20 years on from their Live Aid (1985) triumph, Bob Geldof and Midge Ure recruit the world's music superstars once again to perform live and put pressure on Western governments to help Africa and Make Poverty History.
One of the world's biggest bands return to the scene of their Live Aid (1985) triumph a year earlier to play all their greatest hits in front of a packed Wembley Stadium.
Michael Palin owns what must be the most-used passport in Britain. Now it has been taken out of the drawer once again for the making of his new one-off documentary, Around the World in 20 ... See full summary »
The movie contains two concerts of the British rock band Queen. The first concert is their show at Montreal in November 1981. The second concert is their live performance at Live Aid in 1985.
On 27th July 1986, British stadium rock band Queen broke new ground by playing for the first time in Hungary, a country which was still under a communist dictatorship behind the Iron Curtain.
This show features Live Aid, the biggest benefit concert in history. Taking place simultaneously in two seperate stadiums in the USA and the UK, many of the top contemporary rock music acts play many of their most popular songs to raise money for famine relief in Ethiopia. In addition, short films illustrating the crisis in Africa are run with the appeal for aid.Written by
Kenneth Chisholm <kchishol@home.com>
As part of Geldof's insistence that it should be a one-off event, the TV companies responsible for the outside broadcasts in London and Philadelphia were under strict instructions to destroy all the recordings of the show. The BBC ignored this stipulation, kept its tapes and archived them but ABC dutifully destroyed its own material. This meant that when the Trust decided to release the concert on DVD, all the Wembley footage was available (including multi-tracked audio), but recordings of the Philadelphia sets had to be assembled from B-roll tapes, the BBC's own copies of the satellite-linked sections and material that had been archived by MTV. See more »
Quotes
Judas Priest:
The energy is there simply because the event creates such a unique feeling.
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Alternate Versions
In its original form, the concert ran 16 hours. There were two versions of the U.S. telecast - one incarnation aired complete on MTV, another produced by ABC was in two parts, part one (the first eleven hours) airing in syndication, part two (the final three hours) airing on ABC. In any case, the DVD version is edited to ten hours, leaving out many key performances, such as Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, Power Station, The Hooters, The Four Tops, Rick Springfield, Bernard Watson, Santana, and Led Zeppelin. The DVD version also contains an aurally altered version of Paul McCartney's performance of "Let It Be" (due to a microphone problem in the first half of the song, McCartney had to re-record his vocals twenty years after the fact so that it could be included on the DVD). See more »
Queen's twenty one minute performance, which began at 6:41 PM, has been voted - by more than 60 artists, journalists and music industry executives - the greatest live performance in the history of rock. Queen's lead singer Freddie Mercury at times led the crowd in unison refrains, and his sustained note during the a cappella section came to be known as "The Note Heard Round the World". The band's six song set opened with a shortened version of "Bohemian Rhapsody" and closed with "We Are the Champions". Mercury and fellow band member Brian May later sang the first song of the three-part Wembley event finale, "Is This the World We Created." At the conclusion of the Wembley performances, Bob Geldof was raised onto the shoulders of the Who's guitarist Pete Townshend and Paul McCartney.
Live Aid eventually raised $127 million in famine relief for African nations, and the publicity it generated encouraged Western nations to make available enough surplus grain to end the immediate hunger crisis in Africa. It's also worth noting that the official Live Aid 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.
Courtesy of Neville C. Bardoli OBE
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Queen's twenty one minute performance, which began at 6:41 PM, has been voted - by more than 60 artists, journalists and music industry executives - the greatest live performance in the history of rock. Queen's lead singer Freddie Mercury at times led the crowd in unison refrains, and his sustained note during the a cappella section came to be known as "The Note Heard Round the World". The band's six song set opened with a shortened version of "Bohemian Rhapsody" and closed with "We Are the Champions". Mercury and fellow band member Brian May later sang the first song of the three-part Wembley event finale, "Is This the World We Created." At the conclusion of the Wembley performances, Bob Geldof was raised onto the shoulders of the Who's guitarist Pete Townshend and Paul McCartney. Live Aid eventually raised $127 million in famine relief for African nations, and the publicity it generated encouraged Western nations to make available enough surplus grain to end the immediate hunger crisis in Africa. It's also worth noting that the official Live Aid 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.
Courtesy of Neville C. Bardoli OBE