When Bob Geldof first conceived of the idea of recording a charity single in aid of the Ethiopian famine victims, he had always wanted David to sing on it. As well as getting contemporary bands such as Duran Duran, the Police, Sade, Spandau Ballet, and Culture Club, he knew it was important to get what would soon become known as heritage acts involved—legacy performers who had a wide commercial and global appeal. Like Queen, Elton John, the Who, Status Quo, and the Rolling Stones, Bowie was obviously one of these. He had also recently been at his commercial peak with the whole Serious Moonlight Tour. So when Bowie was unable to sing on “Do They Know It’s Christmas?,” the Band Aid single that was released at the end of 1984, his lines were taken by Paul Young (who, it has to be said, did an admirable job), who at that time was one of the biggest stars in the world. But when it was time to put on the Live Aid event itself, Geldof knew that he had to get Bowie. When he eventually got him—and when he committed, he committed 100 percent—Bowie threw himself into the project. Bowie wanted it to be good, and he wanted his performance and his involvement to be intrinsic to the event’s success. By securing David Bowie, Geldof raised the bar of the entire event. I wrote a book about the ’80s a few years ago, using Live Aid as a pivot, and interviewed dozens of people for it. Everyone I spoke to mentioned how crucial Bowie was to the event—not just in terms of performance, but also how his involvement encouraged other artists to sign up.
BERNARD DOHERTY (LIVE AID PUBLICIST): It had initially been difficult to get a lot of the acts interested in performing, especially some of the Americans, but as soon as Bowie said he was in, it all started to roll. When Bowie said he’d do it, literally everyone said they’d do it. It shows you just how much influence Bowie still had. Everyone started taking our phone calls when David said he was in, which meant we got Queen, U2, Elton, the Who, Macca [Paul McCartney]…A lot of the bigger artists were wary of getting involved, as it was being organized at quite short notice, and it needed someone of David’s stature to lend it credibility.
MIDGE URE (MUSICIAN): I first met David at a Kensington restaurant in the ’80s. Bob Geldof asked if he’d present the Band Aid video for “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” on TV, as the BBC had given us five minutes before Top of the Pops to air the single. (David had unfortunately been unable to take part in the recording of the song.) Bowie arrived fashionably late with his PA. As soon as everyone at the table—me, Bob, high-powered music biz managers, Band Aid trustees—saw him, we all stood up, as if the headmaster had arrived. Everyone turned into giggling fans, hanging on his every word. He readily agreed to introduce the single, even though he’d have to cut off the goatee he’d started growing to enable him to go out shopping in London without being recognized. The next summer David did Live Aid at Wembley—it wouldn’t have been the same without him.
HARVEY GOLDSMITH: Bowie had originally intended doing something far more adventurous than just simply performing, which is why he hadn’t put a band together earlier. He had originally intended to perform a reggae song with Mick Jagger, exploiting the half-a-second time delay between Wembley and Philadelphia, which is where the concerts were taking place. Their respective management teams organized a conference call that resulted in both of them singing in harmony down the telephone line with Bob Geldof. The idea was to have Mick in Philadelphia, and David in London, and they were going to sing a duet together. They chose a reggae idea, as they thought the loping beat would work with any delay. But as it was it didn’t really work out like that.
BOB GELDOF (MUSICIAN): When we were exploring this idea, we had a few dummy runs. And they really were dummy runs, let me tell you. We got together in a room in Soho and we tried it out, seeing if it could work. I sang Bob Marley’s “One Love” as an example. And then of course Jagger and Bowie joined in. I sang, “One love, one heart, let’s get together and feel all right.” Then Bowie sang it. Then Jagger sang it. Then they sang it together. Verna [Live Aid’s technical director] was somewhere in America listening to Bowie and Jagger crackling down the phone at him. It seemed unbelievable to me that I was sitting in a room with these two rock greats, working out a song, making suggestions to them, singing with them. Singing with them. Fuck me! It was so odd hearing their two familiar voices together in that tiny room. They were both desperately trying to outdo each other, and it suddenly struck me how competitive they were. Jagger was tilted back on his chair. Bowie sat beside me on the sofa. I started singing, “One love, one heart,” Jagger and Bowie harmonized on the last line, then David began in his low voice “One love,” and Jagger in a great blues shout repeated “One love,” then Bowie deep and sad “One heart”; Jagger like an old black woman “One heart” and then joyously together “Let’s get together and feel all right.” It was a valiant attempt, but it was never going to work. We just didn’t have the technology to make it work, although the amazing thing was watching the two of them try and outdo each other. Neither wanted to be the one to say that it couldn’t be done, neither wanted to be the one who bailed out first, and so we kept going until it was obvious to everyone that it really wasn’t going to happen.
HARVEY GOLDSMITH: After several attempts at working out a way to make it work, they eventually decided that this wasn’t going to happen, and so we all went off to a nightclub together and they spent the evening trying to outdo each other on the dance floor. They were competitive even when they were dancing. Each of them was trying to attract the attention of all the girls in the club, but mostly they were competing with each other. This gave them the idea of recording a cover of “Dancing in the Street,” to be broadcast at the Wembley event and released as a single. David also had another idea, this one involving a rocket ship, as Bowie wanted one of them to be inside a NASA Space Shuttle, doing a duet with the other on Earth. Seriously. I’m not making this up. At one point, just to try and move it on, and either get a green or a red light, I actually made a call to NASA. I asked them if they had a spare rocket that we could send Mick Jagger up in. I could tell they were thinking, Who is this nut case? In the end, as well as deciding to perform in their own special way—Mick with Tina Turner in Philadelphia and David in Wembley—they decided on an old-fashioned video, camping their way through a rather average version of the Motown classic by Martha and the Vandellas. It wasn’t a great record, but the video was quite camp, quite fun, and it helped raise awareness as well as raising an awful lot of money.
KEVIN ARMSTRONG: In early 1985 I was given a tip-off by a friend of mine called Hugh Stanley Clarke at EMI who said I should turn up at Abbey Road with a guitar to meet a mystery artist and that I’d never regret it. So that’s what I did and that turned out to be the demos for the Absolute Beginners sessions. David didn’t turn up with the song fully formed, and I would go so far as to say I should have by rights had a co-writing credit on the song. We started work on the song “That’s Motivation,” which he did with Gil Evans on the soundtrack. And that’s what we were there to demo ostensibly. Because we were so fast there was time left at the end of the session, and Bowie said, “Look, I’ve got this half an idea for another song. Can we try and throw it together?” I sat with him with a piece of paper and an acoustic guitar and helped him work it out. I think that’s probably what led to the ten-year on-off association because I think at that point he realized I could work with him in some way. After working on the demo sessions, David phoned me and said he’d been asked to do this big charity thing with Geldof, and did I want to be involved? So I went to meet them in the middle of the night in a basement in Wardour Street to do some preliminary work. It was just him and Mick Jagger in a tiny room, and we all sat down and worked out “Dancing in the Street.” It was a pretty pedestrian version, and neither of them thought it was brilliant, but we knew we had to get it done quickly. The record was fine but even then we knew the video was embarrassing. We were all invited down to the video shoot in Docklands after the session to watch the pair of them camping it up for the cameras, clowning about…The dynamic between them was interesting, as there was quite a lot of banter. David knew he had to work at performing, and he had obviously worked at it psychologically as well. He was not a natural performer, whereas with Jagger it seemed effortless. He could walk in with a toothpick and make it happen, whereas Bowie was much more studied. My fondest memory of David that day is the laughter. For somebody who’s such an amazingly layered and sophisticated person, he could have been very intense and introverted. But there was a lot of laughter in him. A lot. During the working process, there was never a point where you thought, Oh, I’m treading on eggshells here. It was really fun. He was warm and charming and funny and there was this kind of crackling energy around him. That’s something I felt upset about when he died. To have been close to that, that special energy that he had. You see it in very few people.
THOMAS DOLBY (MUSICIAN): That summer Bowie had been in the UK doing things like “Dancing in the Street.” Kevin Armstrong and [bassist] Matthew Seligman played on “Absolute Beginners” and said Bowie was going to call me. He did, when I was at Olympic Studios, on a pay phone. He said his regular touring musicians were doing other tours so he asked me to put a band together to play at Live Aid. He was very busy because he was shooting Labyrinth, and he said he would come after shooting for an hour or two at night for three nights because that’s all the time he could spare. His manner was very gentlemanlike, he was so grateful for everything. I thought I was talking to Edward Fox. If you had asked me what image popped into my head when I thought of Bowie I would have said the Thin White Duke, sitting in the back of a dream car looking at a fly in his milk, but he was the total opposite. He’d asked us to rehearse five or six songs, and so we had those ready for when he walked into the studio. When he arrived he just stood in the middle smiling and grinning and just turning around listening to what we were doing and made no comment at all. He just said it sounded lovely, just stood in the middle of the room and exuded, and it was very impressive. Most people would have tried to micromanage, feeling as though they should exert influence. But he just stood there, confident in the knowledge that he knew what he was doing. That was great. We were initially going to perform “Loving the Alien,” but he soon realized that this wasn’t an event to plug his new single, but an opportunity to make his appearance a churchlike moment. It needed to be classic Bowie, as we were all going to church.
CLIVE LANGER (PRODUCER): We first met at the St. James’s Club. He asked us to go round, me and Alan [co-producer Winstanley]. He had already done a demo of “Absolute Beginners.” The lift went up, straight into this apartment. And there he was. He had a bar there, so we had a beer and listened to the demo. The song was so good, it was like a gift really. They’d done the demo at Abbey Road studios, and, I mean he could have released that. But we worked quite hard on it and extended it and changed a few things, so it was worth doing. After that first meeting, I spent a lot of time of him. Not just recording. We would finish recording and just sit around and talk. His knowledge was massive. We were quite comfortable with each other. Coco once said to me that he liked me because I was normal. I don’t know if that’s boring, but maybe a lot of the people around him were trying too hard. We would go out for lunch around Notting Hill and people would take a double look and say, “No it can’t be!” That was quite funny, experiencing the fame of David Bowie. We went to [the Notting Hill] Carnival with him and we were in a first-floor flat. He was sitting on the windowsill looking out at everyone, so whenever anyone looked up and saw him, he was quite pleased. He wasn’t trying to hide at this point, wasn’t trying to disguise himself. Wasn’t trying to run away from fame. We went skiing that winter, and we were quite nearby to him so he invited us over. So we spent New Year’s Eve with him in Gstaad. And Iggy was there, it was a small gathering. There were only about twelve of us in total, and we just sat around drinking Champagne. And when we walked into the house he made us each wear different hats. He gave me a magician’s hat and Iggy had a Viking hat on. So we spent the evening talking to each other with these funny hats on. He wasn’t drinking that much at the time. Coco was there at the time monitoring his drinking. We went skiing with him again at Easter. He liked watching old sitcoms on TV, he liked sitting around. We had a great laugh in the studio one time when we got him to sing “Absolute Beginners” as if he were different people, like Iggy or Lennon. He was a great mimic. His best was Anthony Newley, because obviously at the beginning of his career he really sounded like him.
HARVEY GOLDSMITH: Bowie and Bob were in my office trying to work on the reggae song when we started playing a lot of the videos that people had sent in for use in the show. The BBC had sent a lot in, and we had videos from all over the place. I had one of those pop-up televisions and we started working our way through the videos, looking for suitable material to play at Wembley. When that piece popped up, of all the terrible news footage, with the Cars’ “Drive” already on it—[“Who’s gonna drive you home tonight…”]—we all looked at it and welled up immediately. And Dave immediately said, “Take one of my numbers off and put that up instead.” That was another iconic part of the day. David Bowie actually gave up one of his songs—he was going to finish with “Five Years”—at one of the biggest concerts he’d ever done, in front of what was going to be the biggest TV audience ever, in order to play this video. We were all blown away by his generosity of spirit, as I’m not sure there were many performers who would have done that, or at least not volunteered to do so.
BOB GELDOF: I showed that film to David at Harvey Goldsmith’s about seven thirty at night. Let’s remember for a minute that Bowie is an absolute god. I got to know him when I was a kid. I hitchhiked to see him in Belgium on the Station to Station tour, told him I was in a band and showed him pictures of the Rats. I blagged backstage and he was so nice. Don’t forget he launched Band Aid [by wearing] this lame T-shirt, FEED THE WORLD, and looked like a doofus. But he’s the sweetest man. You just never think about David Bowie like that. We showed him the film, which was famine footage cut to the Cars’ song “Drive.” He sat there in tears and said, “Right, I’m giving up a song.” I said, “Hang on…” I didn’t want David Bowie giving up a fucking song. I mean, hello? But of course he was right. That was the moment that people said, Fuck everything, take whatever you want from me. And it took David Bowie to make that call. No one was going to suggest such a mad thing, but he suggested it himself.
KEVIN ARMSTRONG: We didn’t have much time to prepare, just two days’ rehearsal at Bray Studios in Berkshire, but we were ready. On the day, nobody could ignore the atmosphere that Queen created, as they had just been on before us, but it didn’t seem in any way like, Oh, it’s difficult to follow that. Because we were with David Bowie—we were going to walk on there and they were going to go nuts. And they did. By the time we hit the stage it was probably the best part of the day, the late afternoon. I’d never felt anything like that crowd. It did really seem to be like, you know, we’re here to change the world.
Some artists arrived by car, others by helicopter (Elton John, David Bowie, Spandau Ballet, the Who, George Michael, and so forth). These were landing on a nearby cricket field, where a wedding reception was taking place; after various complaints from the father of the bride, David Bowie was dispatched to smooth things over, and—obviously—have his picture taken with the bride and groom. At the time, the music PR Gary Farrow was running his own agency, looking after the likes of Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Paula Yates, Wham!, and Heaven 17. A good friend of the Live Aid promoter Harvey Goldsmith, Farrow had been called by him to see if he could persuade some of his famous friends to let them use their helicopters for the day, to fly the performers into the stadium from the heliport in Battersea. Due to the number of acts on the bill, and the crowds, there was simply no other way to guarantee them arriving on time. And so Farrow rang the BBC presenter Noel Edmunds, along with some other owners, and they all agreed to supply them. They also arranged for the fuel to be donated, as well as the pilots’ time. Because of the number of return flights needed, the operation was quickly labeled the biggest air-lift since the Falklands War. The helicopters were going to land on a makeshift landing strip, complete with wind sock and lights, on a cricket green behind the stadium, where a match was due to be played that day. It was agreed with the teams that the match wouldn’t be canceled, but that they’d simply take the bales away whenever a heli needed to land. This went on all day. One of the security guards told Farrow that not even the pope had been able to land so close to the stadium. “That’s because he didn’t have a laminate,” quipped Farrow. Bowie repeated this joke all day.
NOEL EDMUNDS (DJ): On the day it was the climax of their cricket tournament, and they wouldn’t abandon their game for us so the umpires had whistles and when they saw a helicopter coming they blew the whistles and cleared the field for us to land. I seem to remember that David Bowie’s management said he only flew in a blue helicopter—that’s blue on the inside—and we managed to find one. I was killing time with him at Battersea before he flew in and I said, “Look at the inside of this helicopter!” He looked at me as if I were mad. He didn’t give a shit what color the helicopter was.
PETE TOWNSHEND (MUSICIAN): Bowie had wheeled out a suit from his younger days and was delighted to explain to me how well it still fitted.
The band was practically new, having only played together three times previously, which is one of the reasons Bowie’s set struck some as so flat. Thomas Dolby was playing keyboards, and was one of the few band members to enjoy it.
THOMAS DOLBY: To my astonishment, I felt like I was on a magic carpet ride. These songs were like our teenage anthems—my fingers just wafted along.
HARVEY GOLDSMITH: David and Freddie Mercury were actually quite similar, although Freddie was obviously more flamboyant onstage. Freddie crafted the science of getting to his audience, whereas David Bowie crafted the art of getting to his audience. David was a genuine enigma, as I don’t think anyone really knew him, you knew what he decided you should know. That was David through and through, being an enigma that everyone thought they knew.
ALAN EDWARDS (PUBLICIST): It’s always a little nerve-wracking when you are looking after your artist and doing two jobs at once. In my case, that day, I was doing about eighteen jobs. There wasn’t much love lost between David and Elton—perhaps they’d fallen out at some point in the past—although the one musician David was genuinely pleased to see was Freddie [Mercury]. They really were delighted to be together again. They stood chatting, as if they’d only seen each other yesterday. The affection between them was tangible. David was wearing an amazing blue suit, and looked incredibly sharp and healthy. Just before David went on, Freddie winked at him and said, “If I didn’t know you better, dear, I’d have to eat you.” No wonder David went out onstage with such a big smile on his face.
Bowie had to follow Queen, although at the time I had no idea how he did it, as the Queen performance was extraordinary. It is quite rightly remembered as the greatest stadium performance ever, something that wasn’t lost on the 80,000 people in the stadium, including me. As Queen left the stage after rocking Wembley’s foundations with “We Will Rock You” and “We Are the Champions,” I wondered why I hadn’t been a Queen fan all my life, and felt rather embarrassed that I had treated them with such disdain. Like the other 79,999 people in the stadium on July 13, and the 1.9 billion watching on TV, I was completely won over. Their performance not only gave them a new lease on life, but they completely altered how many people viewed them. Their performance has since been voted by more than sixty artists, journalists, and music industry executives as the greatest live performance in rock (Jimi Hendrix’s appearance at Woodstock in August 1969 came second, followed by the Sex Pistols’ gig at Manchester Free Trade Hall in June 1976). And with good reason. On reaching his trailer, Mercury shouted, “Thank God that’s over,” and promptly downed a double vodka. Reaction to Queen’s performance was predictable. In the stadium, the crowd was completely floored, as were the other acts, especially those who had yet to appear: Elton John rushed into their dressing room afterward, screaming that they had stolen the show. Next up was David Bowie, but how could he be anything other than anti-climactic? Seven-twenty should have been the perfect time for him to grab the audience, but Freddie Mercury’s extraordinary performance made it impossible. I thought Bowie stood no chance, but he appeared to take it in his stride. By rights he should have been shell-shocked, but apparently not. The final song he sang was “Heroes,” and he introduced it like this: “To my son, to all our children, and to the children of the world.” With that, his pickup band started the song, and he managed to transcend himself.
THOMAS DOLBY: It was a gorgeous day. I lived down by the Thames and I went for a walk in the morning, and everybody had their windows open and you could hear everybody tuned to the same station; there was a whole community focused on the same thing. It was a bit like the moon landing. Because of the traffic I was instructed to go to Battersea Heliport, and Bowie was already there when I arrived, signing autographs and smiling in his blue suit. As soon as we got in the helicopter he changed. He was physically shaking, and started chain-smoking. The pilot kept telling him he couldn’t smoke but he just ignored him, and kept asking how long it was going to take. He was a complete diva for these twenty minutes. He’d only recently started flying again, and I think this was his first helicopter trip. He was a complete bitch. I remember banking over the stadium and seeing the twin towers and seeing a giant screen with Freddie Mercury on it. When we got out of the helicopter, we were driven straight to the stadium, where we were surrounded by about two hundred photographers. As we got out of the car Bowie winked at me and said, “I love this bit.” The personality transformation was really dramatic. There was no green room, and we were literally walked to the side of the stage, and then we went on.
We were mainly running on adrenaline, but as soon as we started rocking we went into this sort of more religious feeling, particularly when we played “Heroes.” Then it was a mixture of euphoria and stage fright, because “Heroes” doesn’t actually have that many changes in it. Simple songs are sometimes the easiest to mess up because you really have to concentrate; with more complicated songs the chord sequences keep you focused. But with “Heroes” you really had to know what was going on. Also, there are singers who have great dexterity, and singers who have great character, and Bowie had the ability to fuse the two. So I had also turned into a fanboy who was miraculously onstage with Bowie.
Afterwards, someone asked Bowie if he wanted to go to the Royal Box, so off we went. In front of us were Charles and Diana and they turned around and congratulated us and shook his hand. David said, “We’re having a sort of sing-song at the end, do you think you will be up there?” And she said, “Well, I think I could manage the National Anthem.”
KEVIN ARMSTRONG: It would be difficult to say that wasn’t one of the highlights of my career. We weren’t sure how good our performance was at the time, but the crowd seemed to love it, and the energy was indescribable.
BERNARD DOHERTY: Bowie was in floods of tears after his performance, blown over by the sheer force of emotion from the crowd. He was crying his eyes out. He couldn’t cope with the enormity of it all, which was astonishing. This was David Bowie!
There was the obvious rivalry between Bowie and Queen, and although they were friends, each wanted to outdo the other. And while Bowie may have been smiling, he was worried inside. Like everyone else at Wembley that day, he knew Queen had stolen the show, and if truth be known, he was a little queasy.
Bowie and Mercury had worked together just a few years previously, when they had recorded the “Under Pressure” single in Montreux in 1981, and they got to see each other’s foibles and predilections at close quarters. Bowie was living there, Queen was recording there, and it was suggested by a mutual colleague (the producer David Richards) that they meet. This resulted in a new composition, kick-started by John Deacon’s bass line, and then accessorized by both Bowie and Mercury. Bowie originally called the song “People on Streets,” but then settled on the slightly more abstract “Under Pressure.”
“[Bowie] was quite difficult to work with,” said Brian May, “because it was the meeting of two different methods of working. It was stimulating but, at the same time, almost impossible to resolve. We’re very pigheaded and set in our ways and Mr. Bowie is too. In fact he’s probably as pigheaded as the four of us put together. After ‘Under Pressure’ was done, there were continual disagreements about how it should be put out or if it should even be put out at all. David wanted to redo the whole thing.”
ALAN EDWARDS: There was a sense of drama about the day, as the whole thing felt innovative, groundbreaking, fundamentally important, as though we all knew we wouldn’t ever be at something like this again. I remember watching Bowie, and while he certainly wasn’t overawed, you could tell that he was carefully watching people. You wanted to look around and remember things, as you knew it was a special day. There was a healthy competitive spirit backstage, although you also felt that everyone was involved for the common good. Every five minutes there was another surprise. Phil Collins getting on an airplane and playing in Philadelphia. I suppose it seems commonplace now, but as soon as that happened—and as soon as it happened everyone in the stadium knew about it—you knew you were a part of a truly global event. There was a sense of oneness, a feeling that the crowd and the performers were somehow all in it together. For one day. We all felt as though we were right at the center of the universe. This was before all the big global events, before the idea of global summits, or big charity events, or colossal fund-raisers. The G8 had started back in 1975 with the Group of Six, hosted by France with the UK, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the States, but it didn’t have the resonance it would have after Live Aid. It fused politics and pop together, and made both seem far more important than they had been in the past, or at the very least gave both a different media perspective. Politics was immediately made popular in a way that appealed to a younger set of people, and pop was suddenly front-page news in a way it had never been before. In hindsight, none of the big events of the last twenty or thirty years would have happened without the ambition of Live Aid. Woodstock didn’t really contain any politics, it was a just a big festival. Live Aid really meant something. And a lot of that was due to David Bowie.
MARK ELLEN (JOURNALIST): Before Live Aid certain people like Van Morrison and Rod Stewart or whatever were considered to be super antiquated. But when they saw Live Aid they saw a lot of bands that they hadn’t heard of and they quite liked them. Also, people thought, I’d forgotten about all these bands, I’d forgotten that Dave Gilmour existed, I’d forgotten about Queen, I’d forgotten about David Bowie and I saw them and they were wonderful and actually the stadium experience looks very pleasant. Like it might be a worthwhile venture to go to see people in places like that. So this was the beginning of the heritage industry.
DAVID BAILEY: We built a studio backstage at Live Aid, and photographed everyone as they came offstage. That was a crazy experience, as it was so unreal. Everyone was famous, and it was like being at some sort of party that never ended. It was hectic. Everyone was great—Elton, Bowie, Paul McCartney, U2, everybody. Freddie Mercury was funny because he French kissed me quite aggressively—he came up and grabbed me, swung me round, and said, “I have to kiss you!”—and the only people who were a bit off were George Michael and Sade, who for some reason didn’t want her picture taken. We auctioned off all the pictures afterwards. I loved it because I was one of only four people who had the magic pass, the pass where you could go everywhere.
GARY KEMP (GUITARIST AND SONGWRITER): What I thought was interesting about Live Aid itself was the way the hierarchy fell into place almost immediately. I had a particular moment when I arrived, when I saw my hero, David Bowie, at the bar wearing this beautiful suit. I made an approach, but he was talking to someone and I didn’t quite get the connection that I would have liked to have got, so I rather secretly gathered myself and crawled away. I think a lot of us felt that we were in the room with our betters. And the ’70s generation had never been better than they were that day, so I think a lot of the younger boys felt very much in their place.
BRIAN ARIS (PHOTOGRAPHER): One of the great things about Live Aid was the fact that while all these musicians had relationships with us, with photographers, they didn’t really know each other, so there was this great curiosity on the day, as everyone started talking to each other. You couldn’t separate Annie Lennox and David.
ROGER DALTREY (SINGER): I found Live Aid a very weird experience. It was just a series of dressing rooms. One minute you’re sitting in a crowd and the next you’re wheeled into what felt like a train station of people changing behind curtains. And we were only playing for fifteen minutes. It just seemed like the concourse of a train station, like Charing Cross, waiting to go home, or go onstage. One or the other. David was funny though. I knew David very well, and every time we met we used to laugh a hell of a lot together. After all, we were both London boys. In all of the photographs I’ve got of the two of us we are both cracking our sides. We didn’t socialize a lot, but professionally we had a great relationship. I was a great admirer of his work, as he was a great inventor, a great pusher of boundaries, which I liked. He was fearless in that respect. This is very necessary in rock, and there was more weight to his music than most. But like I say, he was funny too.
Live Aid documentary producer Jill Sinclair was also producing a Christmas special that day for The Tube, the Channel 4 early-evening pop show.
JILL SINCLAIR (PRODUCER): The interviews were more like a gossip between old friends—what was it like and so on. In a break, Paula [Yates] and I sat down and tried to figure out some questions that would spark a different response. We came up with a list including, ‘What are you going to do [right] now?’ The first person we thought we’d try it on was David Bowie. I grabbed him and she asked him the new question. He looked at her, then straight at the camera, and said, ‘I’m going to go home and I’m going to have a really good fuck.’ ”