at the beginning, and I think of the most inspired decision of the day was the one made by the members of Status Quo, not normally connected with the adjective inspired, which was, to start with rocking all over the world, which, I have to tell you, was a brilliant idea. And under that sunshine, as soon as they started, the whole thing just snapped into place. Straight away, you could feel the whole place going, oh, we get it now. Just because they did that in that way, under that blue sky. And you thought, it's going to be all right.
- [31:58]
Podcast Host
That was David Hepworth, a music journalist, author and TV presenter. He was speaking to Spencer Mizzen. Thanks for listening. This podcast was produced by Jack Bateman.
- [32:17]
History's Heroes Narrator
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- [32:30]
Bob Geldof
You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you.
- [32:37]
History's Heroes Narrator
Join me, Alex von Tanzelman for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes, wherever you get your podcasts.