Forty years ago this weekend, two concurrent concerts were held in London and Philadelphia in aid of relieving a brutal famine that had taken hold of Ethiopia. The legend of Live Aid has grown exponentially ever since. But each retelling draws upon the same familiar names and faces, the cameras trained on the contemporary darlings of Geldof and Collins, Freddie and Diana.
The many millions who watched on from home are treated as a matter of scale, not depth. They are remembered as an amorphous blob of common opinion, a simplified version of the public that in reality can never exist. And yet four decades from the event itself, each individual person retains their own individual memory, full of colour and life and utterly unique to themselves.
