Live Aid: ‘We switched it off when Status Quo came on’

Forty years ago this weekend, two concurrent concerts were held in London and Philadelphia in aid of relieving a brutal famine that had taken hold of Ethiopia. The legend of Live Aid has grown exponentially ever since. But each retelling draws upon the same familiar names and faces, the cameras trained on the contemporary darlings of Geldof and Collins, Freddie and Diana.

The many millions who watched on from home are treated as a matter of scale, not depth. They are remembered as an amorphous blob of common opinion, a simplified version of the public that in reality can never exist. And yet four decades from the event itself, each individual person retains their own individual memory, full of colour and life and utterly unique to themselves.

Peter Collins was one of the lucky ones. He grew up in Belfast, playing in bands and exploring the punk scene, a devoted reader of Melody Maker and the NME. Early in the morning on 13 July 1985, he and his schoolmate Alan headed for Belfast City Airport, bound for Heathrow, then London and Wembley. Already, he had a hunch that it was a day that he’d be talking about for years to come.

Forty years later, he still remembers almost every detail. There was the young boy in the crowd who waited all day for David Bowie, only to suffer an epileptic fit at the very moment he took to the stage; the people with picnic blankets and baskets; the tray of room service sandwiches delivered up to their hotel room later that night. In fact, the only thing missing from Peter’s memory is the music.

“We were going to it not because of how good the bands would be,” he explains. “We were going to it because it felt like that was going to be the thing that was happening on that day, the thing that everybody in the world was going to be aware of.” Paul Rance was 25. He watched Live Aid from a sleepy village in the depths of rural Lincolnshire and describes it as one of the greatest days of his youth. “For people who were a bit older than me, it would have been a bit like seeing England win the World Cup,” he says. “A big communal event. It felt like Woodstock to me.”

Joanne Ash was only nine. Sometimes she is unsure of which parts of the day really happened and which parts have been backfilled into a kind of false memory. Certainly, she recalls having been at a birthday party, the television blaring all day long inside the house as the guests filtered in sporadically from the outdoor sunshine. The party was in Feltham, a town on the western outskirts of London, less than 15 miles from Wembley Stadium.

“I’m convinced that we could hear it,” says Joanne. “I’ve got this idea that we were in the garden going — did you hear that?! I’m sure it was round about the Queen performance. It was just a roar.” At just nine, she stood within earshot of the centre of the universe. Eighteen-year-old Simon Moffatt could hardly have been further away. He and his friends were on a holiday, walking between youth hostels in southwest Wales, with two of the group celebrating their birthdays. “It was quite a big week for us, really.

We would have just finished our A-levels. You get to that age and your whole friendship group starts to disband. “One of our group had brought a little transistor radio with them. We arrived at this little bay, this tiny little bay in southwest Wales, and put this transistor radio on, listening to Status Quo (opening the concert with) ‘Rockin’ All Over the World’. Keith Webb travelled from Grimsby for the concert. He’d been to big gigs before, but this one felt different. “I wasn’t there for an audiophile experience,” he says.

RM Clark, The Independent