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Live Aid: World Wide Concert Book
Gathers photographs of the rock musicians and singers who performed at simultaneous concerts in London and Philadelphia to benefit African famine relief, and shares their comments on the concerts
- GenresMusicNonfiction
192 pages, Paperback
First published August 27, 1985
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
May 17, 2021
This book remains one of my prized possessions - this concert was so influential as a cross-Atlantic mega-fundraiser, as well as broadening my musical appreciation. It's a heaping slice of the 1980s.
March 9, 2023
LITERATURE in PUNK ROCK - Books #14-15
BOOKS:
- Famine and Foreigners: Ethiopia Since Live Aid (Gill)
- Live Aid: World Wide Concert Book (Hillmore)
SONG: How to Get Your Band on TV by Chumbawumba
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNs4Y...
Chumbawumba's first LP, Pictures of Starving Children Sell Records (1986), was a critique of the Live Aid concert organized by Bob Geldof, which they argued was primarily a cosmetic spectacle designed to draw attention away from the real political causes of world hunger.
Live Aid was a single-day (16-hour) concert split between venues in two cities (Wembley in London; JFK in Philadelphia) to raise awareness and financial support for the fight against famine in Ethiopia. Dozens of rock stars played the July 13, 1985 event, including Paul McCartney, Queen, U2, The Who, Led Zeppelin (reunited with Phil Collins on drums).
“For us, to mix star culture with the inequality of the world and not have any politics about what was happening in the developing world was wrong,” Alice Nutter of Chumbawumba explains. “Our view of it was that you cannot have this concern about world hunger and then have Phil Collins fly halfway across the world and not understand the politics of world hunger.”
- The Anarcho-Punk History of Chumbwumba
https://daily.bandcamp.com/features/c...
---------------------------------------------------
The politics surrounding humanitarian aid in Ethiopia from Live Aid forward remain controversial.
The 1983-1984 famine remains the worst of the many periodic famines in the history of Ethiopia/Abyssinia, with an estimated death toll of 1.2 million (a contested conservative estimate). The official cause is ascribed as a multi-year drought period; however, the unprecedented destructive magnitude begs further explanation. Current scholarly analysis has identified multiple human rights abuses as the primary causative factor for over half of all famine mortality.
The primary recipient of Live Aid was the Derg (a Mengistu Haile Mariam-led military dictatorship of Ethiopia). The Derg coupled famine-relief policy with their approach to separatist guerrilla movements in northern Eritrea and Tigray: a process which involved dismantling tribes in a military-enforced resettlement program which hundreds of thousand consequently died.
The Derg were infamous in using hunger as a weapon. In the pre-famine period Derg government troops systematically scorched the farmlands, destroyed crops and killed oxen of suspected counter-insurgency areas in the Northern provinces of Tigre and Eritrea. The Derg then refused to allow Live Aid-based aid to be delivered across these lines of war in Tigre, Eritrea, and the northern portions of Wollo: areas which comprised ~60 percent of the country’s famine victims. Such consequences called to mind the urgent request of Medicins Sans Frontiers (Doctors without Borders) to Bob Geldoff: don't not release the money until there is a reliable infrastructure to get aid to the victims.
Six years later, there was a glimmer of hope for such infrastructure when the Derg was overthrown by the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF). However, this hope was overshadowed by a harrowing question: did famine-based humanitarian aid prolong the Ethiopian Civil war? A scholarly analysis of DC-based Human Rights Watch written by renowned researcher Alex de Waal concludes: [t]he humanitarian effort prolonged the war, and with it, human suffering. This view also being shared by the acting Prime Minister of the EPRDF whom led the overthrow of the Derg.
Oh, that new glimmer of hope for infrastructure in 1991 was beset by a bumpy road when the accountability of Humanitarian Aid NGOs and the imposition of (neoliberal) "conditionalities" met with autocratic tradition in Ethiopia (per opposing perspectives).
BOOKS:
- Famine and Foreigners: Ethiopia Since Live Aid (Gill)
- Live Aid: World Wide Concert Book (Hillmore)
SONG: How to Get Your Band on TV by Chumbawumba
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNs4Y...
Chumbawumba's first LP, Pictures of Starving Children Sell Records (1986), was a critique of the Live Aid concert organized by Bob Geldof, which they argued was primarily a cosmetic spectacle designed to draw attention away from the real political causes of world hunger.
Live Aid was a single-day (16-hour) concert split between venues in two cities (Wembley in London; JFK in Philadelphia) to raise awareness and financial support for the fight against famine in Ethiopia. Dozens of rock stars played the July 13, 1985 event, including Paul McCartney, Queen, U2, The Who, Led Zeppelin (reunited with Phil Collins on drums).
“For us, to mix star culture with the inequality of the world and not have any politics about what was happening in the developing world was wrong,” Alice Nutter of Chumbawumba explains. “Our view of it was that you cannot have this concern about world hunger and then have Phil Collins fly halfway across the world and not understand the politics of world hunger.”
- The Anarcho-Punk History of Chumbwumba
https://daily.bandcamp.com/features/c...
---------------------------------------------------
The politics surrounding humanitarian aid in Ethiopia from Live Aid forward remain controversial.
The 1983-1984 famine remains the worst of the many periodic famines in the history of Ethiopia/Abyssinia, with an estimated death toll of 1.2 million (a contested conservative estimate). The official cause is ascribed as a multi-year drought period; however, the unprecedented destructive magnitude begs further explanation. Current scholarly analysis has identified multiple human rights abuses as the primary causative factor for over half of all famine mortality.
The primary recipient of Live Aid was the Derg (a Mengistu Haile Mariam-led military dictatorship of Ethiopia). The Derg coupled famine-relief policy with their approach to separatist guerrilla movements in northern Eritrea and Tigray: a process which involved dismantling tribes in a military-enforced resettlement program which hundreds of thousand consequently died.
The Derg were infamous in using hunger as a weapon. In the pre-famine period Derg government troops systematically scorched the farmlands, destroyed crops and killed oxen of suspected counter-insurgency areas in the Northern provinces of Tigre and Eritrea. The Derg then refused to allow Live Aid-based aid to be delivered across these lines of war in Tigre, Eritrea, and the northern portions of Wollo: areas which comprised ~60 percent of the country’s famine victims. Such consequences called to mind the urgent request of Medicins Sans Frontiers (Doctors without Borders) to Bob Geldoff: don't not release the money until there is a reliable infrastructure to get aid to the victims.
Six years later, there was a glimmer of hope for such infrastructure when the Derg was overthrown by the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF). However, this hope was overshadowed by a harrowing question: did famine-based humanitarian aid prolong the Ethiopian Civil war? A scholarly analysis of DC-based Human Rights Watch written by renowned researcher Alex de Waal concludes: [t]he humanitarian effort prolonged the war, and with it, human suffering. This view also being shared by the acting Prime Minister of the EPRDF whom led the overthrow of the Derg.
Oh, that new glimmer of hope for infrastructure in 1991 was beset by a bumpy road when the accountability of Humanitarian Aid NGOs and the imposition of (neoliberal) "conditionalities" met with autocratic tradition in Ethiopia (per opposing perspectives).
January 1, 2025
Recently watched a Band Aid documentary as we remembered 40 years on so I then had to get this book back out. It holds many memories. Sadly, 40 years on, Ethiopia still has many challenging conflicts- governmental, humanitarian, and economic.
March 5, 2023
3.75/5 - Great pictures and some cool background information. Set lists and a few more quotes from the participants would have been a welcome touch.
April 9, 2023
got this at a car boot today for £5, i absolutely love it!!!!
July 1, 2024
What a welcome dose of nostalgia from arguably the defining pop culture moment of the 1980s!
August 26, 2012
Great story, great photos
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews