Bob Geldof tells why Live Aid's rock 'n' roll romance wouldn't work 40 years on

As Live Aid celebrates its 40th anniversary, Sir Bob Geldof has told how it wouldn’t work as a fund-raiser today because rock’n’roll no longer has the currency it did in the 1980s.

And the Boomtown Rats star, who was knighted for his 1985 effort to raise money for starving victims of the Ethiopian famine, also claimed there was “no such thing” as white saviour complex, and dismissed criticism that the event, which raised £350m in today’s money, should have had more black British artists performing.

“Rock’n’roll was so powerful it was beyond language,” he explained. “When Little Richard said ‘a wop bop a loo bop, a wop bam boo’ we all knew what he meant and by 1985 the entire world used the common language of rock ’n’ roll.

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“It won’t happen again because this sort of thing isn’t romantic any more, it’s not a thing,” he said. “Rock’n’roll is the most powerful art there has ever been - but it has ceased to be the spine of our culture, it was of the moment and could transmit an idea to the game-changing part of the population, but I’m not sure that exists now.

“The Six O'Clock News was a communal event - the news now is broken up, the algorithm is an echo-chamber of your own prejudices. It’s sh*t and its dangerous but it can be used brilliantly.”

Speaking after a BAFTA screening of a new BBC documentary to celebrate Live Aid’s milestone anniversary, Sir Bob said it was up to others now to come up with new “mad and fun” ideas, but added: “Taylor Swift is a phenomenon. You could do one just with the women. That would be very effective.”

Sir Bob, 73, said that complaints about “white saviour complex” infuriated him, claiming it was a “cultural artefact” that didn’t exist. “There isn’t such a thing,” he told BBC journalist Maryam Moshiri, who interviewed him at the event. “You can f*** off! It’s nonsense. To pay lip service to this tripe is belittling.

“It was about 32 million people dying, live on TV, in a world of surplus food. Millions of people are alive today because us lot watched a f***ing pop concert. That’s nuts. It’s disgraceful.”

He said that critics, including a journalist from The Voice who appears in the three-part series, were wrong to say there should have been more black British artists involved. “It wasn’t about black representation, it was about getting the artists who sold the most records so we could raise the most money,” he insisted. “It was about stopping people from dying.

“That man from The Voice - name the band we should have had? Imagination and Aswad? They weren’t huge. They sold 80,000 records, so do I take them, or the ones that sold 20million? These bands were not big enough.”

Sir Bob also revealed that watching Michael Buerk’s famous BBC news report, shot by cameraman Mohamed Amin, still makes him emotional. “If I see that footage again, it makes me cry - it still bothers me a lot. It’s won endless awards - it goes to, particularly in this day and age, reporting the truth, showing it how it is.

"I remember Michael’s report verbatim simply because the words were so well chosen. And Mo Amin’s pitiless, cyclops eye. You could tell Michael’s rage. He was being the objective reporter but his shame at what he was having to show us, that’s why the entire country reacted as I did.”

The I Don't Like Mondays singer said that plenty of people needed that sort of help today, but there was now embarrassment around the words aid and charity. “I’m not embarrassed in the least by the word “charity”, but we can’t say it any more, we have to put into inverted commas now.”

He said it was hard “not to see hurt, not to know, right now, 2.5million children in Sudan are not getting the American food that they were getting in February - and not react.”

Blaming US policy, he branded Elon Musk, President Trump and Vice President Vance a “confederacy of dunces” for freezing all the country’s humanitarian aid, with Musk describing it as putting USAid “In the wood chipper” at the start of the year.

Dad-of-four Bob said:”Seriously? The strongest nation on earth, the most powerful man on the planet and the richest individual on the planet cackle over feeding aid to the weakest, most vulnerable people in the world into the wood chipper. There is something seriously f***ed about that.”

He said that reports from reputable sources claim that a minimum of 300,000 people had died as a direct result of that policy. “And I would argue that it’s conceivably ten times that. In the UK, we need to re-arm right now and so does the rest of Europe. We’re being invaded by a thug and he needs to be stopped.”

With the wars in Ukraine and Palestine also ongoing, Bob feels that people didn’t now have the “emotional bandwidth” to cope with all the devastation in the world. “It’s just too easy to go ‘f*** you’. If we can use this anniversary then perhaps there’s a glimmer, a slight chance, that we can put back the argument that it is really not in our interest to abandon the marginalised.”

He said he found it hard to watch the BBC documentary, quipping: “I hate the stupid f***ing things I say, I hate looking at myself” and he also moaning that he wasn’t keen on all the music choices the programme-makers had made, which included Status Quo, U2, Phil Collins, Paul McCartney and Queen.

“If you had Pete Townshend talking about The Who, I’d have had The Who on,” he said. “And I would have had Bob Dylan’s disastrous performance.”

Live Aid at 40, BBC2 & iPlayer, July 6, 9pm

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