“LIVE AID could never happen now; the world has grown too mean,” said one of the journalists who arrived to interview Bob Geldof and me before the launch of Live Aid: The definitive 40-year story, which was published yesterday. Never again? I’m not so sure.
Compassion is out of fashion, they say. Look around. Governments everywhere have cut aid to the world’s poor. President Trump has slashed the United States’ aid budget by a deadly 83 per cent. There are wars in Ukraine and Gaza. Defence spending is up in the rich world. A new nativist populism is abroad; the US motto of “America First” echoes in other nations. Trump tariffs are the antithesis of fair trade.
But hold on. Think back to the context in which Bob Geldof got Britain’s top pop stars together to record a Christmas single to raise funds for Ethiopia, where millions of people were starving to death. And it wasn’t just the pop stars who worked for nothing: so did the record companies, retailers, the firms that pressed the vinyl, the women who stuck the labels on, and the men who drove the lorries that delivered them.
Now think about the times in which they did this. It was the height of the Cold War, when the United States and the Soviet Union fought proxy wars in places such as Ethiopia. Ronald Reagan cranked up military spending massively with the “Star Wars” missile system and matching rhetoric about the Evil Empire which polarised the world as a moral struggle between freedom and tyranny. Margaret Thatcher had just waged war abroad with Argentina and at home with the miners.
The old post-war consensus on how the world should run was breaking apart. Thatcherism and Reaganomics cut funding for education, housing, and welfare for the poor, while slashing taxes for the wealthy. The Big Bang in finance brought wealth for yuppies and unemployment in the old manufacturing industries. Urban decay spread. And the gap between rich and poor grew. A new individualism ushered in a more selfish world-view. Greed was good, and there was no such thing as society.
Such was the hostile world into which Bob Geldof launched his plea for a new generosity. But this was not the story of one man: it was the story of how millions of ordinary people played their part in bringing change. Live Aid created the biggest collective event in human history, and shifted the political centre of gravity for decades by fusing the worlds of pop and politics. Then, Live 8 called on people to be participants, not just spectators, empowering them to act outside the normal political process. Live Aid did not capture the Zeitgeist: it created it.
Today, Live Aid and Live 8 are a dangerous memory. They remind us that compassion is a fundamental expression of the better angels of our nature. It can happen again. It probably won’t be done by a rock star through the analogue world of pop music: it will be something in the digital world of social media, which I and other oldies cannot imagine. But hope tells us that it will happen. And Live Aid will provide the psychological and spiritual template.
Live Aid: The definitive 40-year story by Paul Vallely is published by New Modern at £30 (Church Times Bookshop £27); 978-1-917-92338-5.
