The Staging Of A Miracle
Mark Cunningham
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Publication Text & design copyright Š 2015 Mark Cunningham / Liveculture Music Limited
www.liveculture.co.uk
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A Cutlery Tale Back in the 1980s, my mother Joan was running her own specialist leisurewear company, Grapevine, supplying a number of rock’n’roll merchandising firms, promoters and record labels with custom orders from her home in Essex. At the time that news of the forthcoming Band Aid single broke, she had been organising promotional garments for Tears For Fears and their record company Phonogram — the label that represented Band Aid. Recognising the importance of Geldof’s in-the-works project, I encouraged Mum to donate some T-shirts and sweatshirts to Phonogram to promote ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’, which hadn’t yet been recorded. In fact, at that time the song was still known as ‘Feed The World’. Phonogram’s marketing people were delighted with her pledge of the T-shirts, but said they were still waiting for artwork. That day, the 22 year old version of yours truly was sitting at Mum’s kitchen table, doodling a very amateurish logo idea (saved for posterity below), comprised of a fork and knife either side of a globe, as if the world itself was a dinner plate. It was such a simple little squiggle that I didn’t think any more of it until Mum told me she had taken the sketch to Phonogram and it had been given to their art studio to work on. She was later given a final version – a Photo-Mechanical Transfer (or PMT), as it was then called – to be printed on the backs of the shirts. It’s interesting that, according to that most reliable of sources, Wikipedia, three other people have laid claim to that same logo: Phil Smee, Markus Newman and even Geldof himself, according to Midge Ure. I once cornered Geldof with some friendly banter on the subject but he brushed it off. As for me, well, I know exactly where it came from and it was quite a moment when I saw it flying high above that Wembley stage. Thanks, Mum. X
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“It’s 12 noon in London, 7.00am in Philadelphia, and around the world it’s time for LIVE AID!” To some of us, it only seems like it was yesterday that Live Aid took the world and its collective conscience by storm. Its 30 year anniversary is a sobering reminder of how quickly time passes, what a vastly different world we now inhabit and how events such as Live 8 could not have happened without the many lessons learned in 1985. Back then, the mullet was king and four channels of terrestrial TV were all UK viewers had to choose from, the mobile phone was the size of a brick and mostly confined to in-car use by the wealthy; the fax machine was in its infancy, and the World Wide Web was still just an idea. That an event so unique in its complexity was executed almost
perfectly without the use of those everyday tools that we now take for granted is something that never ceases to amaze. Following on from the phenomenon that was the Band Aid single ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ and its American counterpart, ‘We Are The World’ by USA For Africa, Live Aid was simultaneously staged in Wembley Stadium and JFK Stadium in Philadelphia, along with an often forgotten event in Australia — Oz For Africa, headlined by INXS. This mammoth fund raiser for Ethiopian famine relief boasted the cream of contemporary rock and pop talent — from Queen, U2, Dire Straits and The Who performing in the UK, 9
Wembley Stadium, London.
to Led Zeppelin, Eric Clapton, Mick Jagger, Madonna and Simple Minds in the USA. Logistically and technically, it was then the most complex rock’n’roll event ever televised live. The first real move towards staging the event took place on February 10 1985, when Bob Geldof and Midge Ure met with their mutual promoter Maurice Jones of MCP to discuss a range of possibilities. However, in Geldof’s mind there was one person whom he felt for sure held the key to pulling it off: the legendary promoter, Harvey Goldsmith. Goldsmith explains his introduction to Geldof’s brainwave: “Bob called me with this proposal, saying he’d started Band Aid and made a successful 10
record, and now he wanted to do a show. I said ‘Look, I’ve got Wham! going to China and Roger Waters on tour in America, and I’ve got to deal with it, so call me when I get back’. Which he did, of course… he just said ‘We’re doing it!’ “We agreed to meet in my office whereupon he reeled off what we were doing. I asked him which acts he’d got and he rattled off Stevie Wonder, Queen, The Who… they were all going to do it, no problem. He also insisted that we were not going to do one show, but two… at the same time. “Bob added that what he really wanted to do was link it all together with television, and that he was going to the BBC to get them to
JFK Stadium, Philadelphia.
agree to giving us a whole day of live broadcast time! “I just kept telling him how completely berserk he was, saying ‘You can’t do that, but it might be possible this way’, to which he said ‘You can, it’s gotta be done like this.’” Gradually, Goldsmith began to succumb to the Boomtown Rat’s infectious enthusiasm, and the battle to convince the television powers went into motion, with the help of John Smith of the BBC’s Pebble Mill Studios in Birmingham. “We went to the Beeb armed with the success of Band Aid, and Bob in his very direct manner started screaming at them,” says Goldsmith. “The BBC people were into it, they
were going to produce it and make it all work, but they were also going to take all the rights and only give him two hours of television. Bob just didn’t want to know about it. He said, ‘I want the whole bloody thing on screen.’ “It was a Friday afternoon, five o’clock, and these people wanted to go home but I could see they were intrigued by Bob’s fighting talk. So I turned round to the BBC guys and said ‘You have until four o’clock on Tuesday to make up your minds’, and walked out. “And bless them, at the strike of four that Tuesday, they phoned and said ‘We think we can make it work’. Until that happened we didn’t have a show. 11
Geldof & Goldsmith arrive for the Wembley build-up. Right: Bill Graham.
“Bob had pipe dreamed about America, but we still didn’t have America; he had pipe dreamed about Wembley, but we were still without any confirmed acts, despite everything he’d told me in the beginning. More artists’ reaction to his phone calls was, ‘We don’t know what you are talking about but if everybody else does it, we’ll do it.’ “He called everybody else and they said the same: ‘If everybody else does it, we’ll do it.’ So I got on the phone to all of them and said ‘Everybody else is doing it, and so are you!’” Amidst great passion and sleepless nights, the organisation of Live Aid took shape from Goldsmith’s board
room in Oxford Street over the course of a feverish 10 week period. “We were at it 24 hours a day. Suddenly there was a spark and we used it to juggle all the balls in the air. When we held the press conference at the Hard Rock Cafe, half of the announced acts had not actually committed. “Stevie Wonder phoned us and said ‘I am not going to be the token black act. I am out.’ And all these other acts that we had promised were calling us in the middle of the press conference, saying ‘What’s all this all about? What exactly are we supposed to be doing?’ It was probably the ultimate rock’n’roll bluff!
“Everybody wanted a piece of the action when they realised the long-term implication for themselves...” Harvey Goldsmith 12
The Prince and Princess of Wales in attendance.
“But then everybody wanted a piece of the action, certainly when they realised the long-term implication for themselves. Bill Graham phoned up one day and said, ‘I’ve got to put Black Sabbath on.’ We said, ‘They don’t fit.’ He said, ‘I’ve got to play Black Sabbath. If I don’t, I won’t get their merchandising because I own Winterland.’ We couldn’t believe what we were hearing. “‘What the f**k are you talking about?’ I said. ‘What has it got to do with us whether you get your merchandising or not?’ There was all that kind of shit going on. “On the night before the show, Tommy Motolla phoned me up and threatened to pull Mick Jagger from the line-up because he wanted Daryl
Hall & John Oates in the last part of the show, and I just said ‘Pull him then!’, which he didn’t, of course!” Finding a suitable venue for the American side of Live Aid proved to be far more difficult than they imagined. “We went to New York, but we couldn’t get either Shea Stadium or the Giants Stadium, and RFK in Washington was also a non-starter. Bob thought we should go to Bill Graham, but I said ‘Bill’s on the West Coast and we can’t have the show there because there’s an eight hour time difference which wound render the whole idea impossible.’ “Bill suggested we do it in Stamford, but it had to be in a landmark city. It was Larry Magid who thought of the idea to go to the JFK 13
Midge Ure and David Bowie played important roles.
Stadium in Philadelphia and got the Mayor’s blessing; it wasn’t far from the East Coast, for time difference reasons, and it was the home of the Liberty Bell, so it made perfect sense. So although Bill Graham, bless him, took all the credit, it was really Larry who made it happen in Philly.” Magid, the president of US giant Electric Factory Concerts, says that he and Graham put the Philadelphia show together in three and a half weeks, spending much of the latter period turning down artists who were desperate to appear. “Bill was keen to make sure that everyone appreciated this was a live event first, and that the TV element 14
was secondary,” says Magid. “The TV guys took exception to this and the final lead-up week witnessed a huge battle between both camps. Bill was getting out of control at on the night before the show, the producer, Mike Mitchell called the police in to arrest him for trespassing. Things were getting a little crazy!” As July 13 drew closer, David Bowie added his name to the growing list of committed stars at Wembley, while Mick Jagger agreed to perform in the USA. The pair hit upon a novel idea — a duet divided by the Atlantic Ocean, but ultimately scuppered by a lack of technology.
Concorde passenger Phil Collins and ‘man of the match’ Freddie Mercury.
Goldsmith recalls: “We scratched our foreheads for quite some time on that one and thought we could do it by satellite. Hours were spent trying to figure out how we could conquer the inevitable time delay and it was getting out of hand until something quite special happened when Bowie was in my board room. “We were getting piles of bands’ film footage from all over the place which we had transferred to video and watched on a big Panasonic TV screen. “Then CBC in Canada sent over this unique footage — a five minute montage sequence of the famine problems in Ethiopia that they had put
together, with the Cars’ ‘Drive’ as the soundtrack. “There I was in my office with my people, Bowie and Geldof, all on the phone to the world and his wife, when suddenly we all heard this music, looked at these visuals and thought how moving it was. “It really was a tear jerker and Bowie just said ‘You’ve got to put that in the show, it’s the most dramatic thing I’ve ever seen. I am going to give up one of my numbers so that you can put this on’. And, to me, that was probably one of the most evocative moments in the whole show and it really started to get the money rolling in from that point onwards. 15
THE PRODUCTION MANAGER Wembley’s Live Aid Production Manager, Andrew Zweck (pictured), simultaneously ran the organisation of Geldof’s pipedream alongside his activities on Bruce Springsteen’s Born In The USA European Tour. As Zweck says, although Springsteen declined to perform at Live Aid, he played a major part by allowing his staging to remain at Wembley an extra week, free of charge, following his own show at the venue. “Everyone donated everything, which is why Live Aid must have a cost of a total of £120,000, nearly half of which was the rent of Wembley, whereas Philadelphia’s show cost nearly $4 million! We rang up everybody and said, ‘You will do it for nothing, you will come and not be paid’, and they were fine. “It was different in America; the guilt factor wasn’t there. They said,
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‘The American way is to pay us in full. You’ll get a better quality product and make more money.’ They spent $4m but made $40m.” Although Live Aid was arguably the biggest promotional event ever known, attracting some of the major names was a constant battle. The power struggles between artist management and the show’s producers also make for some hilarious anecdotes. Says Zweck: “Madonna was just a rising star in ’85 and her manager called up and said, ‘She’s gotta close Philly… no question about it.’ Harvey said, ‘It’s not a good idea, it would be better if you went on at 5pm, ‘cos if you wait till the end, everyone else in the world would have gone to bed.’ ‘Yeah, exactly,’ came the reply, ‘That’s what I said!’. Much acclaim for the quality of the show should be reserved for the BBC
from whom the rock’n’roll boys had much to learn. “I remember the day the BBC walked in when the deal was done. Michael Appleton sat at a table with eight people, all with clipboards, and they said, ‘Right, we’ve written a running order for crossing to and from America. At 16.17, The Who will stop and we’ll cross to America for the Robert Plant.’ We all burst out laughing, saying, ‘This is rock’n’roll, man, The Who’ll stop dead at 16.17? It’s bollocks!’ “But in the end, the BBC were the saviours of the day, because of their resources and experience. We must never lose sight of how brand new it was and what it was to invent it for the first time.” Zweck’s recalled the absence of a master plan, just one week before the event. “I was absolutely shitting bricks, wondering how we were going to pull this off. I phoned every top production manager that I knew on the planet, such as Michael Ahern, Keith Bradley, Chris and Roy Lamb, but they were all in Philadelphia. So I called the only other guys I knew — Brian Croft, Peter Clarke from Supermick, and Pete Wilson and Steve Raymond from Harvey’s office. ‘Guys’, I said, ‘we’re the stage management team… how are we going to do it?’” Further help came from Ollie Kite of Edwin Shirley’s who managed the
movement of trucks and equipment within Wembley’s relatively small backstage area. “We couldn’t have 22 bands’ worth of backline in there; they had to come and go in shuttles during the day. We then had to decide where to fit all these pop stars. There were four portacabins left by Springsteen, and it was [MCP’s] Tim Parsons’ job to manage a strict rota system for the artists using them as dressing rooms. We were going to do it the British way: cheap!” When did Zweck first truly appreciate the magnitude of the event? “Just as Status Quo played the first note I thought, ‘Hang on, this is extra big’. We were on to a winner, it was just off and running, and we were walking on air. “We just knew it was the biggest thing we were ever going to be involved in, the sensation was there from that first note. Of course, that wasn’t apparent during the previous week, with all the panics about the timetable and communicating that to all the bands, crews, and management. “When Bob Geldof performed [with The Boomtown Rats] it was a great moment. He was a genius, an inspiration — we loved him and we love him to this day. Harvey, too. Live Aid was Harvey at his absolute peak as a leader, as a motivator, as a doer, as a hustler, a creator and an achiever.”
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Big stars: Dire Straits’ Mark Knopfler, Alison Moyet & Paul Young and The Who.
“That Cars video did more than anything else to highlight what the issue was which was the single most important element of the whole venture. “So from that point onwards everything started to come together. Shoving acts on and off all day was no longer the aim, and I kept saying to everybody ‘It’s all very well but this show’s got to have a shape to it.’” Despite the technical drawbacks, Bowie and Jagger still managed to salvage their duet by recording their best-selling ‘Dancing In The Street’ single, the video for which was repeatedly aired on television in 18
between the live acts and Geldof’s legendary ‘Give us your fookin’ money!’ appeals. Midge Ure, the co-writer of ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’, describes the frenetic lead-up to the event as “riding this incredible wave of momentum that got bigger and bigger with each passing day.” He said: “For me, the moment when I really started to understand just how big it was, came when I was listening to someone mention to Harvey that we’d lost connection to the shuttle. “He wasn’t talking about a shuttle bus — he meant the Space Shuttle! One of NASA’s astronauts had been
Bono’s outlandish performance helped U2 acxhieve global status overnight.
asked to introduce one of the bands. Crazy stuff!” One aspect of Live Aid which was sadly overshadowed by the events at Wembley and Philadelphia was the involvement of Australia. Goldsmith comments: “I kept getting phone calls from a mad person in Australia who promised an Aussie concert on the same day. I’d get home, be on the phone to L.A. until 2.30 am and at 5.30am the phone would wake me up, and this lunatic from Australia would be on my case. “But he really pulled through and told us how he’d got it together and
was going for it in a big way. So Live Aid was actually in three cities and not two, and started off in Australia on the TV transmission.” THE FOREMAN Having spent more than 10 weeks attempting to lure the cream of the world’s artists to Live Aid, Goldsmith ironically spent the best part of show day trying to get them off the rotating stage, which was built by Imagination and originally specified for a Ford car launch. Brian Croft recalls that Supermick’s Peter Clarke acquired 20 kitchen wall clocks which showed London and Philadelphia 19
BRIAN MAY REMEMBERS Thinking of Queen’s set, many things come home to me so clearly – some big, some small, but all in crystal clear ‘as if it were yesterday’ quality. Freddie of course, every pore, every muscle, fit and bursting with energy. It’s so hard to imagine he’s not still like that. My great technician and long-time friend Brian Zellis, worrying about every move my guitar lead made, every squeak from the very temperamental amplifiers – my every day environment in those days.
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The whole crew, running around doing their essential things, the people on whom our reputations, and even our lives depended on every working day. One bit of unsecured truss metal, one loose bit of staging, one bit of unearthed wiring and we would easily have all been history now. Even seeing my old pedal board functioning so well (it’s now rusting away at my studio, long since obsolete) brings a strange sense of ‘where did all that time disappear to?’ It’s 30 years ago... how can that be?
And what do we think of it now? Well, in the circumstances I think it A Tait set drawing. stands up well. The audience had all Below: Tait stabiliser racks and the FTSI Navigator workstation. bought the tickets before it was announced that Queen were on the bill. It was the first time we had ever gone on stage ‘naked’, as it were. We had none of our legendary lights (it was daylight anyway — another ‘never before’ for us), no stage costumes, just jeans and shirts, none of our own stage set, a shared PA, which to be honest hadn’t sounded too great when the show opened earlier that day. In effect, it was like stepping into an unknown world, perhaps an untrusted world. Our controls were all gone. But what we DID have was our crew, the best in the world, vastly experienced, vastly loyal and skilful. We had our own backline — the few personal bits of gear which were personal to each performer: my and Deacy’s amps, Roger’s kit, and Freddie’s piano, our own precious Bechstein which travelled the world with us. And we had Trip. Trip Khalaf was, and probably still is, the world’s best out-front sound mixer. Every report I have ever heard says that when we walked on stage, the sound in the stadium suddenly improved 500%. Well, that’s Trip. Plus perhaps the final ingredient. We came from a place where we
had grappled with the challenges of playing football stadiums around the world, and pulled it off. Very few bands had that experience in those days. Later on, U2 were to travel a similar road, but on that July day at Wembley, we were alone in knowing what it took to get across in this situation – especially our amazing front man, the channel through which all the energy flowed, Freddie. Yes, it WAS one of Freddie’s finest hours. It still comes across that way. He made even the guy at the back of the stadium feel involved. He reached out and took hold. He gave it all and there’s a total honesty and inner commitment that shines through him. And in the moments when a small smile creeps in, an awareness of what magic he actually is pulling off. I suppose we also have to look to Bob himself for the last word. He asked us personally to play at Live Aid, in a way that was very hard to refuse, of course. And he said: “Treat it like a jukebox, a Global Jukebox. Don’t get clever. Play the hits.” We did just that – in a specially condensed ‘Medley’ version which we actually DID rehearse diligently the week before. We took him at his word. And his word worked. brianmay.com
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The omnipresent Collins with Sting, opening act Status Quo and Bryan Ferry.
times backstage, leaving no excuse for anyone to misinterpret the strict schedule. Says Goldsmith: “There were more clocks on that show than were in the watchmakers! I was like a foreman, wandering around with a clipboard, focused on the satellite time we had booked, and in those days you were lucky if you got it. Getting people off stage is my main memory, plus the Prince and Princess of Wales coming, which was a big pleasure. “There were a few other memorable moments, all for the wrong reasons, such as Paul McCartney’s dodgy microphone on ‘Let It Be’ and The Who temporarily dropping out on 22
television because the satellite link disappeared for five minutes. We had to run to time without fail. “We knew, for example, that at a certain time Madonna was going to be on stage in Philadelphia and everything we had scheduled at Wembley had to line-up either side of her, and vice versa.” A highlight of the day was Phil Collins’ appearances in both cities, which was only made possible by a supersonic Concorde flight across the Atlantic. “Tony Smith [Genesis’ manager] called me and said Phil would only do it if he played both cities. I said ‘Done!’, and then there was silence at the other end of the
line. He said ‘What do you mean? How are you going to do it?’ I told him not to worry and that if Phil was up for it, I would figure it all out. So I went to British Airways and blagged a Concorde trip. Once we were on this roll, it was as if nothing could stand in our way.” Stuart Galbraith was the transport manager for MCP at the time of Live Aid, and his responsibility was to manage vehicles and drivers for all of the artists, to and from Wembley, including running Phil Collins to the tarmac to catch his Concorde flight to Philadelphia. “Being a good publicist, Harvey was known more for his work on Live Aid than MCP, but the truth was that it was a co-promotion,” says Galbraith. SOUND, LIGHTING & SCREENS Over in Philadelphia, Clair Brothers Audio handled the PA requirements, fielding a then standard 120-cabinet S4 system, and a mix of LP (Low
Profile) 15-inch and 12AM monitors. The bands, Roy Clair confirms, were mixed by the three Clair consoles at FOH and, on monitors, two Harrisons and a Midas. Meanwhile, Wembley’s sound system for Live Aid was supplied by Malcolm Hill Associates (MHA) who had built up a good relationship with Maurice Jones, whose company, MCP, looked after the technical aspects of the event. The PA, which was manufactured by Hill Audio (whose MD Rob Lingfield later joined Martin Audio but sadly died in 2011), consisted of a proprietary 80-box M4 FOH system and on-stage wedges, powered by 32 Hill DX3000 amps. A twin console situation existed at FOH, with two 32-8 Hill J-Series desks, while two 32-10 M-Series consoles handled monitors. Two major technical faux pas at Wembley will never be forgotten. The first happened when the BBC’s transmission of the show was lost
DAVE CRUMP How could I forget 1985 — it was the year I started Screenco. We actually started trading a couple of weeks before Live Aid, and received hundreds of calls tying to blag our one and only Starvision screen to relay the event. In the end we decided to support an eccentric dry stone wall builder from
Bollington who put together a bizarre event in the Pennines with local acts and what was then the world’s biggest mobile TV screen. It’s a shame it rained and no one showed but it was near Manchester and a real character building experience!
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during The Who’s set. Production manager Andrew Zweck explains: “The BBC had decided that, because the mains electricity at Wembley had always proved very stable for football matches, they would go with that rather than generators. Unfortunately, the main fuse exploded and that was that!” SILENT MACCA The most memorable catastrophe, however, concerned Paul McCartney’s frightening silence when giving a rare solo performance of ‘Let It Be’. This was his first live appearance since his final tour with Wings in 1979, his Japanese drug bust the following January, and the murder of John Lennon which led to his temporary – though unpublicised – vow to retire from touring. It therefore took much persuasion from Geldof for him to break his
self-imposed exile. Unknown to McCartney, whose monitors were working perfectly, the stadium and TV audiences heard only a distant murmur from the ex-Beatle and did not hesitate in voicing their frustration. Not exactly the best welcome back to the stage after nearly six years. Of all the performers, McCartney was the most apprehensive. “Paul had invited all the Live Aid technical staff to see him at his office in Soho Square about a week or two before the event”, says Zweck. “He needed convincing, and Geldof kept saying, ‘Paul, you’re The Beatles, you’re the biggest act of all time, it cannot be Live Aid without you.’ “Paul wanted every detail on how the show would work, who was in charge, who was on before him, and what was required of him. We sat with him for two hours, telling him,
WOB ROBERTS I was 25 years old and working as guitar tech for Nik Kershaw at Live Aid. I still have the laminate although thankfully I’ve lost the blonde flecked mullet. I remember the day vividly. Status Quo seemed far too quiet when they opened; the GLC noisy boys were having a hissy fit over a five hour concert. That had all changed by the time Queen hit the stage.
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Fifteen mins to get the gear on the revolve... Nik’s guitar not in the monitors when he walked on stage... 20 minutes later dragging the gear off so the Spandau Ballet could get on... it was mental! But was a good-natured event with everyone having fun while drawing attention to things that are fundamentally wrong with this world.
‘Paul, we all know what we’re doing’, whereas we were actually making it up as we went along. And in the end he said, ‘Great’. The tragedy was that he was the one act who least deserved such a technical failure.” Martin Connolly, now with Capital Sound, was the logistical brain behind Live Aid’s rehearsals at Bray Studios. He blamed crew fatigue for the problem. “It was the end of a very long day. Paul’s piano was put through one of the two FOH boards,” says Connolly, “and his vocal was in the one behind it as a result of the mic being patched into the wrong stage box. Hence all the panic. When the problem was realised halfway through the song, it required two engineers to mix a simple vocal and piano performance!” Sound engineers on duty included Mike Scarff, Steve Dove, Bob Pridden, Jeff Hooper, Chris ‘Privet’ Hedge, Phil
Tame, Tom Boyle, Kevin Hopgood, Paul Timmins and John Callis. Says Privet: “I was ‘volunteered’ by Malcolm Hill Associates for the week. It was a great deal — no wages, no expenses, no sleep and shouted at a lot. We did rehearsals all week with Elton John and The Who, whom I was mixing. Marillion, who were retaining me, kindly lent me their truck to transport myself to the rehearsals and show. I was trusted with the fanfare and Quo. Bang! We were off. “The gravity of the occasion only really dawned for me, and I think for the crowd, when the show went to the US/UK switch part of the show and we had time to think. The atmosphere was unique, the tragedy of the famine and why we were all there only then began to sink in at Wembley. It got heavier and heavier. Then came Queen, out came the cork and the usual finale mic fight ensued.
PATRICK WOODROFFE It was a glorious sunny day, full of optimism, and reminiscent of the great festival era of the late ‘70s. All the bands shared the production onstage and the rather basic facilities backstage, and there was a sense that something was happening that was bigger than the sum of the parts. I had to leave Wembley as the sun went down, to get to Hyde Park where
the London Philharmonic was doing a firework concert set to Handel’s ‘Water Music’ on the Serpentine. Live Aid finished on BBC1 just at the moment we went on air on BBC2. I remember Andre Previn crammed into the little control area next to the stage, baton in hand, trying to catch the last few moments of ‘Let It Be’ on the monitors before he had to take to the podium.
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L-R: Lighting crew chief Steve Moles, Queen sound man Trip Khalaf and Hill Audio’s Rob Lingfield who sadly passed away in 2011.
Over. Load out was swift and Geldof gave us a McDonalds burger. Oh, the glamour!” Trip Khalaf also has vivid memories of the big day: “I was standing on the mix position at Wembley trying to mix Queen while fending off the effete but annoying threats of the GLC to turn it down. “I found my inputs spread over four consoles whilst successfully negotiating a £50 bribe to Mike Scarff, the system engineer, to open up the limiters and make me louder than anybody else... and banging my head against the scaffolding, wondering how I get myself into these things. I quite enjoyed it.” LIGHTS & SET While Bob See and Bill McManus organised the lighting for Philadelphia’s live show and TV broadcast respectively, Wembley’s 26
lighting personnel came under the jurisdiction of crew chief Steve Moles, known these days, of course, as an industry journalist. Moles comments: “We were at Wembley at the end of Bruce Springsteen’s Born In The USA tour of Europe [another Goldsmith promotion], and we were asked to do Live Aid for no greater expedient than we already had a rig in place. Peter Clarke of Supermick had been cajoled by his mate Geldof to light the concert and he’d called on his friend Paul Turner of Zenith Lighting, the contractor for Springsteen, to make the big gesture. “Zenith, along with Theatre Projects and TTR (Theatre Technical Research), had only recently been taken over by Samuelson Concert Productions and they were more than thrilled to be associated with such a prestigious event.”
By today’s standards, Wembley’s rig was a modest one, carrying just a few hundred PAR cans and some VL1s. “It’s laughable in hindsight but back then it was a big rig and most definitely state of the art. Design was by committee. Jeremy Thom had provided a wrapping for the show, scrims for the PA wings, and dressing for the stage, but lighting was an open book. “I remember standing on stage after the last Springsteen show with Paul Turner, Peter Clarke and Phil Freeman who Turner had brought along. We knew we had to pull the Springsteen system apart if only for originality’s sake, but I don’t think anybody had a good vision of what to do. There were some clear imperatives, however, with loads of follow spots in the truss and out front to ensure light levels for the cameras, and heavy washes in as many colours as possible to give visiting LDs something to play with.” Colour scrollers were still in their infancy — eight of which had been out on the Born In The USA tour. “They were barely reliable, bloody great heavy things from GAM, so they weren’t really an option; we offered Par-fuelled muscle power instead.” Dave Keighley is one of the few
people who can claim a direct link with both Live Aid and its partial successor, Live 8. In 1985, he was MD of See Factor’s UK operation, and also working on production for Adam Ant and several other acts on the bill, while 20 years later, Keighley filled an executive role with PRG Europe, the lighting provider for Live 8 in London. “For the weeks leading up to July 13, I was in constant contact with our office in New York regarding what we were providing for Philadelphia, and also Wembley, because we were operating a partnership with Supermick,” says Keighley. In addition to the sound and lights, Live Aid’s Wembley show featured two ‘bookmark’ video screens. These were the then state-of-theart Mitsubishi Diamond Vision CRT screens — monstrously heavy by today’s standards — supplied by the now-extinct West Nally Visions which involved Steve Halliday and Bryan Leatham. CREWING At Wembley, the stage crew was supplied by Showstars, the east London company founded only two years earlier by Graham Shaw who, by then, had formed a solid relationship with Goldsmith.
“It’s laughable in hindsight but back then it was a big rig and most definitely state-of-the-art...” Steve Moles 27
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Stateside heavies: Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin.
Graham Shaw remembers: “It was a fantastic day, despite being a daunting prospect at the outset. I’d worked on a number of shows at Wembley Stadium but I remember looking out through the stage drapes at this huge crowd – I’d never seen Wembley so rammed! “There’s a quote in Bob Geldof’s book where he recalls turning to Andrew Zweck and saying ‘Well, it’s all in your hands now’, and sure enough Andrew said exactly the same to me when we were both standing in the wings! “Right up to the morning of the show, I was still hiring people to come and work because the changeovers
between acts were so demanding. The load-out was also a challenge because I’d never seen so much equipment in one place. We were still loading trucks the next day. “Like a lot of the suppliers, in the week prior to Live Aid we had worked on Springsteen’s show at the same venue. We’d started building the stage on June 29 – the day my first child was born. “At around 8.15am I was at the hospital as my daughter made her first appearance but by midday I was at Wembley for which my ex-wife never forgave me. That stage was left in place for Live Aid as Bruce’s gift to the cause. 31
Madonna at JFK.
“I’m still very proud of what we achieved on that momentous day although, unlike some people, we didn’t use that experience as a stepping stone. In reality, Showstars was just stumbling from one project to the next, but we had very good people within our ranks and we soon established ourselves as a force to be reckoned with.” RAZZMATAZZ Much credit for the end result, Steve Moles says, should be given to Phil Freeman who spent most of the preceding three nights programming the Avolites desk. “Most of the effect and razzmatazz 32
was provided by the VL1s with the lion’s share of the work done by Dave Hill, who went on to become one of the most prolific programmers of our age, but as far as the cameras were concerned these wobbly lamps were purely incidental. “Jimmy Barnett, then Chief Executive of the fledgling Vari*Lite Europe [the distributorship run by Samuelsons, the forerunner of CPL], did deputise on VLs for Queen’s performance, but only for old time’s sake, having been their LD for years. “Perhaps the greatest thing we did that day was establish a support network for the truss spot operators. The all-day show required spots
Crosby, Stills and Nash performed their Woodstock classic ‘Suite: Judy Blue Eyes’.
continuously from the moment Status Quo hit the stage, but the operators couldn’t be expected to stay up there all day. “One of my crew, Brian Condrey, came up with the idea of extending a gang plank out from the scaff so we could swap operators during changeovers. This proved especially useful for the one operator who got sponsored for an enormous amount of money to do the whole show. “Brian and another crew member, Mike Humenuik, went up several times to pull him out of his seat, rub him around to get his circulation going, and take him a pot to piss in. You wouldn’t be able to do such a thing
today, which is quite correct, even though it takes the spirit of adventure away.” Backdrop and scenic design company Hangman had been servicing Spandau Ballet’s tours for three years and its founder, Alan Chesters, had formed a friendship with Gary Kemp which led to Hangman’s involvement in Live Aid’s Wembley show. Chesters recalls: “Bob Geldof had been out for dinner with Gary and told him about his plans for this big event. So I offered my services to Bob, and he asked me to stand by my phone and wait for the chaos to begin! We were given the job of producing the 33
The London audience.
header that the set designer, Jeremy Thom, had organised, but we were only given the go ahead eight days before the show! “Like a lot of people working on this event, we were thrown into a stadium environment for the first time and didn’t really know what we were doing. We were still painting the PA scrims in the stadium while the bands were soundchecking. Bob substituted the original idea of flying flags of the world on the PA scrims with coloured rectangles. Because there were so many despotic regimes and countrties at war, no one could settle on whose flags should be used! So we laid these blank rectangles out on the ground and I walked around daubing spots 34
of paint on each one, asking anybody who was around to finish them off! “As the bands came off stage from the soundchecks, they mucked in and I have an indelible vision of Francis Rossi, Paul Weller and Midge Ure on their knees with a paint brush!” STAGE MANAGEMENT Along with Steve Raymond and Pete Wilson, Brian Croft worked as a stage manager on the day of the show. Croft, who ensured that the Springsteen lighting rig stayed at Wembley and was specially reconfigured for Live Aid, recalls that the simple changeover regime was the secret behind the smooth-running Wembley event.
Flag waving in Philly.
He says: “The 45 foot diameter revolving stage was split into three colour-coded, triangular segments, with Steve, Pete and I looking after one each. While one band was performing, we’d be working away getting the next lot of backline ready on another segment.” Andrew Zweck recalls: “ Live Aid was so busy that we decided not to stay in radio communication with the rest of the crew. Somehow it all worked… the spirit of the day carried us along. Any more sophisticated and I think it would have been chaos.” Steve Moles concludes that it was one of the most memorable shows of his lighting career, a day of tremendous highs and lows. “The
ecstacy of the day, and the floods of tears at the finale, were followed by one of the grimmest load-outs I’d ever done. It had started to rain just towards the close, the kind of rain they could have done with in Ethiopia — slow, steady, and soaking.” Bob Geldof subsequently received an honorary knighthood from the Queen, and a C.B.E. honour was bestowed upon Goldsmith, both partly in recognition of their Live Aid achievements. In 2005, Midge Ure was awarded an O.B.E. in the Queen’s Birthday Honours. When Geldof received a Best Live Event Of All-Time award from myself and colleague Andy Lenthall in 2002, he was keen to acknowledge the 35
PA scrims, on-stage drapes and
Bowie, Alison Moyet, Pete Townshend and Geldof sang back up for Paul McCartney on the troublesome ‘Let It Be’.
crucial roles played by the technicians and production crew. He said: “They were the ultimate troupers. I mean, every single one of them deserves a f***ing medal. They worked long, long hours to help us achieve something we’ll remember for the rest of our lives, and I give them my deepest thanks.” The fund raising target for Live Aid was originally set for £1 million. At 11.30pm on the night before the show, Geldof rang Goldsmith at home with the feeling that maybe, if the event ran smoothly, it might attract as much
as £5 million. It raised £140 million. Live Aid was, of course, the first truly global rock concert event and one that Maurice Jones points out was produced without any corporate sponsorship. But Goldsmith, sees it as marking another kind of turnaround. “After that day, rock’n’roll became part of the establishment and lost its edge. It wasn’t rock’n’roll anymore,” he says. “The Royals, Prime Ministers and city suits were going to gigs, and it all changed. Rock stars were no longer bad boys and in hindsight, that was the negative side.
“[The crew] were the ultimate troupers... we’ll remember them for the rest of our lives, and I give them my deepest thanks.” Bob Geldof 36
The all-star Wembley finale.
“The most important thing about Live Aid was that there were seven trustees — John Kennedy, Geldof, Chris Morrison, Midge Ure, Maurice Oberstein, Michael Grade and I — and we all had a veto. I used my power of veto to absolutely insist and maintain that Live Aid happened once and once only. There was to be no album, no video and no film.” Despite this insistence, however, a lavish DVD set of the Live Aid performances and associated footage
was belatedly released in late 2004 and became an instant best-seller, along with the Band Aid 20 single. Along with the Band Aid 30 rerecording of the Christmas classic, 10 years later in 2014, these initiatives ensured that further waves of funding reached those in crisis in Africa. As for Live Aid never happening again, well, in a way it did – on another July day in 2005. This time, the setting was Hyde Park. But that’s another story. 37
Above: Geldof receiving an award for ‘Best Live Event of All-Time’ from TPi magazine and awards founders Andy Lenthall and Mark Cunningham. Below: At the 2006 TPi Awards, Geldof thanked the crews of Live Aid and Live 8 for their “immense” contributions.
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Mark Cunningham was a professional musician and producer before branching out into music industry journalism, media consultancy, event production and marketing. The founding editor of three magazines – SPL, Total Production International (TPi) and Corporate Event Design – he has also authored several acclaimed books. ‘Good Vibrations: A History of Record Production’ (Sanctuary, 1996) ‘Live And Kicking: The Rock Concert Industry In The Nineties’ (Sanctuary, 1999) ‘Horslips: Tall Tales, The Official Biography’ (O’Brien Press, 2013)
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Photography: Phil Dent, Mark Cunningham, Mirror Group, Michael Bettell, Louise Stickland, Harvey Goldsmith Productions, Camera Press, Band Aid Trust, Phonogram, Steve Moles, Trip Khalaf, Rob Lingfield and other unidentifiable sources.