Live Aid: pop's Big Bang moment

Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. It may be hard to believe for those of you who can remember it happening, but this month marks the 40th anniversary of the iconic music extravaganza that was live-aid. David Hepworth co presented the BBC's coverage of the event, a role that gave him a ring sized seat at Queen's celebrated performance, and led to a sweary encounter with Bob Geldof. Here, in conversation with Spencer Mizen, David serves up his main recollections of the day, and reveals why he believes that after the 13th of July, 1985, the world of entertainment would never be the same again. So David, you kick off your latest book, Hope I Get Old Before I Die, with the observation that live aid was an event almost as close to the end of the Second World War as it is to the present day, which is uh pretty m mind-blowing.

But when you arrived at Wembley Stadium on the morning of 13th of July, 1985. Did you have any idea that we'd still be talking about this concert 40 years later that would kind of come to be regarded as this great cultural milestone in post-war history? No, I certainly didn't think we'd be talking about it all these years later. I think I knew it was going to be a bit of a success, but I didn't know it was going to resound in the way that it did.

I think we'd grown accustomed since Bob Geldoff did the band-aid record at the end of the previous year to the fact that this was going to turn out to be more successful than initially predicted. But no, I didn't think it was going to reverberate in the same way. In fact, oddly enough, and this is something that uh I think the president finds it hard to get its head around, is that you could take part in events like LiveAid in in 1985 without being in in any way aware of how it was landing in the outside world because he obviously didn't have mobile phones and and all the all the means of you know monitoring feedback.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (29 minutes, 4,448 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 5 episodes for $3.49, and monthly plans are cheaper still.