Live Aid: The Definitive 40 Year Story

The authoritative, official inside story of 40 years of Live Aid, from Band Aid to todayIn 1985, with £100+ million in his back pocket from Live Aid – the greatest rock concert the world had ever seen – Bob Geldof took a trip across Africa to decide how to spend the money he had raised for the Ethiopian famine. He asked Paul Vallely to go with him. Over the next four decades Vallely became one of Geldof’s closest advisers – travelling with him to meet the world’s top rock stars and politicians. Here, for the first time, Vallely gives his full eye-witness account of those 40 years. The book, which has a foreword by Bob Geldof, is crammed with stories of how pop, poverty, politics and power are interwoven in the Live Aid story. Geldof encounters presidents, prime ministers and popes as well as the pop heroes who adorned his bedroom wall as a boy. Bob drinks late-night whisky with Margaret Thatcher, is forced to write a grovelling apology to Bill Clinton and meets Vladimir Putin on a boat in the Mediterranean. He pressurises The Who, sweet talks Pink Floyd, and is awestruck by Bowie. Is Bob Geldof a bully or a charmer, saint or ‘white saviour’, or simply a force of nature?   But there is more to this than music. The journey from Live Aid to Live 8 was one from giving money to calling for action, from charity to justice – and an entire generation went on it with him. Live 8 in 2005 was the largest gathering in human history. Its eight simultaneous concerts created a seismic event which the leaders of the world’s most powerful nations could not ignore. It made a whole generation feel they could make a difference. In more ways than one, Live Aid rocked the world.

Paul Vallely was covering the 1984–85 famine in Ethiopia for The Times when he and Bob Geldof first met. Inspired by his on the ground reporting, Geldof asked him to travel across Africa with him in 1985 to decide how to spend the £140 million raised by Live Aid. He co-wrote Bob’s bestselling autobiography Is That It and wrote a number of publications on Live Aid and Live 8 for the Band Aid Trust. In 1990, he wrote a pioneering study Bad Samaritans: First World Ethics and Third World Debt, which set Geldof and Bono on the charity-to-justice journey from Live Aid to Live 8. He also worked as Geldof’s adviser on the Commission for Africa, which laid the groundwork for the Gleneagles G8to lobby world leaders to double aid to Africa and cancel its debts. He wrote the Penguin edition of the Commission for Africa report and was co-author of its full report, Our Common Interest. He was chair of two international development agencies, Traidcraft and the Catholic Institute for International Relations and is a senior research fellow at the Global Development Institute, University of Manchester.