On the evening of 23 October 1984, Bob Geldof, singer with the waning pop act the Boomtown Rats, had a social engagement. He had been invited to Mayfair for the launch of a book by Peter York, profiler of London’s most privileged bons vivants. But before he left the house, Geldof watched the BBC television news and a report by Michael Buerk about a hellish famine in Ethiopia.
Among the many startling, blackly comic archive clips in Live Aid at 40: When Rock ’n’ Roll Took on the World is footage of Geldof at that glitzy party, reeling from what he had seen on TV and remarking to a fellow guest that it was “gross” for them to be enjoying champagne and canapes. That tension between glamour and guilt is at the heart of this three-part retrospective that doesn’t ignore the flaws in Geldof’s grand plan to use music to feed the world. It’s a fascinating portrait of a complex man’s imperfect attempt to solve an impossible problem.
