AFTER BAND AID, POP COULD NEVER BE THE SAME AGAIN. HOWEVER, AS ITS KEY PLAYERS EXPLAIN IN THIS ARCHIVE INTERVIEW, IT WAS ONLY BLUFF, BLUSTER AND BOB THAT COULD POSSIBLY HAVE MADE LIVE AID HAPPEN…

JOHNE ARLS

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In the aftermath of Band Aid, Bob Geldof became revered by the public and distant from music. He thought the impact of Do They Know It’s Christmas? would be over by the New Year of 1985, when The Boomtown Rats were going on tour. But instead, Geldof became the public face of charity and the man believed to have the answers for famine relief. He speaks to CP just after a magazine shoot at a photo studio in South London, so he’s got his silver stage jacket on. Wearing the jacket makes him feel like a rock star, says Geldof, and he certainly speaks with the stage presence of a true showman.

The musicians Classic Pop spoke to for this feature are united in one belief: if Bob Geldof asked you to play Live Aid, you played. He’s far from a bully, but his certainty gives nobody any other options. Yet even Geldof had been spooked by the enormity of Band Aid. “The impact of it scared me,” he says. “I didn’t know what I should do. In my head, I’d thought I could go straight back from Band Aid to being a musician. I was a born salesman – I sold tunes the way my dad sold towels – but suddenly I couldn’t sell The Boomtown Rats. I couldn’t go on Wogan and be asked about Africa and say ‘Well, Terry, it’s amazing, and incidentally the Rats are touring, here’s a song we’re playing.’ I’d carried the band on my crusade and we were f***ed.”

Going to Ethiopia had only made Geldof more aware that the charity was, no pun intended, only a sticking plaster for the scale of famine in Africa. “Band Aid worked,” emphasises Geldof. “But there was so much more to do. I’d said to myself I’d do what I could if Band Aid worked, so it would have been irresponsible not to take that to its logical conclusion. As a musician, what else could I do? Simple: put on a show.”