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Simple Minds - Don’t You (Forget About Me) (Live Aid 1985)
Main Post: Simple Minds - Don’t You (Forget About Me) (Live Aid 1985)
Top Comment: I’ve always loved how this song opens.
Live Aid Performance... its not that bad... but my question is... why have 2 drummers in the first place?
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I dont understand... i guess a percussion and a drummer would be cool... but 2 drummers? Is it a technical thing? did they want like a really big drum sound? what was the intention and did it work?
Top Comment: Firstly, the original plan was to play with Phil Collins as the drummer. The problem was that Phil Collins had already been invited to play during Sting’s Live Aid performance in London and he also had to do his solo show appearance. He was the only artist to appear on both sides of the Atlantic. Eric Clapton invited Phil to drum for his solo performance in Philadelphia during the Live Aid likewise Led Zeppelin. He COULDN’T let anyone down so he made extraordinarily heroic efforts to get from one continent to another on time (made mostly possible by the time zone difference between the UK and the US). Led Zeppelin believed Phil was not going to come at all and so they hired the other drummer to play the songs. The drafted-in drummer thought he would join Led Zeppelin if he showed-off and that’s the reason Phil was having trouble playing in sync with the other guy.
TIL Led Zeppelin reunited at Live Aid in 1985 with Phil Collins replacing John Bonham on drums. It was…
Main Post: TIL Led Zeppelin reunited at Live Aid in 1985 with Phil Collins replacing John Bonham on drums. It was...
Top Comment:
The performance was criticised for Plant's hoarse voice, Jimmy Page's out-of-tune guitar, a lack of rehearsal, and poorly functioning monitors. Plant described the performance as "a fucking atrocity for us. ... It made us look like loonies".[60]
Page later criticised Collins' performance, saying: "Robert told me Phil Collins wanted to play with us. I told him that was all right if he knows the numbers. But at the end of the day, he didn't know anything. We played 'Whole Lotta Love', and he was just there bashing away cluelessly and grinning. I thought that was really a joke."[61] Collins responded: "It wasn't my fault it was crap... If I could have walked off, I would have. But then we'd all be talking about why Phil Collins walked off Live Aid – so I just stuck it out... I turned up and I was a square peg in a round hole. Robert was happy to see me, but Jimmy wasn't."[59]
Due to their "sub-standard" performance, Led Zeppelin have blocked broadcasts of the performance and withheld permission for it to be included on the DVD release.[62] Philadelphia named it "one of the worst rock-and-roll reunions of all time", with Victor Fiorillo writing: "I'd like to be able to blame all of the awfulness on anaemic Phil Collins, who sat in on drums, and Page himself later fingered the Genesis drummer for screwing up the set. But Collins was just the beginning of the bad. Go ahead. Watch and remember. It really was that terrible."[63]
Jimmy even saying that the Led Zep Live Aid set wasn't good...
Main Post: Jimmy even saying that the Led Zep Live Aid set wasn't good...
Top Comment:
I mean the man aint dumb. The performance was quite terrible. He really got his shit together afterwards and thank god. Page always set a high standard for himself. He even said in a Rolling Stone Interview that he thought his showing during the bands performance of Achilles Last Stand at Knebworth (that made the DVD) wasn't great. Funnily enough, its one of the fans most beloved performance of the song.
What was the real impact of the Live Aid concert of 1985?
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With the new Queen biopic out, it'd be interesting to know how much Live Aid actually helped in Ethiopia, especially with so much recent scrutiny over foreign aid involvement in Africa. Is there any way to quantify its impact?
Top Comment: I'm going to start with some context about Ethiopia in 1984-85. In 1974 the Ethiopian Emperor was ousted and in 1975 the then-Ethiopian government, the Derg, or the the Provisional Military Government of Socialist Ethiopia, embraced Communism and embarked on various reforms, including land reform and nationalisation measures. Opposition to the government, both to particular reforms and to general government mismanagement and corruption drove a civil war in Ethiopia from 1974 to 1991. So the context of Ethiopia was famine relief being delivered to a country in the middle of a violent civil war, with the official (Marxist) government of the day having control over only parts of the country - but those parts included the ports. I'm going to discuss two aspects of the impact of Live Aid, firstly on the health of the people and secondly on aid practices. There's not many studies on the impact of the aid itself on Ethiopian people, the only one I'm aware of is Dercon, Stefan & Porter, Catherine. (2012)., Live aid revisited: Long-term impacts of the 1984 Ethiopian famine on children. Journal of the European Economic Association. 12. 10.1111/jeea.12088. This study looked at the height of adults who were infants during the famine, relative to their siblings who were either older or younger, and found that they were significantly shorter as adults, and couldn't find signs of relief operations at the time making a difference. The article says it's the first study of the impact of the famine on outcomes. That said, this study doesn't tell us anything about the children who didn't survive the famine. I can't find any studies that look at the impact of Live Aid in terms of lives saved, I expect the civil war made it hard to collect data, at times the British Air Force was dropping relief food from the air. And it wasn't like it was back to normal once the famine was over, the civil war kept going for years afterwards. In those circumstances, determining the numbers of dead is hard, let alone the impact of a particular intervention. The other aspect I want to discuss is the impact of Live Aid on aid policy. The Live Aid relief effort was criticised by Spin in 1986 for funds being diverted by the Ethiopian government of the day to buy weapons to win the civil war and continue its (much-hated) resettlement policy. See Spin retrospective in 2015 on their 1986 report . However in 2010 the BBC apologised for a report it had made earlier in 2010 along those lines, after an internal investigation had found said claims unsupported. In summary I think we can say that Live Aid's high profile raised awareness of the risks of humanitarian aid in countries with abusive governments (and quasi-governments). More generally, there's an ongoing economic debate about the effectiveness of aid (all aid, not just Live Aid) in reducing poverty. A criticism is that a government that gets most of its revenue from the economic activity of the people that it governs has incentives to be more responsive to said people's interests than a government that gets its revenue from elsewhere, be that natural resources or foreign aid. Here's an accessible summary of the arguments . Note that this argument is based on data across numerous countries and does not relate specifically to aid to Ethiopia. In summary, the benefits of Live Aid are doubtful, but there's been basically only one study on it. The one study found no effect but couldn't include raw lives saved. Talk of Live Aid funds being diverted to continue the civil war and severe human rights abuses seems doubtful, but there are general concerns about the effectiveness of foreign aid.
Freddie Mercury moves the crowd at Live Aid (1985)
Main Post: Freddie Mercury moves the crowd at Live Aid (1985)
Top Comment: this is one of the goosebumpiest moments in pop culture history.
Highest quality Live Aid video?
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Can't seem to find a high quality video of queen at live aid; all are either low resolution or have radio interruptions. Checked youtube, please link. Thanks:)
Top Comment: Live Aid was shot on Standard Definition cameras so there is no HD version. On YouTube the best you will find will be 480p https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=teoG5yhV2RQ If you have Queen Rock Montreal there is a extra of Live Aid on that in DVD format in the best quality possible.