Bob Geldof in Toronto while promoting the North American premiere of Just For One Day on Sept. 26, 2024.Jennifer Roberts/The Globe and Mail
In Toronto during a press tour for Just For One Day – The Live Aid Musical, Bob Geldof is asked by a photographer to take off his sunglasses. “Do I have to?” he replies. “I’ve got bags under my eyes.”
Does he ever. The bags are so heavy that some airlines might charge him extra for carry-on luggage. Is the 73-year-old Irish rock star, all suede jacket and shaggy white hair, tired?
“Not really,” he says, sitting down to speak to The Globe and Mail in an empty rehearsal studio. “I’m just a baggy guy, what can I say?”
What he says is “thank you” when random people approach him about organizing (with producer-musician Midge Ure) the landmark Live Aid concerts in benefit of Ethiopian famine relief in the summer of 1985. The year before, Geldof and Ure co-wrote the charity single Do They Know It’s Christmas?, recorded by the star-studded British and Irish super-group Band Aid.
“It does play on people’s memories,” he says. “Just last night, a waiter gave me a bottle of Bordeaux. Before that, a fan told me I had changed her life. I said, ‘Sorry about that, I didn’t mean to, I just wanted to raise a few bob, you know?‘ ”
The docu-jukebox musical about the Live Aid benefit concerts makes its North American premiere at the CAA Ed Mirvish Theatre in Toronto on Jan. 26. The original televised concerts took place in London’s Wembley Stadium and Philadelphia’s John F. Kennedy Stadium, with performances by such artists as Bob Dylan, Madonna, the Who, U2, Queen, Elton John, Paul McCartney, Diana Ross, Bryan Adams and David Bowie (whose Heroes song lyrics inspired the musical’s name).
It was a monumental undertaking. Days before the concerts, an exhausted Geldof told an interviewer that his post-Live Aid plan was to “go home and sleep.”
He’s still working on that. At the end of the 1980s, he intended to shut down the Band Aid Charitable Trust after the song and concerts had raised millions. That was 35 years ago.
“It’s daily for me,” he says. “This morning I woke up to 11 e-mails dealing with the civil war in Sudan.”
Just For One Day, which made its debut at the Old Vic in London a year ago, has a limited run in Toronto to March 15. According to the producers, 10 per cent of all ticket sales will be donated to the Band Aid charity that has raised more than $265-million since 1984 to support organizations dedicated to the prevention or relief of poverty and famine.
Ever since the Live Aid concerts and release of Do They Know It’s Christmas?, and continuing with the Live 8 benefit concerts in 2005 and four re-recordings of the song, Geldof has heard the criticism that the charity efforts perpetuate the stereotype that Africa is a helpless continent. (The lyrics of Do They Know It’s Christmas? rhyme “world of dread and fear” with “death in every tear.”)
When plans for the Just For One Day musical were first announced two years ago, Nigerian author and journalist Moky Makura wrote in The Guardian that Live Aid led to a patronizing “save Africa” industry.
'This wasn’t a political issue, it was about human beings unnecessarily dying,' says Geldof.Jennifer Roberts/The Globe and Mail
“It left a lasting and unpleasant legacy that has shaped the story of Africa and how the world sees us,” she wrote in 2023. “Thirty-eight years later, were we really going to relive our worst moment – as a musical, no less – and retell the story for a whole new generation?”
To which Geldof replies, yes.
“I think Africa was a broken continent, and in many respects it still is,” he says. “Poverty is preposterous. The issue was, how do you eliminate it? How do you grow an economy?”
Before Geldof was the front man for the group the Boomtown Rats, he was a journalist. (He even had a stint editing at the Vancouver-based alt-weekly The Georgia Straight.) He lauds the reporting from Ethiopia by the BBC’s Michael Buerk and the CBC’s Brian Stewart in 1984. It is believed Buerk’s memorably impassioned report of the “biblical famine” reached more than 400 television stations worldwide.
“Do They Know It’s Christmas? would have been a stiff if people hadn’t seen the news reports," Geldof says.
Former CBC newsman Stewart was heavily involved in covering the Ethiopian famine at the time, but only saw part of the concert broadcast, which reached an estimated 1.5 billion viewers in 150 countries. He believes Live Aid’s message was important.
“It helped mobilize an already aroused public to want to help directly and effectively, and most importantly, this brought pressure on several Western governments to significantly up their involvement in one of the worst famines of modern history,” he told The Globe recently.
Stewart, like Geldof, believes the “white saviour” charge is inaccurate and unreasonable.
“At the height of the famine I made it a point to highlight the fact that the majority of aid workers in the field among the sick and starving were Ethiopians, and that Ethiopians were contributing one-month’s salary to help victims,” he said. “At the human level, is the absence of effort by the outside world, a mindset bordering on weary indifference, somehow preferable to the Live Aid celebration of international caring and determination to help?”
The musical is stocked with songs including the Police’s Message in a Bottle, Bob Dylan’s Blowin’ in the Wind, the Beatles’ Let It Be and Bowie’s song about being heroes “just for one day.”
The story is set in the time of Margaret Thatcher’s dismissal of societies (“there is no such thing”), Ronald Reagan’s trickle-down theory economics (dollars that actually didn’t trickle down much at all) and a general “greed is good” ethos.
Flying in the face of that came a very opposite notion from Live Aid that landed in London and Philadelphia like UFOs.
“Our thinking was that not only was there a such a thing as a society, but here we are,” Geldof says. “We think greed is stupid, and we’re about to prove that by handing over vast millions. This wasn’t a political issue, it was about human beings unnecessarily dying.”
Just For One Day runs Jan. 26 to March 15 at CAA Ed Mirvish Theatre; info and tickets at Mirvish.com.