Yeah. I have my Dave Clarke old man shouts at cloud moments but I’m trying to be nice these days 
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re: Guardian article. The UK market found most 80s European pop pretty comical but I often thought that did the music a disservice. Personally, I hated the ‘irony’ that followed in the 90s… Eurotrash, the new ‘knowing’ Eurovision, St Etienne ‘he’s on the phone’…
Your Littlejohns on Fleet Street went loco about Sabrina’s tits as though she was some one-off freak cabaret act that had landed off a porno. But if you watched Spanish or Italian tv at the time, there were hundreds of similar women making records or crooners with greased back hair, miming along to backing tracks on late night tv, whilst some cornball presenter with a parrot on his shoulder read out lottery numbers.
The point is this stuff was pretty banal and the music was ubiquitous, filling up counterfeit compilation tapes locked away in cabinets outside petrol stations. The Brits would only ever stumble across a small % of it by accident in the resort discos.
In UK media, there was never any serious analysis of the fact artists across Europe were:
A. singing in a foreign language (which only ABBA really managed to conceal)
B. exposed to a completely different media and musical history (only France had anything like a comparable black music tradition)
C. in some cases emerging out of dark age dictatorships and still finding their way culturally, often enthralled by UK/US music but without the social context
D. not as invested in the history or sanctity of pop culture in anything like the same way as a macho British music media still trading off the Beatles and every ‘iconic’ yoof scene thereafter.
which is why I get a bit annoyed by listicles smirking at comedy foreigner holiday records, because they’re often plucked out of the air without any context given to the time and place they were made
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I do remember a lot of these fondly from the kids discos on package holidays as a kid
Desireles - Voyage Voyage is still a tune in my book
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Oh yeah, there were some great 1HW’s!
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Very well put!
This guy should write for a living or something
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Enjoyed this. Pete Paphides remembers Live Aid 40 years on.
Attending Live Aid: “I may have failed at history, but soon I was going to be part of it.”
Actually, there was snow in Africa that Christmastime – but it was on the snowy peaks of Kilimanjaro and Tanzania – inaccessible to all but the hardiest of explorers. And, of course, the only bells that ring there are not the clanging chimes of doom. You’ve also got the Ghanaian Kangogi and the Grello – a castanet-like finger bell. But as Do They Know It’s Christmas swiftly became the biggest selling single of all time, no-one was picking nits – least of all me. However proud Britain was of Bob Geldof, I was that little bit prouder. Aged nine, The Boomtown Rats had been my favourite of all the new wave bands. I never understood why my older brother Aki – a Pistols fan – scorned them for not being proper punks. What, after all, could be more punk than being in a gang called The Boomtown Rats? Add that to the fact that their most well-known song was about a girl who, rather like me, didn’t like school very much and, somewhere in the suburbs of Birmingham, Bob had a fan for life.
He really did, too. Months before Band Aid redefined him in our eyes, I was one of a handful of people who had bought the Rats’ final album In The Long Grass. With mounting frustration, I noted that each of the first three singles from the album had stalled outside of the Top 40. The fourth single was called Dave and it was about a friend of Bob’s who had discovered his wife and the mother of their children dead next to an empty bag of heroin (more than a little prescient considering the events Geldof’s own life many years later). Leaving nothing to chance, Bob set about the extraordinary business of hyping the song into the Top 40. He gave £1000 each to two of his bandmates and told them to drive around Britain buying copies of the record from all the shops in Britain whose sales went on to compile the weekly charts.
Alas, Bob’s cunning scheme was scuppered when chart compiling body Gallup noticed that the limited edition of Dave came in a clear seven-inch single with a ticket gaining its owner free entry into any date on the Rats’ spring 1985 tour. Gallup called it a bribe. I remember a livid Bob railing against the judgement on Central News’s weekly pop slot to the show’s disapproving presenter, moonlighting Showaddywaddy singer Dave Bartram. “He’s got a lot to say for himself, hasn’t he?” said an unsmiling Bartram. As low points go, they didn’t come much lower than a ticking off from Showaddywaddy. In 1984. Even a true Boomtown Believer like me could see that it would take a miracle to throw Bob and his band a lifeline at this point.
And so, just weeks later, at the end of 1984, when the nation conferred sainthood upon Bob Geldof, I felt that this was a vindication for both of us. In May 1985, when news broke in the Evening Mail about a massive transatlantic benefit for the Ethiopian famine, I knew that I would absolutely be there.
Having said that – there were problems.
Tickets were due to go on sale at 10am the following Friday – the morning I was due to sit my History GCSE. I knew that there’d be no point getting the bus to Cyclops Records – Birmingham’s sole ticket outlet – after I had sat the exam. By midday, it would be too late. As things stood, there was only one person on the planet who loved me enough to get join that queue at dawn, but Friday was the busiest morning in my parents’ chip shop. My mum had three crates of cod, haddock and plaice to fillet and portion, and a gallon of curry sauce to make. The last thing she needed was to spend four hours queuing outside Cyclops trying to secure my entry into the Greatest Gig Of All Time.
Shoving aside all considerations beyond my visceral desire to be inside Wembley Stadium on July 13th (the expense; the logistics; the fact that I would still be 15 on the day of the gig; any sense of agency my mother might have wanted to exercise in any of this) I walked into my parents’ bedroom at 6am and practically rolled her out of bed with a handwritten sheet of instructions that would get her to the Victorian shopping arcade that paid host to Cyclops. Did she really understand why this mattered so much? Of course she didn’t. But unconditional love doesn’t need to understand. Over thirty years later, I would find myself dozing in a Manchester car park at midnight waiting for my teenage daughters to find the car after the end of an apparently life-changing show by The 1975. Stretching out ahead of me was a three-and-a-half hour drive. Why were we here? Because unconditional love doesn’t need to understand. Because paying it forward is as important as paying it back.
In the end I failed my GCSE – I might as well have saved my mum the bother and queued up for the tickets myself. But by the evening, I was a cause celebre. If you knew someone who was actually going to Live Aid, that was enough to ensure it. Several regular customers to my parents’ chippy had also spent the morning queueing, but perhaps they had nicer children who didn’t have the heart to push them out of bed. At 7pm, one customer made a cash offer of £400 for my tickets. My dad called me at home; no way. A week later, another customer offered £1000. “Are you fucking mad?” gasped my incredulous brother. “It’s immoral to profit from starving Ethiopians,” I piously explained. He pointed out that if I was that bothered, I could donate the proceeds to those starving Ethiopians. It was, I weakly countered, the principle of the matter. Thankfully he didn’t ask me what principle I was seeking to uphold here.
My parents also thought I’d gone mad – but news of the bill had come through and I knew that any gig which gathered together talent like Nik Kershaw, Spandau Ballet and Paul Young in one place could surely never be repeated. I don’t know why I believed this as utterly as I did, given how far I’d seen the star of my beloved Boomtown Rats plummet. But I genuinely believed that these acts would be as big (or thereabouts) in perpetuity as they were in the summer of 1985. In decades to come, it seemed certain to me that people would look back at the line-up and wonder how so many pop titans could have been gathered together at such short notice. I may have failed at history, but soon I was going to be part of it.
And because I believed this, it would soon become utterly bewildering to me that – after a brief phone-around of my classmates – I was going to struggle to find a taker for my spare ticket. Much as Robert Singleton adored Nik Kershaw, his mum said he wasn’t old enough to travel to London without a grown-up. My best friend William absented himself on the basis that failing to invite Gary Numan both to the Band Aid recording and to Live Aid deserved nothing less than a full-on boycott. Finally word came through via my brother, that one of his cool art school friends was desperate to go. So desperate, in fact, that she would consider going with me if no other alternative presented itself in time.
We must have made an odd sight, me and Annette. I had downy bum-fluff on my face and mustard cords; Annette was a Home Counties Clare Grogan. It was awkward between us. I knew it was the ticket she wanted, not my company. Nevertheless, given two hours on an intercity train from Birmingham to London, I rather hoped she might be surprised to find herself fascinated by this curious young fellow who was word perfect on The Lumberjack Song from Monty Python’s Flying Circus and owned an actual signed photograph of Kelly Monteith.
Besides, Live Aid transcended tribal boundaries. Even Smiths fans didn’t quite understand why Morrissey had refused to associate himself from the whole exercise. Live Aid was somehow both my punk and – in ordaining a ruling class of respectable rock elders – the most unpunk thing that had ever happened to music. As I saw it, this was the day that the kids would get together and show those square politicians in their suits that with Nik Kershaw, Spandau Ballet and Paul Young on our side, we could succeed where they had failed. Introducing Dire Straits, Radio 1’s Voice Of Rock Tommy Vance, roared: “Money for nothing and chicks for free! That’s the chorus to one of their songs, but their hearts are in helping to FEED THOSE WHO ARE STARVING!!”
When the gates opened, Annette and I sprinted across the massive blue tarpaulin covering the hallowed turf to bag a spot just beside the sound desk right in the middle of the pitch. If you were using hits as your yardstick, then Status Quo could have gone head to head with almost anyone on the bill, but their unassuming geezerdom served to somehow diminish their standing in the pantheon of greats. They were entirely bereft of mystique and their lack of success in America meant that they could never have been contenders for the stretch of the show which saw sets alternating between Wembley and Philadelphia. The titular serendipity of Rockin’ All Over The World would ultimately have been what secured them the job of first band on.
In the week preceding the show, there had been murmurings in some cynical corners of the media that The Boomtown Rats wouldn’t have stood a chance of getting on a bill like this – had one of them not put it together. Some even implied darker motives – that Bob had only gone to all this trouble in a last-ditch attempted to reignite his failing career?
And me? What did I say? Bob’s gig, Bob’s rules. So when his band did I Don’t Like Mondays and he sang, “And the lesson to day is HOWTODIE!” whilst raising his saintly first in the air and holding the pose for what felt like a tiny eternity, it seemed pretty clear to me that this would be the defining image of the day. In years to come, that pose would surely be immortalised on posters that students would blu-tack onto their walls next to Che Guevara and Bob Marley. And my kids’ jaws would drop as I told them how I actually saw it happen with my own eyes. “What was it like dad?” they might ask. And I’d tell them, “It was just a very powerful moment. Because, if you think about it, we really all were there to learn a lesson about life and death.”
It was a good day for this sort of earnest pop revisionism. For a while it seemed like you could take any sad song and pretend it was about famine. We all fell silent when The Cars’ Drive appeared on the big screens, accompanied by news footage of the famine. “Well put,” I thought to myself, “Who IS going to drive her home tonight?” Beside me, Annette was weeping. I wondered why I wasn’t crying. Was there something wrong with me? I didn’t know how you could go from becoming a person who didn’t cry at sad things to one who did. And that was a problem. Because what felt certain to me was that if I could cry at Drive by The Cars, Annette might think I was cooler.
Perhaps I just needed to be more in the moment and just stop second-guessing myself. In fact, what I really needed to do was just spend some more years on the planet. I knew the difference between right and wrong, between justice and its opposite. But also, I was – like a lot of adolescents – in denial of my own narcissism. My diary entries were Adrian Mole-ish gifts to posterity sculpted to fascinate the owners of the fortunate fingers that would one day find them and rifle through them. But in the real world, I’d have to watch my future wife miscarry our baby; I’d have to watch my daughters grow; Friends would be lost to terminal illness and relatives to suicide; I’d attend the funerals of loved ones much younger than me. All of it barely enough to activate the most fleeting sense of what it might be like to wake up from the very perimeter of human existence and not be able to meet the most basic needs of the children you brought into the world. Whatever I needed to learn wasn’t going to be learned by the time Paul McCartney came on to sing Let It Be. But twenty years later, at Live 8, when Madonna sang Like A Prayer alongside Birhan Woldu, the child originally featured in that ‘Drive’ footage, it pretty much ended me.
While I wasn’t ready to entertain the notion of Live Aid as transactional spectacle predicated on incentivised altruism, some artists were totally comfortable with that arrangement. Adam Ant was given just one song to make an impact and unwisely sent his career into freefall by plugging his crap new single Vive Le Rock. For some reason, the critical Bryan Ferry was spared the critical sword of Damocles despite the fact that three of the four songs he chose to play were from from his new album Boys & Girls. George Michael was much better. Duetting with Elton John on Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me, he demonstrated that this was an outcome for which he’d been rehearsing in his bedroom in Bushey a decade previously. In years to come, we’d gain a greater awareness of the extent to which he would have to figure out who he was amid the distractions of fame and the cultural strictures of his own background. Listening back to the way he sings the line, “though I search myself it’s always someone else I see”, it’s apparent that these tensions were always hiding in plain sight. Did I register that at the time? Not consciously. But was it a moment? My god it was a moment. And everyone felt it.
It is, of course, impossible to talk about Live Aid without talking about that Queen set – 20 minutes so enshrined in the collective memory that, when the time came to film the Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody, writer Anthony McCarten reverse-engineered the plot from premise that this story could peak with the events of July 13, 1985. We must, of course, be mindful of the way history can be retrospectively freighted with a drama and significance that wasn’t wholly apparent at the time. But Queen’s Live Aid set wasn’t like that. If you could trace the energy spike in the stadium within the first few seconds of Bohemian Rhapsody you’d be simply drawing a vertical line from the bottom up. Remember Rik Mayall’s depiction of Lord Flashheart in Blackadder II? Almost over as soon as it began and yet not only are you reeling, you can detect a similar response in the supporting actors as its playing out. It wasn’t unreasonable – given how he was on next – that David Bowie might stroll on and do Under Pressure with Freddie, but that might have diminished the impact of this gluttonous orgy of self-celebration.
No-one was smarter with their bit than Queen, who understood the two golden rules of a self-promotion: (i) If you want to shift enormous quantities of your greatest hits album, play the hits; (ii) if you want to shift enormous quantities of your new/next studio album, then you still play the hits, because that’s how you generate the necessary goodwill. Queen experienced the biggest sales spike in the wake of Live Aid and, after the release of their next album A Kind Of Magic, they returned to Wembley as the headliners of their own show. They even silenced the intrusive voices in my own head and had me doing the double-clap on Radio Ga-Ga. In a day that was supposed to be about advancing the greater good, the setting aside of egos to – as Tommy Vance had put it – “FEED THOSE WHO ARE STARVING!!”, Queen rehearsed the fuck out of their 20 minutes, never losing sight of the fact that the 72,000 people dutifully repeating Freddie’s DAAAAYO’s were a mere fraction of the total audience. Somehow they managed to deliver six hits, climaxing in We Are The Champions. To have sequenced the songs in this order speaks of arrogance as outrageous as it was justified. Not only did Queen win Live Aid, but they rubbed everyone’s noses in it with a song built effectively around a victor’s playground chant: “Nyer-nyer-nyer-nyer-nyer”.
The only other group who devoted a comparable amount of thought to creating a unifying ‘spectacle’ in their set were U2. At that point, I’d seen enough clips of U2 to know that Bono often did this thing where he’d pull a girl out of the audience and lead her by the hand on stage where he would dance in embrace with her. This was the sort of move that made him a figure of ridicule among hipper peers like Ian McCulloch and Julian Cope. But it was also a little bit of theatre that played out better as the venues got bigger. It created an intimate connection in environments where intimacy and connection weren’t always easy to attain. But what actually happened during U2’s performance of Bad – a track from their most recent album The Unforgettable Fire – wasn’t as straightforward as that. Certainly it was hard to discern from where Annette and I were standing. As the instrumental break begins, Bono is perched at the edge of the stage beckoning frantically at a section of the crowd. In the stadium, it wasn’t entirely clear from the images on the low-res screen what the gesturing was about, but if you look at it now, it’s clear that there are U2 fans waving for his attention in a manner that suggests they want to be chosen. Finally, he realises he’ll have to do it himself and leaps of the end of the stage – a height of maybe six or seven feet.
And then? Well, it rather depends on who you believe. In 2005, The Sun tracked down the fan pulled out of the crowd by Bono and claimed that he had saved her life. “The crowd surged,” Kal Khalique reportedly said, “and I was suffocating – then I saw Bono.” Did Bono really save Khalique’s life? Would there have been a fatality that day had Bono not miraculously seen her face across the ravine of security and cameramen that separated the stage from the crowd? Somewhere between Khalique’s recollection, The Sun’s reporting of it, some people’s desire to believe in the messianic power of rock stars and the footage itself, that’s a story you can assemble if you so wish.
To do so, however, is to miss the truly extraordinary story – and the reason why, all these years later, U2’s Live Aid performance of Bad is pretty much the only thing I go back and listen to from the entire show. Before we get into it, it perhaps worth noting that, in the immediate aftermath of that performance, U2 left the stage thinking they had blown it. “We were really depressed,” said The Edge. “Bono … felt it had been kind of clumsy and that generally the whole thing hadn’t lifted up.” From where we were standing, with our view impaired, there was maybe an element of that. But none of that matters if you listen to the audio. Because while Bono’s down there, invisible to the Edge, Larry Mullen and Adam Clayton, they’re left with no choice but to act as the musical equivalent of a plane circling the airspace near Heathrow awaiting permission to land.
Actually, scratch that analogy. Because it doesn’t come close to honouring the telepathic bond shared by the rest of the band as they maintain the dramatic tension in the song – in particular Larry Mullen driving the whole thing from the back, gradually building it up, until at around 8m 45s, when Bono is back on stage, seemingly surprised to find that two more fans have been “selected” and are waiting for him. He hugs and kisses each of them and that – now that his band can see him again – Larry finally releases the pressure with the most glorious snare fill, a cue for Bono to sing, “Let it go/And so fade away.”
At some point from thereon in, there must have been a whole bunch of decisions the band would have to make without the privilege of being able to discuss them. Do they still have time to play that third song? Do they just ride this out, through Bono’s singalong interpolations of Ruby Tuesday, Walk On The Wild Side and Satellite Of Love? What you’re listening to at that juncture is childhood friends using their shared history to pull each other through a moment of utter uncertainty, desperate not to be destroyed or disgraced by it. Forced to act there and then, the rest of U2 improvise something that turbocharges the sense of tension and release that was already written into the song. Summoning everything they have to avert a humiliation that seems inevitable to them at this point.
There also happens to be something in a song written for a friend who is lost to heroin addiction that echoes the inadequacy of all of this. Pop stars trying to feed the world. The more I repeat Tommy Vance’s words in my head – “their hearts are in helping to FEED THOSE WHO ARE STARVING!!” – the more I realise how apt it was that to credit the initiating event of this to the group name Band Aid. I didn’t ponder the pun beyond the fact that Band-Aid had been a name of a well-known adhesive bandage. It took me decades, however, to clock the more self-flagellating aspect to the name. As in “It’s like sticking a Band-Aid on a gaping wound.” And yet, what do you do? Nothing? Bad speaks to that question more than any other song associated with Live Aid. More than Drive. More than Let It Be. More than that version of I Don’t Like Mondays. Certainly more than Mick Jagger and David Bowie’s Dancing In The Street. And perhaps even more than Do They Know It’s Christmas. I listen to that version of Bad in 2025, and it reminds me that doing something inadequate surely has to be better than doing nothing. I listen to Adam Clayton commence that high single note bass run into the closing seconds of Bad, knowing that, if he does so, that’s Larry’s cue to rattle home the song’s rousing closing section. And it does me in every time.
However, the truth is that back in Wembley 40 years ago, I didn’t really understand life in that way. I was there because I believed that pop stars were superior beings who could make it all better. After all, wasn’t that what they had done for me, over and over again? As the last rays of sunlight disappeared, I got to gaze on proudly – perhaps even a little proprietorially – as Bob was raised aloft by almost every sticker in my 1985 Smash Hits yearbook. Look at it on the telly now and you’ll notice how poorly stage-managed it all is, with A-list pop stars like Freddie Mercury and David Bowie struggling in vain to wrest a bit of mic action off the bassist from Big Country’s and concert promoter Harvey Goldsmith. Besides, after eight hours rooted to the spot, I was bursting for the toilet. We bought cheeseburgers at Euston and ate them on the train home. My dad drove straight from the chip shop and picked me up at Birmingham New St. My brother – who had been diligently taping the whole thing had also come along for the ride
“Did anyone see us on the telly?” I asked. “We were in the middle of the pitch and Annette had a colourful golf umbrella.” No they hadn’t, but everyone was talking about how Bob Geldof had said “Fuck” live on air. The revolution had literally been televised. Now people were really going to have to sit up and pay attention when the Boomtown Rats released their next album.
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I know it’s been discussed to death but always enjoy a new angle, esp on an all-time fave
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Music’s not my style but she’s a local and you love to see her doing well. I’m good mates with her dad too 
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Interesting to learn that the single failed to chart in the US.
When we heard Sugar Bear and KC Flightt in the UK there was no mystery of where the samples came from.
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Any excuse to post THE version ( that Justin played at Most Excellent every week )
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it was all over MTV here in the states. i think it didn’t chart because radio wasn’t sure what to do with it (they were still enthralled with power-pop and soft rock), plus there may have been too long of a gap between the single’s release date (jan of 1980) and the debut of MTV (aug of 1981).
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And no mention of Beloved/The Sun Rising or Orbital/Belfast!
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An interview with Janet Street Porter. Doesn’t mention how hugely influential she is to people of a certain age who came home from school to find rave on tv at 6pm or Public Enemy live from Brixton. Top woman.
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Absolutely, a hugely important part of the musical path I took as a teenager.
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