Live Aid

Live Aid was a multi-venue rock music concert held on July 13, 1985. The event was organised by Bob Geldof and Midge Ure in order to raise funds for famine relief in Ethiopia. Billed as a "global jukebox", the main sites for the event were Wembley Stadium, London, attended by 72,000 people, and JFK Stadium, Philadelphia, attended by about 90,000 people, with some acts performing at other venues such as Sydney and Moscow. It was one of the largest scale satellite link-ups and TV broadcasts of all time -- an estimated 1.5 billion viewers in 100 countries watched the live broadcast.

Collaborative effort

The concert was started in 12:00 (GMT) in Wembley (UK). It continued at JFK Stadium (US) starting at 13:51 (8:51 AM Eastern time). The UK's Wembley performances ended at 22:00. The US's JFK performances and whole concert ended at 04:05 (11:05 PM Eastern time). (See the full schedule of the concert here ). Thus the concert continued for 16 hours, but since many artists' performances were conducted simultaneously in Wembley and JFK the total concert's length was much longer.

Related Topics:
UK - US

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No one concert before had brought together so many famous performers from the past and present, whose names are shown below (under Live Aid performers). However, some of the artists who had been announced earlier did not appear at the last minute, including Tears For Fears, Julian Lennon and Cat Stevens (who wrote a song for the Live Aid concert that he never got to perform--had he done so, he would have made his first public concert appearance since converting to Islam and changing his name to Yusuf Islam), while Prince provided a clip of 4 The Tears In Your Eyes.

Related Topics:
Tears For Fears - Julian Lennon - Cat Stevens - Islam - Yusuf Islam - Prince

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It was the original intention for Mick Jagger to perform an intercontinental duet from the U.S. with David Bowie in London, but problems of synchronisation made it impossible -- instead, Jagger and Bowie created a video clip for the song they would have performed, a cover of Dancing In The Street. Jagger still performed with Tina Turner live at the Philadelphia portion of the concert.

Related Topics:
Mick Jagger - David Bowie - Tina Turner

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Each of the two main portions of the concert ended with their particular continental all-star anti-hunger anthems, with Band Aid's Do They Know It's Christmas closing the UK concert, and USA for Africa's We Are The World closing the US concert (and thus the day's proceedings).

Related Topics:
Band Aid - USA for Africa

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Since the concert, bootleg videos and CDs have circulated widely. The concert was never supposed to have been released commercially, but in November 2004 Warner Music Group released a 4 disc DVD edition of the concert (see more details below).

Related Topics:
November 2004 - Warner Music Group

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