Live Aid remembered – from inside and out – on its 40th birthday
A 40th anniversary special with two of its presenters (Hepworth and Ellen) and old pal and TV critic Boyd Hilton who watched on the day aged 18 (“young, pretentious, idiotic”) and reviews the new BBC documentary. We look back at … … the ways Live Aid changed television – “not about music but spectacle and scale”. … would the idea of staging it have ever come about in the world of social media? … being in the room for the Geldof F-Bomb. … Ian Astbury smoking on live TV, the concrete mausoleum of the old Wembley Stadium, Concorde, Status Quo and other things that now seem so 1985. … how Live Aid was the death of the New Romantics – “they don’t work in daylight” – and why Boy George turned it down. … the footage set to the Cars’ video, the emotional pivot of the day, and the interview with the Ethiopian girl Birhan Woldu in the new documentary. … how the thin sound of ’80s acts like the Style Council and Ultravox didn’t have the impact of old-school guitar/bass/drums. … was Live Aid the first live televised rock concert event? …and fragments of our fading memories – the U2 drama, Adam Ant, Sade, the lost link to Ian Botham, Billy Connolly in tears, acts unwisely playing new singles, Noel Edmonds’ helicopter shuttle, the BBC insisting it “mustn’t feel like a Telethon” – and all achieved without mobile phones. Plus the return of Oasis, the BBC’s tangle with Neil Young at Glastonbury and the fall-out from the Bob Vylan broadcast. … and a few Glastonbury moments - Rod Stewart’s cocktail-dress cabaret girls and the 1975’s Matt Healy stumbling on with a fag and a pint of Guinness.Find out more about how to help us to keep the conversation going: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Mark Ellen and David Hepworth have been talking about and writing about music together and individually for a collective eighty years in magazines like Smash Hits, Mojo and The Word and on radio and TV programmes like "Rock On", "Whistle Test" and VH-1.Over thirteen years ago, when working on the late magazine The Word, they began producing podcasts. Some listeners have been kind enough to say these have been very special to them. When the magazine folded in 2012 they kept the spirit of those podcasts alive in regular Word In Your Ear evenings in which they spoke to musicians and authors in front of an audience. Over these years they've produced hundreds of hours of material. As of the Current Unpleasantness of 2020, they've produced yet hundreds of hours more with a little help from guests kind enough to digitally show them around their attics such as Danny Baker, Andy Partridge, Sir Tim Rice and Mark Lewisohn. For the full span of the Word In Your Ear world, visit wiyelondon.com. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Ireland