Live Aid [DVD] [2005]

Product Information

While the telecast was run advertisement-free by the BBC, both the MTV and syndicated/ABC broadcasts included advertisements and interviews.

Thus, the concert continued for just over 16 hours, but since many artists' performances were conducted simultaneously in Wembley and JFK, the total concert's length was much longer. Marillion, riding high in the UK charts that summer with their Misplaced Childhood album and " Kayleigh" single, missed out on an invitation to perform at Wembley because their manager had deemed it not worthwhile for singer Fish to participate in the "Do They Know It's Christmas? Led Zeppelin have blocked broadcasts of the performance and withheld permission for it to be included on the DVD release.According to Gary Kemp, "Dare I say it, it was evangelical, that moment when Geldof stopped 'I Don't Like Mondays' and raised his fist in the air. Sprinkled amid these performances are a couple real gems, including a performance by Run DMC, the event’s sole representative of the ascendant rap movement. John Entwistle's bass wouldn't work at the start, causing an awkward delay of over a minute before they could start playing. Geldof responded by deriding both the articles and Médecins Sans Frontières, who had been expelled from the country, and reportedly saying, "I'll shake hands with the Devil on my left and on my right to get to the people we are meant to help". She would put a little mark on the children who got chosen, with Geldof stating of her at the time, "In her was vested the power of life and death.

Mick Jagger and David Bowie intended to perform a transatlantic duet, with Bowie in London and Jagger in Philadelphia.Later in the evening, following David Bowie's set, a video shot by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation was shown to the audiences in London and Philadelphia, as well as on televisions around the world (though neither US feed showed the film), showing starving and diseased Ethiopian children set to " Drive" by The Cars. Although Dylan's comments were criticised, his remark inspired fellow musicians Willie Nelson, Neil Young and John Mellencamp to organise the Farm Aid charity, which held its first concert in September 1985. Rick Springfield, the Four Tops, the Hooters, the Power Station, Billy Ocean and Kool and the Gang were among those acts that were left off the DVD. There had never been a concert event of such magnitude-the biggest names in music performing in a concert broadcast live from 2 continents to an audience of over 1.

It was one of the largest satellite link-ups and television broadcasts of all time; an estimated audience of 1.

Kershaw also described the event as "irritating, shallow, sanctimonious and self-satisfied" for failing to confront the fundamental causes of the famine and being "smug in its assumption that a bunch of largely lamentable rock and pop floozies was capable of making a difference, without tackling simultaneously underlying problems". Regarding Buerk's landmark BBC News report as a watershed moment in crisis reporting that influenced modern coverage—one that was broadcast in its entirety with Buerk's narration on a major US channel—Suzanne Franks in The Guardian states, "the nexus of politics, media and aid are influenced by the coverage of a famine 30 years ago.