Original subtitles

This programme contains some strong language

It's 12 noon in London, 7am in Philadelphia,

and around the world, it's time for Live Aid!

40 years ago, music brought the world together

to fight a famine in Ethiopia.

♪ We could be heroes... ♪

32 million human beings dying of hunger in a world of surplus food.

And it's this simple thing that drives me nuts.

♪ Just for one day. ♪

It all began with a song.

The most remarkable number one ever.

It sold a million in a week.

Well, that's more than any other record in the history of music.

It inspired Live Aid, one of the biggest global events in history.

To be honest, it seemed a harebrained scheme.

It seemed like this could never happen.

I remember the stadium shaking.

I was singing my face off, honey.

♪ It was 20 years ago today Sergeant Pepper taught... ♪

20 years on, Live 8 challenged leaders of the world's richest

countries to address the causes of poverty in Africa.

People were saying, "Why in the hell are we going to spend money

"over in Africa when we got road problems in my state?"

I said to Bob, "I'll do the politics, you do the public."

Nothing can ever repair the damage

colonisation, slavery did.

Nothing.

But this was demonstrating what we could do.

This is the story of how a pop song inspired a movement that

secured tens of billions of pounds for Africa.

You can't change the world with a song or even a concert.

But you can plant a seed.

♪ ..Lonely Hearts Club Band. ♪

It was a dreary October, and I got home at six o'clock in the evening -

and, as I always say, that's, in rock and roll terms,

a measure of how not well you're doing,

because if you're in a rock and roll band, you're really not at home -

and turned on the television.

Dawn, and as the sun breaks the piercing chill of night

on the plain outside Korem,

it lights up a biblical famine, now, in the 20th century.

This place, say workers here, is the closest thing to hell on Earth.

There's not enough food for half these people.

Rumours of a shipment can set off panic.

As on most days, the rumours were false.

My partner, Paula, couldn't stand watching it.

She didn't want our child to watch it.

She clearly associated what she was seeing with our child

and just grabbed her and ran upstairs,

and I stayed transfixed.

Two months ago, there were 10,000 people here.

Now the latest harvest has failed, there are 40,000.

There were enormous numbers of people wherever you looked,

camped out, swamping this, this...

...this smallish town.

There was a low... a low wall, I remember,

um, a little enclosure.

And there were some people in the enclosure who were being given food.

All the rest of the people, who had no food at all,

just looking at, you know, the tiny number of people who did,

who did have something.

I remember this... terrified,

bewildered young girl

in this maelstrom of madness.

The choice of deciding who came into the feeding centre

was really very difficult, because there was

thousands of people that needed to come in

to feed thousands of children.

I only had 60 or 70 places.

But making that decision day after day, does that do anything to you?

Yes, of course it does.

What do you expect? Yes, of course it does.

It breaks my heart,

but at least I can see some of the ones that I am helping.

That night, I had agreed to go to

the book launch of the stylist of the 1980s, Peter York.

That was probably the book where Peter York defined

the posh girls who hung around the King's Road as "Sloane Rangers"

and the cornucopia...

...of everything, free,

and talking about something as hollow as style...

...must have annoyed me,

that I was going around very angry and saying to people,

"Have you seen this? Have you seen? It's terrible."

I was just watching that Ethiopian thing.

I think this is gross after, coming out, after seeing that.

Oh, yeah. I'm serious.

A lot of people eating a lot of food. I'm so sorry...

Sorry, do you want any champagne?

Well, I've limited myself to two sausages, as a result, so...

People are going, "Give it a rest, Geldof," you know, sort of thing.

I came down in the morning, about ten,

and there was a green bowl on the pine table in the kitchen,

and Paula had put a note in there saying,

anyone who comes to this house must put £1 or £5 into this bowl.

And I thought...

...that's just not adequate.

♪ The silicon chip inside her head

♪ Gets switched to overload

♪ And nobody's gonna go to school today

♪ She's gonna make them stay at home... ♪

I had been in a very successful band for ten years,

and I had been forced to realise

that maybe those best years of my life up to that point

were beginning to turn.

♪ Tell me why I don't like Mondays

♪ Tell me why

♪ I don't like Mondays

♪ Tell me why

♪ I don't like Mondays

♪ I wanna shoot-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo

♪ The whole day down... ♪

All I had the power to at that moment was write tunes.

But the immediate knowledge was that The Boomtown Rats

were not guaranteed to have hits any more.

These new guys had come along.

♪ Her name is Rio

♪ And she dances on the sand. ♪

Beautiful suits. Coifed hair.

♪ Just like that river twisting through a dusty land. ♪

Margaret Thatcher was at the peak of her power.

The country was so polarised.

This miners' strike was on.

The Big Bang, as they called it. Deregulation of the City.

The game was to go for growth through money.

I understood the new thing because my wife had befriended

all of these people on the show that she was host of -

the go-go rock show of the 1980s, with Jools Holland -

and that was called The Tube.

Tell me, Sting, what we really want to know is,

how come you get your gear off so often?

You're in enough trouble as it is. Why?

So I called Paula

and I asked who was on the show that night, and she said Ultravox.

♪ Dancing with tears in my eyes... ♪

I was chatting to Paula. The phone rang,

big old plastic thing, and she answered it and it was him.

I said, "Put him on."

And Bob had just seen the Michael Buerk report,

and he told me what he'd just seen and how disgusted he was.

And he just said, "What do you want to do?"

And I said, "Well, we do something like a Dylan song or, you know,

"a Lennon song or something..."

And he said, "No, let's... let's just write something."

If we wrote a song and donated the song royalties,

hopefully raising £100,000, that was realistic.

So the business side of Bob thought, "Get it out before Christmas.

"That's where money gets made in record sales."

OK, so we'll write a Christmas song. "It's Christmas-time."

I lived in Chelsea, and as I walked up the King's Road,

I saw Gary Kemp, who was the main guy,

the main writer and lead guitarist in Spandau Ballet,

spending his first flush of pop star money.

He comes running in and, um, you know,

his presence is huge, he takes over.

He sort of banged his head on a chandelier or something

and then he said this report was, you know, in Ethiopia

and the famine is huge and it's out of control.

And it broke my heart and it broke Paula's heart.

I walked down, the 50 yards, down to the Picasso Cafe,

and Sting was coming up the road.

We'd all seen that appalling footage. And, you know,

most of us didn't have a clue what we could do.

Just feeling powerless and useless.

And I'd known him since the very, very earliest days of The Police,

and I also thought he was really good, annoyingly.

He says, "I've got a song."

And I said, "Yeah?"

He said, "I think we should, you know,

"all sing this song and then raise money for Africa."

I went, "OK, Bob..."

You know, Bob's not the kind of guy you can say no to.

He's persistent.

So by the time I sat down, we had Ultravox, The Boomtown Rats,

Spandau Ballet and The Police.

In Britain, relief agencies have received a flood of donations

after last night's first BBC News pictures of the disaster.

The scale of the disaster in Ethiopia is so great

that money collected like this

is only a fraction of what is needed.

I was already scheduled to go to London on October 28th,

so we heard about the BBC report, but my government

was not aware that the United Kingdom

is in a revolution, complete revolution.

After the footage that shocked the whole country,

I was being received like a celebrity,

representing the poor people dying back home.

So it makes you very uncomfortable, yeah.

So it was a sense of guilt, a sense of sadness.

It's just mixed feelings, yeah?

So should I smile, or why should I...? What do I do here?

Until October 23rd, 1984, nobody took us seriously.

I had been three times

in the General Assembly before 1984.

Unless the situation is salvaged, and salvaged immediately through

a generous and concerted action by the international community,

the widespread fears and dire warnings

that the death toll may rise to truly catastrophic proportions

may very well come to pass.

There is no doubt about it that the whole world knows -

I mean, not the people, but the governments know.

But the Cold War between the West and the Soviet Union...

It was at its peak.

They wanted us to pay a price for the ideology that we have taken.

It was a Marxist military state backed by the Soviet Union,

run by this organisation called the Derg,

at the top of which was this tyrant called Haile Mariam Mengistu.

Most of the liberation movements then, African liberation movements,

were, uh, working very closely with Soviet Union.

Being an ally of the Soviet Union means adopting the Marxist ideology.

And there were raging civil wars

which prevented aid workers getting to people.

And at that time,

well, Mengistu was intent on celebrating the tenth anniversary

of his overthrow of the old emperor.

Somebody provided a television in each village all over Ethiopia.

All the feeding centre and everything was shut in town,

and everyone had to go and so-called celebrate.

The idea was to see how wonderful Mengistu Haile Mariam was.

Mengistu did not want any bad news.

He wanted to report a list of successes,

and he told me in a big meeting, the Politburo meeting,

"Now, look here. It's the wrong time to talk about this thing."

But after the BBC, suddenly the topic

was Ethiopia, Ethiopia, Ethiopia.

Tonight we end this programme with this report from Michael Buerk

of the BBC, who went to Ethiopia.

Dawn. And as the sun breaks through...

I talked to President Reagan.

There's no question that some people in Washington

felt we shouldn't provide aid -

they're a Soviet clientele, etc.

But I was showing the pictures to the President.

He looked at that and said, "This is terrible.

"We've got to do something about it."

It was four minutes footage on NBC,

but it has already sparked the whole, the whole of America.

300,000 metric tonnes of wheat from our government reserve

is being made immediately available for emergency food programmes.

In addition, $50 million from other accounts

is being transferred for emergency food use.

♪ Throw your arms around the world at Christmas-time... ♪

Bob turned up with a guitar that didn't have all its strings,

which kind of gave me an indication of how this was going to go.

And what he sang to me sounded like a demented Bob Dylan. You know...

♪ There won't be snow in Africa this Christmas-time. ♪

And of course it was... It was more confused with the fact

that he played something different every time,

because he's not a guitar player at all.

I kept thinking, "I'm trying to make a silk purse out a sow's ear here."

It's a pop song.

It was meant to last three minutes in 1984.

I turned up in Acton at Midge Ure's house.

He had a studio set up and they played me the demo of the song.

I did the first harmony pass on the song,

and then they used that demo of the two of us singing it

to teach everybody else.

Were we nervous the morning of the actual recording? Yes.

Right, Bob, we spoke to you yesterday.

It's all starting to happen now. What's it feeling like?

Well, there's only Midge and me here and about 100 film crew, so

I wish somebody else would hurry up and get here!

Bob and I standing out there

in a sea of cameras and microphones round us,

and neither of us knew who was coming.

All of it was wing and a prayer. No contracts with anyone.

No-one was paid. Just their word.

Bob leant across to me and said,

"If it's just The Boomtown Rats and Ultravox, we're fucked."

But they all turned up!

Thanks. Thank you.

Duran - exhausted. Rock star, up all night.

I just think, you know, if you're in a position to do something

about a situation like that, you should do it.

And that's what we're all doing.

Spandau just in from Japan. Hello!

So what Bob had explained was that,

you know, there were going to be some big names there.

Their fans were all there.

I think I walked in unmolested.

I was too old for them.

Surprised at those who came.

Thrilled to see Kool And The Gang, whoever asked them to come.

So we're all in, Bananarama

and everybody that's going to do this record is there,

apart from George. Boy George.

I said, "Where's George? And he said, "He's in New York."

I went, "Fucking hell."

Hello, George? Are you awake?

Do you want me to call you back? And I call and he's groggy.

You know, "Where are you?"

It's half ten, you lazy...

"There's a Concorde in two hours. Get on it," you know?

Let's take it line by line anyway. I want to actually get to hear

the thing. How did you hear about it? He told me.

No, we were at yours and the phone went. He told me.

There was a lot of male, um... egos in the room.

Not enough women.

I won't say anything else, actually. Sorry.

I think everyone was nervous walking in the room

as to how we would react with each other.

Um, and Paula Yates was really the...

The lovely glue, carrying her child around, Fifi,

and I think their dog Growler was there, and, um,

they're a great family. Everybody knew Paula.

We all knew Bob through Paula.

She was funny and witty and highly intelligent,

and she kept everyone kind of entertained,

walking around, chatting to them and stuff.

What's your next single?

It's called Last Christmas. It's a Christmas single.

Is it very Christmassy? Very.

Well, I can't ask you to sing a verse - you'll get mortified.

You can't ask me to sing a little bit? Oh, I'll sing you a little bit.

All right. It goes...

♪ Last Christmas I gave you my heart

♪ But the very next day You gave it away... ♪

And I'm not giving you any more than that.

Oh, that was good.

And, listen, I'll go and tell all my girlfriends George sang to me.

If we get to number one now, I'll feel I'm depriving, you know...

This of... Well, I don't mind which gets to number one.

It might work out everyone can have a go.

That's true. That would be great. That would be the best way.

It's peculiar. Need to be really quiet now. George sang something!

Yes, I know, I saw. Oh, God, it was thrilling.

I saw you go all weak-kneed!

You have to be really quiet cos there's no backing track.

I'm going to tell Bob.

Then it's that sort of crossover line...

I don't think Midge had a plan about what names were going to do what.

I don't think that was very clear.

I'm sitting there with a lyric sheet,

thinking we hadn't written enough lines.

So this range is sort of Paul Young's range.

Yeah. And it sounds nice

if it just comes out of that whole block of voices.

Yeah. ♪ It's Christmas-time... ♪

♪ And there's no need to be afraid

♪ At Christmas-time

♪ We let in light and vanish shade

♪ Ooh-ooh, in our world... ♪

There was a sense of euphoria for all being together,

making this record and listening to the vocals of George Michael,

which were just unbelievable.

♪ Christmas-time... ♪

♪ But say a prayer

♪ Pray for the other ones

♪ At Christmas-time... ♪

That actual line itself, the... ♪ But say a prayer... ♪

is hard for me to sing powerfully. If we... If we...

If you wanted to kind of change the notation a little bit.

so it started off a bit higher or something...

♪ But say a...

♪ But say a prayer... ♪ I could do that if you want.

That sounds great. That's great.

It was perfect because it was George.

It was exactly what you would hope that he would do with it.

No, I was a little uncomfortable. You can tell that

because I'm doing the shy thing, which is a dead giveaway.

All right. Well, again.

Are these the lyrics? Yeah.

And then, of course, really relaxed by the line Bob gives me.

"Thank God it's them instead of you, mate."

He says, "Are you sure this is what you mean?"

♪ Where the only water flowing is

♪ The bitter sting of tears... ♪ It's a hymn, really, isn't it?

Far out, Bob.

You got there in the end. Fuck off!

The war, the horror of the famine. Just be aware of it.

There's nothing sentimental about what I'm saying or trying to say.

I'm being very fucking blunt.

I'm Irish.

Bob Geldof's Irish. We have the folk memory of famine.

I just said, "OK, I will attempt to be worthy of that..."

"..cruel prayer."

♪ Well, tonight thank God it's them instead of you... ♪

He went up an octave to the one that I had done on the guide vocal,

and it just took off at that point.

They want you to do it in a day and finish it in a day

so it could be on the streets as soon as possible.

We had come to the studio with the backing track intact,

and Midge didn't really want to add anything more.

And, um, Phil shows up with his kit.

Poor guy sat there for five hours.

His head would pop up behind the mixing desk and say,

"Are you ready for me yet?" And I'd say...

"Half an hour, Phil."

Well, are you going to play drums or what?

I hope so. That's what I came for. Oh, please.

Yeah. No, no, that's what... I'm going to be playing drums.

As soon as they let me have a go, you know.

They said, "That's... "That's the song.

"So just go out there and play, you know?"

Well, are you going to show him how you want the drums, mate?

I will do. I mean, basically just a pair over each tom.

It's just that I wanted a couple of really high ambience

with lots of compression on it.

Mm. Lots of that. Yes. That kind of thing.

What was intimidating was

that people started coming in to listen.

Everyone was in awe of this because you're watching brilliance.

Pretty fucking good, old chap.

♪ And there won't be snow in Africa this Christmas-time... ♪

Totally different melody, Bob!

It was like a school day, you know.

We were all in the hall at assembly. That's...

That's basically what it felt like.

Two, three, four.

♪ Feed the world

♪ Let them know it's Christmas-time... ♪

This was...25-year-old kids,

working-class kids,

trying to change something so huge - intercontinental.

And that energy was naive in many ways.

There's something about pop music, rock music,

whatever you want to call it,

it is inherently working class because it comes from nothing.

I was born in a tenement slum in the outskirts of Glasgow.

That element doesn't go away. We have empathy, you know.

We feel things. That's why we write things.

That's why we create things.

Oi, Simon!

Once he knew that they were all there,

there is no way Boy George is not going to swank in late.

Hi. How are you doing? Hi.

It's really odd seeing all these people in the same room.

It's the whole front page of the Daily Mirror tomorrow.

It is. The whole front page, and it just says on the top,

"billion-dollar band".

And the whole centre spread just says "Band Aid".

Band Aid?

That's the name of... Oh, sorry.

I'll phone up tomorrow and complain. I don't like the name.

So turn me up, cos I really can't hear it.

It's better cos it helps me with the phrasing.

Otherwise, I can't put my heart and soul into this, you know?

♪ And in our world... ♪

When you hear him singing raw,

no backing track, you kind of go, "Ooof." Serious voice, you know?

♪ Do they know it's Christmas-time at all?

♪ And there won't be snow in Africa this Christmas-time

♪ The greatest gift they'll get this year is life

♪ Oh

♪ Where nothing ever grows

♪ No rain or rivers flow

♪ Do they know it's Christmas-time at all?

♪ Oh... ♪

What happens after that?

I didn't think we had...

...a deserving number one. I thought we had a pop single,

but it had to work. It had to be.

Now, we're coming up to Christmas, aren't we?

It's the busiest time of the year for the pop music industry.

The competition for the number-one spot in the charts

is normally really quite vicious,

but this year is already a little bit different.

1.5 million was the figure, you know,

writ large in the newspapers today.

You think it's going to raise as much money as that?

At first I thought, most people think that if you sell

half a million records, you're a millionaire.

In fact, even with a huge percentage of sales, you get about £70,000.

And then I got onto the record retailers and this was,

I think, the big coup.

They all immediately agreed to waive any profits. Great.

Which is fabulous. So that put it in another ballgame.

We'll know by Christmas, won't we? Absolutely.

And hopefully it'll get to Ethiopia straight away.

We begged Bowie to introduce our video prior to Top Of The Pops,

which at that time was, I don't know,

18 million people or something watched.

And now here's David Bowie.

Hello, this is David Bowie.

I've been trying to think of shock tactics to present

what I've been asked to present,

but the figures themselves are really alarming.

He was wearing some superb Bowie, beautiful thing,

you know, some Japanese latest thing.

And we shot it and I said...

He said, "What?" And I said, "You look... You look too fucking cool."

I said, "It's famine, you know? And I said,

"Will you wear my crap T-shirt?"

It would be wonderful if you could all buy copies of this record

over the next period, through Christmas.

If you can't afford them, club together

with somebody else to buy a copy.

You know that the money will go to the Ethiopians. Thank you.

Once he intro'd us, we had everyone. We had...

That was the '80s.

I mean, really, you know, there it is.

♪ It's Christmas-time

♪ There's no need to be afraid

♪ At Christmas-time

♪ We let in light and we banish shade

♪ And in our world of plenty

♪ We can spread a smile of joy

♪ Throw your arms around the world

♪ At Christmas-time

♪ But say a prayer

♪ Pray for the... ♪

People were coming in and buying 30 copies of the record

and giving 29 back for it to be sold again.

♪ But when you're having fun... ♪

So suddenly all sorts of shops are calling up.

Famously, I remember a butcher in Plymouth, his front window.

And it was the goose, the turkey, the sausages or whatever,

and the Band Aid record.

♪ Where the only water flowing... ♪

Fortnum & Mason got through to me.

"How exactly does one sell a pop record?"

I think there was cynicism from some of the music press

about the quality of the song.

But it wasn't about that.

It was a simple piece of music.

But it was something more than that.

It was something social, there was something tangible about it.

At one time, every plant in Europe that could manufacture

vinyl singles was being used for the Band Aid single.

In just one week, they've raised more than £1 million.

It's the fastest-selling single ever.

Britain's brand-new number one, Band Aid,

Do They Know It's Christmas-time?

New York stores were sold out in the first hour.

Only one shop in Washington had a supply this morning.

Retailers and record buyers are clamouring for more

and the promotion campaign has only just begun.

So, it could look like we will actually, with this one song,

exceed the total UNICEF budget for 1985.

They had bought that record

and made it their own empowerment.

Cynicism disappeared.

I said that we were going to try and fill these sacks,

big brown ones, for Band Aid.

This is the last sack, because all the others are full to the top.

I think that the Government should help more,

they're not really putting their foot in.

They should give some more money to help.

Throughout northern Ethiopia, aid efforts are overrun

by the sheer mass of the starving, malnourished and the sick.

But numbers keep growing and supplies are always short.

Of course, it takes time to bring the food here in Ethiopia,

but till now, we didn't see much.

Birhan Woldu, carried for eight hours by her father

to a Catholic aid centre in Mekelle.

There isn't anything we can do, really, for this child.

The child is too far gone, nothing will save this child now.

There isn't anything we can do at this point.

After hours of covering other tragedies, we returned to

the Catholic mission and were surprised by a small miracle.

Sister, we may have had a bit of luck this morning, did we? Yes.

I was working in Ethiopia.

I was sending photographs

virtually every day.

And I phoned my editor and said, "Are we still using this?"

And he said, "No.

"Ken, I can't keep using it,

"we lose circulation every time we use a big show on it.

"People get turned off by it."

So he said, "Come home."

Bob was a neighbour of mine. I went over and knocked his door.

And Bob comes to the door and I said...

"If you don't go, we can't cover the story any more." "Why not?"

"Because we've done it.

"And we can't keep doing it, there needs a peg to hang it on."

And he said, "Ken, I'm a fucking rock-and-roller.

"I can't be seen with dead babies, that would be just ridiculous.

"It would look like I was climbing onto some sort of bandwagon."

I promised Bob that I would not take

any photographs of him with dying babies.

That was his main concern, and I promised it wouldn't happen.

I'd never been in Sub-Saharan Africa.

I was sort of embarrassed,

this Irish pop singer swanning in with his press corps.

Quite frankly, I was really amazed at the way he looked, you know?

I was expecting a British diplomat,

someone in a three-piece suit.

His hair was not combed, he hadn't shaved.

He looked awful, I tell you!

Band Aid was good and we'd heard about it.

What we didn't like

was the title of the music.

Do They Know It's Christmas?

It was the wrong title.

Because they just didn't do their homework.

Ethiopians are the oldest Christians in the world.

So that offended us a little bit.

And like the song's making,

Ethiopia is not a poor country, that poor,

where there is no rain and so on.

In fact, it's a place, it's neighbours with rivers.

You know about the Nile.

Simplifying things like that is not going to be...

...to be right, you know?

So I'm skittering through the airport and I see Mother Teresa.

And I think, "Crikey, hang on a minute."

So I had a word with her and I ran off to get Bob.

I told him, "OK, you will meet this saint,

"please refrain from using your F-words,

"your obscene words, be polite."

Suddenly, it's "St Bob" from the press,

and literally a living saint, quite literally a saint.

And Bob threw his arms so wide to hug her.

And Mother Teresa was not ready for that,

to be hugged by a weird-looking Irishman!

But she was very polite, very polite.

Very kind.

What I remember is her feet.

And particularly her toes.

They were like claws.

They were very old, she was thin as a whippet.

And tiny little thing.

And she played the old lady shtick.

But, boy, this was show business.

Like, she immediately lasered in on the media around me

and became Mother Teresa.

Saw the TV reports and I just got a lot of pop musicians

and we made the record and it just went crazy. And we got £8 million.

I thought we'd make 70,000, so we got 8 million.

And I said to her, "Well, I'm here,

"maybe you could help give me something."

And she said, "I can't do what you do and you can't do what I do.

"But we both have to do it."

He came on January 5.

January 5 is Christmas Eve for Ethiopians.

I say, OK, this guy, he thinks there's no Christmas in Ethiopia,

let's show him how we celebrate Christmas.

Now it seems to the world that Christianity came from Europe.

Like, Christ looks like Europeans,

Christ looks like Americans,

history has changed.

It was an evening service

and he was there,

spent the whole night in the church.

This bloody thing going on for 14 hours.

I mean, the Mass in Ireland bored the arse off me, you know.

I knocked that on the head as soon as I could.

The famine was in the epicentre of this war.

And when I say war, I mean properly war.

MiGs, tanks,

you know, bombing their own people, etc.

Here are these guns

and smoke

and starving... people.

I'd never really been in a war situation.

Where I found myself was...

...some sort of human carnage dump, you know?

You know, it was heartbreaking, what you see.

It was very sad.

How would you react if you see a small kid...

...just on the verge of death, you know?

So, all I could do was...

See, what was I doing there?

What was I doing there?

Some kid dying for a lack of a handful of grain.

I mean, that's not an easy thing to deal with for anybody.

Especially if you're not aware of the existence

of these kind of things and you're suddenly exposed to it.

I had this urgency within me.

I had never seen anything as bad.

All these children were just in his wake, running through the camp.

I took this photograph,

it was used across two pages,

"The Pied Piper Of Pop."

Here was Captain Africa, St Bob.

So now it's a terrible mistake to have done this.

But at the same time, if you don't do it, Bob, then that story's gone.

They want you to weep, they want you to cry, they want you to pick up

the infant as if they're just objects for their fucking story.

And the horrible thing is, they weren't wrong.

And I was just absorbing it

and one of the journalists is tuning the World Service.

And they played Do They Know It's Christmas?

And it was very low,

so I just thought...

...it's the weirdest thing ever.

That studio, a couple of weeks ago,

and here, like, you know, so...

Just added to the complete, psychedelic...

...um, overload.

And suddenly, louder than simply the background thing

to this vista, Bono...

♪ Well, tonight, thank God it's them instead of you... ♪

All the rage, all the shame.

Ethiopia's Marxist government has begun a huge operation

to resettle people from the barren areas of the north

to the more fertile land in the south.

It sounded logical.

An area is not fertile,

you take people from infertile areas,

because the country is so big.

The operation is a highly controversial one.

The migration, assisted by the Soviet Union,

criticised by Western governments.

In this operation, the Russians have no qualms.

They cram 250 people into each plane,

which normally takes 100 passengers.

They're herded in like cattle.

We are the subject of adverse press propaganda.

Yes, you are. I mean, I think there is a misinformation campaign.

But you're to blame for it too.

Look, the first pictures we saw of resettlement were these ancient

and beautiful people starving and in rags under armed guard,

going into these vast, Russian planes.

They probably have never seen a plane.

They have nothing left, only their dignity.

And to the West, the immediate psychological reaction

is Jews being led at gunpoint into cattle trucks by the Nazis.

President Mengistu arrives with an interpreter.

We were shown into this palatial room

and there were some other people who had been with us, backed off.

It was a very small meeting in the centre of this marble room.

I understand...

...that I have to show respect.

Even though it is the last thing I'd do, having seen what I've seen.

And in the course of this, through the interpreter,

he asked Bob for £1 million.

Bob just... It was like lighting the fuse!

And I walked up to him, I think very sharply,

and I was just angry and I just said, "I think you're a BLEEP."

The interpreter stopped interpreting.

But even Mengistu knew the F-word

if you put 14 of them in each paragraph.

When we finished the meeting,

I don't want to go over the details,

the councilmember says to me, "Is this man...?

"You are really serious, taking this to the chairman?"

In the first part of Band Aid, there was a tiny office in Euston.

It was an old bus garage.

And we had a tiny little, sort of, office

in the corner of this bus garage that was deserted.

One of the things that Bob had emphasised at the very

beginning was, there will be no overhead.

Every penny you give us will be spent on aid.

We've begged, borrowed and stolen everything.

Everybody who was on the team was working for nothing.

All over the land, people were volunteering.

The entire country, more or less, had seen that BBC report,

and everyone felt the same shame.

The same rage, the same anger.

The Treasury has once again emphasised that VAT

must be paid on Band Aid's charity record for Ethiopia.

I think they're mean.

For 18p, it would be worth just waiving VAT on this record.

Especially as it's selling so much.

And it's probably never going to happen like this again in history.

I think they should waive it.

Because there's so many millions of people starving

and dying every minute of the day.

All we're saying to them is, look, everyone's done their bit,

you've got this money in circumstances where

you wouldn't have got it but for the famine

and but for the work that's been done to try to aid that famine.

Thatcher, the Milk Snatcher earlier -

taking milk away from schoolchildren,

free milk away from schoolchildren,

was now taking food from the starving people

that the entire country had gathered to resolve.

There was this lane...

Newspaper awards, and I knew she was going.

There's an area. And I was there, and the place was crowded,

and she came up the stairs, full armour,

hair, make-up, you know.

And I was shot forward, and I was up for it.

We had a bit of a problem with the VAT on the record. I know.

But, you know, don't forget, we've used some of your VAT

to give back and to plough back. Mm.

We've given again and again.

I mean, a government has to get taxation from somewhere.

I'd prepared how I should behave,

that I would not raise my voice.

At the moment, you've got a problem with the butter mountain,

you don't how to dispose of it.

To sell it to the Russians is the cheapest way.

I'm sorry, but butter doesn't do very much good in Africa,

as you know! It's grain. Well, butter oil actually does,

it is one of the major supplementary foods...

Butter oil, if you can get it done.

But it is a by-product of butter.

But, look, a lot IS going, a lot of surplus food is going.

But, Prime Minister, there are millions dying,

and that's the terrible thing. Yes, indeed.

She looked up and fixed me with the Gorgon glare, you know, ice eyes.

And she was immediately pushed out of my way. And I thought...

I hadn't done it.

I hadn't nailed it.

But then, even the right-wing press took up the cudgels.

It's a Friday night, I get a phone call...

And, um...

"Is that Mr Geldof?" "Yes."

"Could you stand by for the Chancellor of the Exchequer?" "OK."

"The Government is prepared to make a donation

"to the exact level

"of the VAT due on the Band Aid record."

"I said, 'Thank you very much, Chancellor.' "

And he said, "However, there is one caveat." "Yes?"

And he said, "We would rather

"if you didn't issue any statements about this to the press."

And I said, "Yes, of course, thank you very much.

"And please thank the Prime Minister."

♪ Work all night on a drink of rum

♪ Daylight come and me wan' go home

♪ Stack banana till the morning come

♪ Daylight come and me wan' go home... ♪

We got a phone call from Harry Belafonte saying,

"Do you know what they're doing

"in England? This song,

"Do They Know It's Christmas?"

He said, "All of these artists have come together.

"Particularly the white artists there,

"there weren't very many African artists involved."

Harry Belafonte burst upon the musical scene

and was a driving force in social justice in the '50s.

"They're raising millions of dollars with a song, let's do it here.

"We've got bigger artists, a bigger market."

The biggest artists in the world were here, there was Michael Jackson

and Lionel Richie and Prince and so on. In fact, I said,

"I tell you what, let's just start at the top of the record charts

"and work our way down."

What Harry said was, "Why are white people saving black people

"when black people can't save black people?

"What are we doing?"

So he said, "We have this power,

"let's go do this." You know,

there's Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder,

Quincy Jones, Lionel Richie, come on, guys.

What we had no idea of was that

we were going to be joined by 40 other artists.

The phone rings and...

"Is that Bob Gel-dorf?"

And it's this husky, gravelly voice, very slow.

And I go, "Yep, who's that?"

He goes, "It's Harry Belafonte. Here's Michael."

And suddenly he goes... HIGHER-PITCHED: "Hi, Bob."

And, like, Paula's sitting on the sofa like, "Again?"

And I go...

"It's Michael Jackson!" She goes...

And she gets up and she runs around.

And he said, "Will you come out and help us?"

Lionel Richie was hosting the American Music Awards

on January 28th, and all the stars from America were coming to that.

And I decided to have the recording session following that,

because the artists would all be in town.

We walked through the door and there is Michael,

standing on the mic, ready to go.

At 10am, right on the dot.

Quincy decided that nothing should be left to chance.

And we put actual tape down on the floor

with people's names on them, telling them where they were going to stand.

Diana and Michael and Lionel and Stevie and, you know,

Billy Joel and Tina Turner. It adds up.

I mean, after a while, you can't even count any more.

And Quincy says, "OK, we all know Bob Geldof."

Blank.

Nobody knows Bob Geldof, you know?

I mean, this is my bedroom wall come alive.

He just came back from Ethiopia and he'd like to talk to you.

Oh, would I? Oh...

Erm, well, maybe...

To put you in the mood of the song you're about to sing,

which hopefully will save millions of lives, I think

it's best to remember that the price of a life this year is

a piece of plastic, seven inches wide with a hole in the middle.

You walk into one of the corrugated-iron huts

and you see dead bodies lying side by side with the live ones.

And on a good day,

you can only see 120 people die slowly in front of you.

I don't want to bring anyone down

but maybe it's the best way of making what you really feel,

and why you're here tonight, come out through this song.

So thanks a lot, everybody, and let's hope it works.

This guy came in, breathing fire.

You could just see it in his eyes.

Not only did he want to do it,

but he had the answer to it.

You've got a man with first-hand experience and you try to

relay that to the singers and tell them what it was like.

Because people, you can't take it for granted

that people understand this, they don't.

Let me know when you're ready! Ready!

♪ We are the children... ♪

Quincy had a choirmaster listen intently to everyone's voices

and pair them together before the thing.

"You're singing with them, you're singing with them."

What we'll do is, you're leaning in on your part.

And then when the other person comes in, when you duet with someone,

whatever the case is, when your part comes up, lean in.

♪ Won't you send them your heart

♪ So they know that someone cares?

♪ And their lives will be stronger and free

♪ As God has shown us by turning stone to bread

♪ And so we all must lend a helping hand

♪ We are the world

♪ We are... ♪

It was right at the top of Springsteen's voice,

the G-sharp which he does in Born In The USA.

I mean, the powerful, that's his...

That's his, um...

...hot note.

That was the genius of watching Quincy do his work.

♪ We'll make a better day, just you and me

♪ When you're down and out... ♪

We just got lucky, or blessed or whatever you want to call it.

Because usually, boy, if you ever need any favours from God,

there's no answer like that.

♪ Let us realise

♪ Oh, that a change will only come

♪ When we stand together as one... ♪

To generate even more money, there will be a behind-the-scenes

video, T-shirts, sweatshirts, a poster autographed by the stars...

It can't happen with just the performers,

it's about the people that sold the records,

the disc jockeys that played it,

the record companies that helped push it.

And, number one, the people, the audiences, the public that

got involved and cared and responded to what the performers did.

There's no one person involved in it,

and I guess that's what I like most about it.

♪ We are the world

♪ We are the children

♪ We are the ones who make a brighter day

♪ So let's start giving Let's start giving

♪ There's a choice we're making

♪ We're saving our own lives

♪ It's true, we'll make a better day

♪ Just you and me... ♪

I remember the phone call that Michael gave me, one morning.

He said, "Lionel, turn on the TV."

And they had a four-screen split,

they're singing it in London,

they're singing it in New York,

they're singing it in LA,

they're singing it in Tokyo.

He said, "What's that?" I said, "I don't know."

It was beyond...

♪ Just you and me, yeah

♪ We are the world... ♪

It's 12 noon in London, 7am in Philadelphia,

and around the world, it's time for Live Aid.

Bob came in and said, "I've got this idea."

He came back from Africa

and realised how big

the problem was out there.

And had kind of got it in his mind

that he needed to raise more money.

And just announced, "We're doing a concert, Harvey's doing it,

"see you later."

Rockin' All Over The World by Status Quo

♪ Oh, here we are and here we are and here we go

♪ All aboard and we're hittin' the road

♪ Here we go

♪ Rockin' all over the world

♪ A giddy up and giddy up and get away

♪ We're goin' crazy and we're goin' today... ♪