Following Friday’s Old Fruit feature that used the TV re-broadcast of 1985’s Live Aid concert from England and the USA as a launchpad for those retro film clips, I have additional reflections on that famous day’s concert. As highlighted with my comments on Dire Straits, there was some inevitable wiser head re-evaluating of other big name sets that I may have previously been lukewarm about. Top of that list is Queen who, I have to confess, have always been a musical blind spot for me but, as much as I am aware that praising Queen’s Live Aid set goes way beyond stating the bleeding obvious, I cannot find fault with it or them as a band. I thought The Who also were far more punchier and energetic than I previously recalled (was their set really interrupted by an outage prompting the broadcaster to show David Bowie & Mick Jagger’s ‘Dancing In The Street’ video? I do not remember that). Little wonder it is written that the old timers won the day over the eighties pop acts appearing earlier. The likes of Spandau Ballet and Ultravox sounded so thin in that arena, not to mention ridiculous looking in mid-summer heat with their ankle length trench coats and gallons of mullet holding hairspray. And what was Paul Young thinking playing ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ in July sun when he surely knew the whole ensemble were closing the concert with it? For me, the two mid-eighties pop stars coming out with most credit on the day were Howard Jones and George Michael; the former for being head and shoulders the best grand piano player on stage and the latter, joining Elton John for a version of ‘Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me’, simply down to his showcasing that strong and pure singing voice he possessed.

Dig back in time to the July 1985 music press and it appears that Live Aid was not given unconditional support despite the undoubted good intentions of Bob Geldof. The NME claimed that the concerts were “unwilling to address the furious conflicts of ideologies that allowed the African disaster to happen” whilst the writer Don Watson also dismissed the shows as “corporate pop turned corporative charity.” Amidst the criticisms of the occasions inability to address underlying political and social issues contributing to the famine there were equally loud voices pointing out certain non-participants and the lack of prominent black artists. From a personal point of view there were a number of bands and artists making a noise in 1985 who arguably deserved a slot; of those Billy Bragg, The Smiths, R.E.M., The Waterboys, The Fall, Talking Heads, Fine Young Cannibals and The Pogues are all good shouts (certainly stronger than Adam Ant that year). However, Bob Geldof did acknowledge the issue about black artists and was undoubtedly sincere in his frustration that scheduling and performance condition preferences prevented booking big names like Michael Jackson and Prince. As for the other nuanced critiques, Geldof had an endearing way of cutting through that objectional noise to focus people’s attentions on the far more basic and urgent prerogative of raising money to supply food for starving people and you cannot knock him for that.

On the BBC repeat broadcast there were a few of the American sets that did not get a re-run. I touched upon the Led Zeppelin absence in the Old Fruit feature last week, but the penultimate appearance on the night by Bob Dylan, backed by Ronnie Wood and Keith Richards, was also surprisingly cut. I went online and found most of his set and it turned my thoughts to earlier this year and the ‘A Complete Unknown’ film which recalled the mid-sixties outburst of hysteria from the folk scene after Dylan went electric. I spotted members of that folk community in the Live Aid footage; Peter, Paul & Mary were definitely on the stage during the ‘We Are The World’ finale whilst earlier in the day Joan Baez had sung ‘Amazing Grace’, utilizing that rather irritating folk trope of speaking every line to the crowd before singing it. The idea is to encourage audience participation but it has the unfortunate opposite effect of making Joan appear like a vibe-sapping try-hard head mistress. Still, I could not ignore that, twenty years since he was booed for abandoning topical folk material to play electric music of a more personal, surrealistically poetic nature, here was Dylan heading up a mainstream public event with a topical undercurrent playing the same acoustic folk music he had been accused of dropping two decades earlier and getting panned for it. Bob’s setlist at Live Aid was ‘Blowin’ In The Wind,’ The Ballad Of Hollis Brown’ and ‘When The Ship Comes In’ and upon revisiting it I felt strongly that the fundamental issues were out of his control. Behind that thin curtain backdrop was an impossible to ignore turbulence of set-building activity for the closing number alongside a gathering throng of unconstrained performers preparing a land grab for a prime onstage position during the rousing show closing chorus. Still Bob being Bob, he had to throw his own spanner into what could have been a mainstream career resurrecting moment by expressing a desire for some of the money to go towards American farmers struggling to pay their mortgages. Ultimately, that did inspire Willie Nelson, Neil Young and John Mellencamp to launch Farm Aid but on the day, it is fair to say the sentiments felt off colour to many who were solely, and rightly, focused on the famine crisis at hand.

Anyway, enjoy this month’s playlist which does not feature many artists who appeared at Live Aid although Neil Young and the Beach Boys do get a look in…