This concert was the soundtrack to soft power. Is it the swan song of foreign aid?

40 years ago this month, music brought the world together for a concert to fight a devastating famine in Ethiopia.

Live Aid took place on stages in London and Philadelphia where Queen, David Bowie, U2, Madonna, Tina Turner, Patti LaBelle and others performed for a 16-hour event that reached 2 billion TV viewers. 

For the generation that heard Band Aid's "Do They Know It's Christmas?" and USA for Africa's "We Are the World," the marathon Live Aid broadcast on July 13, 1985, was a global call to action.

Live Aid co-creators and musicians Bob Geldof and Midge Ure organized the Transatlantic event that introduced music and advocacy to stadium crowds and home audiences. (And Irishman Geldof is notable to Georgians as the frontman for the Boomtown Rats, whose biggest hit, "I Don't Like Mondays," was inspired by a 1979 visit to Atlanta and WRAS, Georgia State University's radio station, which now shares the air with GPB.)

Across the planet, people mailed or phoned in more than $100 million while watching Live Aid's legendary performances like Queen's "Radio Ga Ga" and George Michael singing Elton John's "Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me."

Over the years, the concert and its successor events, including Live 8 in 2005 and remakes of the Band Aid song, have received harsh criticisms ranging from stories about rebels stealing grain to recent complaints from young Africans who see their continent as a land of opportunity, not need.

But a new documentary, LIVE AID: When Rock ‘N’ Roll Took on the World, and a Broadway-style stage show, Just for One Day: The Live Aid Musical, aim to cast the concert's legacy as a net-positive chapter in the origin story of modern humanitarian relief and development. 

The four-part CNN and BBC docuseries premiered July 13 and features interviews and performance footage woven into arguments over the efficacy of aid and government’s role in it — questions which persist today as both the U.S. and U.K. rethink and reduce their commitments abroad. 

Introducing music fans to the concept of aid

LIVE AID: When Rock ‘N’ Roll Took on the World begins with Geldof’s motivation for getting music fans involved: the rage and helplessness he felt after viewing a television report on Oct. 23, 1984.

A group of Christian retired World War II pilots had flown photographer Michael Buerk to Ethiopia to capture what a BBC London announcer labeled in its newscast that night as indelible images of a “biblical famine.” Anchor Tom Brokaw shared the footage a few hours later on NBC Nightly News in America. And Geldof, in London, started ringing his mates to figure out a plan to help.

The federal agency USAID also acted quickly.

“There’s no question in Washington some people felt we shouldn’t provide aid,” then-USAID administrator Peter McPherson says in the first few minutes of the CNN documentary, as viewers see a photo of him presenting the same heart-wrenching pictures from Ethiopia to President Ronald Reagan. “He said, ‘This is terrible, we’ve got to do something about it.”

By that November, the United States upped its aid commitment to $45 million for Ethiopia from $10 million (and then-House Speaker Tip O'Neill Jr. complained it wasn’t enough); U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher announced an additional 5 million pounds for Ethiopia; organizations such as Africare and UNICEF raked in millions in donations; and Geldof and Ure formed a supergroup of pop stars and cowrote a song they hoped might raise hefty funds for the newly established Band Aid Trust by becoming England’s coveted Christmas No.1 — and it did, bringing in roughly $10 million.

U.S.A. for Africa’s “We Are the World,” penned by Lionel Richie and Michael Jackson, followed in March 1985, along with the Live Aid concerts that July.

At Live Aid in London, David Bowie introduced a CBC film of the starvation-ravaged people the show meant to help. The crowd of more than 72,000 fell silent watching the images set to a recording of Boston rock band The Cars’ hit “Drive”— marking a moment of realization and a turning point for how young people viewed their new power as part of shared causes.

Caption

Dozens of artists performed at JFK Stadium in Philadelphia as part of Live Aid on July 13, 1985.

Credit: Creative Commons

Concert coincided with a generation of growth in international development 

Although the term “soft power” was not coined and popularized until the 1990s, the documentary demonstrates how Geldof, Ure and other musicians who performed at Live Aid became vectors of influence between pop culture, government agencies and prominent charities. 

Ure, who performed at Live Aid with Ultravox, is a trustee for the Band Aid Trust, which managed the donations sent to Ethiopia at the time, and funds that, over the decades, have supplied food and medicines in other countries and are still doing so today. In an interview with GPB ahead of the 40th anniversary, he said the 1985 concert empowered musicians and fans to confront their nation's leaders about hunger and poverty.

"We [were] using a platform that we created that's deemed fluffy and disposable," he said of the group of musicians, many in their 20s and 30s, who gathered that day. "And all of a sudden, we were showing governments the way and showing them up, embarrassing them into having to do something."

LIVE AID: When Rock ‘N’ Roll Took on the World follows Geldof from asking Thatcher to drop the VAT tax on the sales of "Do They Know It's Christmas?" in 1984 to meeting with U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair around the G8 Summit in 2005. At Live 8 that year, Geldof introduced Birhan Woldu, a woman who survived the 1984 famine after an image of her near-death face at age 3  became its emblem.

Geldof and U2's Bono also inspired advocacy movements and lifesaving initiatives on the African continent including USAID-adjacent programs such as Obama’s Power Africa and George W. Bush’s President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which has saved millions of lives since 2003.

USAID officially shut down and merged remaining operations with the State Department this month, and earlier this year, GPB reported on MANA, the Georgia-based company that produces fortified peanut paste for USAID as it experienced a roller coaster of canceled and reinstated contracts.

On July 15, 2025, two days after the 40th anniversary of Live Aid, NPR reported that PEPFAR had been rescued from the $9.4 billion package of proposed funding cuts. As of publication time, that package was making its way through Congress with USAID funding still marked for rescission.

In the final installment of the documentary, Bono said he did not want the loss of aid to feel like "a funeral" for 40 years of development since Live Aid.

Caption

Bob Geldof (left) and Midge Ure are pictured inside Wembley Stadium for the launch of Just for One Day: The Live Aid Musical in London on May 1, 2025.

Credit: Jack Hall Photography

Music's impact and the future of aid

The music remains linked to the activism it ignited, and Gen Z is discovering Live Aid via a production in London's West End, where Geldof and Ure made a special appearance on July 13.

Just for One Day: The Live Aid Musical is donating 10% of proceeds to the Band Aid Trust, with the goal of raising more than 2 million British pounds by the end of this year. The play distills a parade of songs into a dramatic storyline featuring familiar tunes by Sting, Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan and others.

Those same stars performed at the 1985 Live Aid, along with dozens of the world's top rock bands, including The Who, members of Led Zeppelin and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.

For musicians like Howard Jones, who played a poignant ballad on a grand piano at Live Aid in London's Wembley Stadium that hot summer Saturday 40 years ago, the concert created a collective hope that a song and a ticket could make the difference.

"I played ‘Hide and Seek’ at the piano, and it's a thing I'll never, ever forget in my life," Jones told GPB. "It was a most amazing feeling of being supported by this huge population of people that was there and also people on TV and the stories that I've heard of people getting up early, you know, to watch it all and how much it affected them."

Jones said that despite the criticism of Live Aid, "the most important thing is that it did save lives."

Bob Ferguson of the poverty fighting organization Oxfam America said this year, with the closure of USAID and shifting attitudes toward aid, the message of Live Aid remains relevant.

"We know that so many humanitarian aid projects are not just useful but essential, and I, for one, wouldn't have interest in that if it wasn't for my early understandings of why that was important, starting with Live Aid."

Excerpts from this story originally appeared on NPR.