A groggy 9am on Saturday, July 13, 1985. The JFK Stadium in Philadelphia. It’s the morning of Live Aid, the global charity event – arranged hastily by Boomtown Rats singer Bob Geldof after an epiphany watching TV reports of famine in Ethiopia – now regarded as the defining musical moment of the 1980s.
The foundational Live Aid show at Wembley Stadium had begun two hours before – midday UK time – with Status Quo doing their cheeky-chappie version of Rockin’ All Over The World. “I’d done a gram of coke and half a bottle of tequila before we even went on stage,” Francis Rossi later told me.
