Live Aid [DVD] [2005]

Product Information

Waters appeared backstage at the Wembley Stadium leg of Live Aid (where he was interviewed), and the classic Pink Floyd lineup reunited for the follow-up to Live Aid, Live 8, in 2005. Philadelphia named it "one of the worst rock-and-roll reunions of all time", with Victor Fiorillo writing: "I'd like to be able to blame all of the awfulness on anaemic Phil Collins, who sat in on drums, and Page himself later fingered the Genesis drummer for screwing up the set. In Europe, the TV feed was supplied by the BBC, whose broadcast was presented by Richard Skinner, Andy Kershaw, Mark Ellen, David Hepworth, Andy Batten-Foster, Steve Blacknell, Paul Gambaccini, Janice Long and Mike Smith and included numerous interviews and chats in between the various acts. When organiser Bob Geldof was persuading artists to take part in the concert, he promised them that it would be a one-off event, never to be seen again. Queen's twenty-one minute performance, which began at 6:41pm, was voted the greatest live performance in the history of rock in a 2005 industry poll of more than 60 artists, journalists and music industry executives.

Web icon An illustration of a computer application window Wayback Machine Texts icon An illustration of an open book. It was a great gig, but I thought it was a bit dodgy not having any black acts on the bill when it was raising money for Africa. Although the phrase "give us your fucking money" has passed into folklore, Geldof has stated that it was never uttered.

Many of these recordings were in mono, because in the mid-1980s most home video machines could only record mono sound, and also because the European BBC TV broadcast was in mono.

Live Aid was a dual-venue benefit concert held on Saturday 13 July 1985, and an ongoing music-based fundraising initiative.It did instigate Farm Aid, which was a good thing in itself, but it was a crass, stupid, and nationalistic thing to say. The reports featured a young nurse, Claire Bertschinger, who, surrounded by 85,000 starving people, told of her sorrow of having to decide which children would be allowed access to the limited food supplies in the feeding station and which were too sick to be saved. Bob Dylan's performance generated controversy; while transitioning from "Ballad of Hollis Brown" to "When the Ship Comes In," he said: "I hope that some of the money .

The original event was organised by Bob Geldof and Midge Ure to raise further funds for relief of the 1983–1985 famine in Ethiopia, a movement that started with the release of the successful charity single " Do They Know It's Christmas? The Coldstream Guards band opened with the "Royal Salute", a brief version of the national anthem " God Save the Queen". The most complete footage that exists is used from the BBC source, and this was the main source of the DVD. At the time, before multichannel television sound was enacted nationwide, very few televisions reproduced stereo signals and few television stations were able to broadcast in stereo. On the final night at Wembley, 22 December 1984, an impromptu gathering of some of the other artists from Band Aid joined Culture Club on stage at the end of the concert for an encore of "Do They Know It's Christmas?

That was probably one of the most evocative things in the whole show and really got the money rolling in. The Who's performance was described as "rough but right" by Rolling Stone, but they would not perform together again for another three years. Geldof had previously refused to allow the video to be shown, due to time constraints, and had only relented when Bowie offered to drop the song " Five Years" from his set as a trade-off. The official DVD is the only authorised video release in which proceeds go directly to famine relief, the cause that the concert was originally intended to help.

In 2007, Queen released a special edition of Queen Rock Montreal on Blu-ray and DVD formats containing their 1981 concert from The Forum in Montreal, Canada, and their complete Live Aid performance, along with Freddie Mercury and Brian May performing " Is This the World We Created. The phone number and an address that viewers could send cheques to were repeated every twenty minutes. In the event, he was the last performer (aside from the Band Aid finale) to take to the stage and one of the few to be beset by technical difficulties; his microphone failed for the first two minutes of his piano performance of " Let It Be", making it difficult for television viewers and impossible for those in the stadium to hear him. On the same day, concerts inspired by the initiative were held in other countries, such as the Soviet Union, Canada, Japan, Yugoslavia, Austria, Australia, and West Germany.

The [Duran] Duran set was memorable for Simon Le Bon's off-key falsetto note that he hit during 'A View to a Kill', a blunder that echoed throughout the media as 'The Bum Note Heard Round the World'. She would put a little mark on the children who got chosen, with Geldof stating of her at the time, "In her was vested the power of life and death.