Live Aid - Wembley Stadium, London, Britain, 7-13-1985, Part 5: The Who, Elton John with Kiki Dee and George Michael, Freddie Mercury & Brian May, and Paul McCartney

This is the last of five albums of the London portion of Live Aid. With this, I'm finishing my Live Aid posts. It's true there were smaller Live Aid related concerts in some other countries on that same day, but the vast majority of the musical acts were only well known to the people from those countries.

First up for this part of the concert was the Who. The band broke up in 1982, and made it official in 1983, so this was a reunion. (They would reunite for good in 1989.) Apparently, there was a red light in front of the stage to indicate when the musical act was going over their allotted time. Lead guitarist Pete Townshend broke the light while jumping around. I don't know if that was accidental or not, but the band ended up going five minutes over their time slot.

Townshend wrote a song specifically for Live Aid called "After the Fire." The Who was supposed to perform it in this concert. However, they didn't commit to joining the concert until the last minute, so they didn't have enough time to practice it. Townshend gave it to the band's lead singer, Roger Daltrey, who had a minor hit with it later in the year.

The Who were also beset with some serious technical difficulties. Part way through their first song, "My Generation," a blown fuse caused their stage TV feed to cut out. Ironically, this happened during the line "Why don't you all fade away," right on the word "away." As a result, they couldn't be seen for the rest of the song, and most of the next song, "Pinball Wizard." Some of the vocals could still be heard for these two songs, though they were very low in the mix. I used the audio editing program UVR5 to boost the vocals relative to the instruments. They sound decent now, but the sound quality is still not as good as the other songs on this album. That's why those two songs have "[Edit]" in their titles.

Elton John was next. At 32 minutes, it ended up being the longest set in either Live Aid concert. This was actually too long. Maybe because of the broken warning light, he went over his assigned time slot. George Michael was still part of Wham! at the time (he would go solo a year after this). The plan was to have Wham! play a set after John finished, but this was cancelled due to all the delays, not just from John, but other delays accumulated earlier in the concert. But John somewhat compensated for this by having George Michael join him in a duet of the song "Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me." This was the first time they performed the song as a duet. In 1991, they would release a studio version of the duet and it would hit Number One in both the U.S. and Britain.

John also did a duet with Kiki Dee on "Don't Go Breaking My Heart," since those two performed it together when it hit Number One in 1976.

After that, two members of Queen, lead singer Freddie Mercury and lead guitarist Brian May, returned to the stage to play an encore of sorts. They wrote the song "Is This the World We Created?" together in 1984 in direct response to news reports about the famine in Africa. So that's presumably why it was performed towards the very end of the concert instead of part of Queen's set earlier.

Note that this song has "[Edit]" in the title. That's because some strange noise got onto the recording. For a section towards the end of the song, one could clearly hear some thumping as well as the sound of a person talking. I used the UVR5 program to break the song into different tracks and then wipe out most of the talking and thumping. Only a little bit remains, from where some of the talking was simultaneous with some of the singing.

The last proper act was Paul McCartney. According to the Wikipedia article about Live Aid, the concert organizers considered it a high priority to get at least one surviving member of the Beatles, especially McCartney, to help give the concert credibility with the politicians they were hoping to influence. Apparently, former Beatles Ringo Starr and George Harrison also seriously considered taking part in the concert. However, they declined doing their own sets for fear that they would be dragged into performing with McCartney and turning it into a quasi-Beatles reunion. (A full reunion obviously could never have occurred, since John Lennon died in 1980.)

Given the fame of McCartney, and especially the importance the organizers put on having him involved, it's surprising that he only played one song, "Let It Be." My guess is that the TV coverage was due to end at a certain time, and the concert was still running late, so he had to cut his set short. That was bad enough, but his microphone also failed for the first two minutes of the song, making his vocals for that section almost totally inaudible. He wasn't aware of this problem. However, off stage, Bob Geldof, Pete Townshend, Alison Moyet, and David Bowie noticed the problem and rushed onto the stage to help sing backing vocals. They did so, although right at that time his microphone finally started working again.

Live Aid was supposed to be a truly live event, with no album or film of it released later. However, McCartney must have had a good feeling something would eventually be released anyway, because he rerecorded his missing vocals the next day so they could be used for any future versions. That turned out to be a very good idea, since a DVD of some Live Aid performances were released in 2004. And it's lucky for me, because I was able to use those rerecorded vocals. So there's no problem with his performance here.

After McCartney came the usual finale, where all the stars returned to the stage to sing "Do They Know It's Christmas?," the song that started the music industry's response to the Ethiopia famine. Near the end of the song, concert organizer Bob Geldof was raised up onto the shoulders of McCartney and Townshend to celebrate all he accomplished in putting the concert together.

So ends Live Aid. Phew! It was a lot of work putting this whole thing together. I think I'll go back to posting normal albums for a little while before tackling another one of these big rock festivals.

This album is an hour and three minutes long.

088 talk (Tommy Vance)
089 My Generation [Edit] (Who)
090 Pinball Wizard [Edit] (Who)
091 talk (Who)
092 Love Reign O'er Me (Who)
093 talk (Who)
094 Won't Get Fooled Again (Who)
095 talk (Billy Connolly)
096 I'm Still Standing (Elton John)
097 Bennie and the Jets (Elton John)
098 Rocket Man (Elton John)
099 talk (Elton John)
100 Don't Go Breaking My Heart (Elton John & Kiki Dee)
101 talk (Elton John & George Michael)
102 Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me (Elton John & George Michael)
103 Can I Get a Witness (Elton John)
104 talk (John Hurt)
105 Is This the World We Created [Edit] (Freddie Mercury & Brian May)
106 Let It Be (Paul McCartney)
107 Do They Know It's Christmas (Band Aid)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15749031/LveAidJFKStdiumLondnPA__7-13-1985_Part5.zip.html

There were three main acts in this portion of the concert, so I included photos of those three: Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend (jumping) of the Who are in the top left, Elton John is in the top right, and Paul McCartney is in the bottom left. That left one more spot. I considered a photo of Freddie Mercury and Brian May, since they performed a song too. However, I saw a photo from the finale of "Do They Know It's Christmas" that showed Bono, Paul McCartney, and Freddie Mercury all singing into the same microphone. I thought that was so cool that I had to include it.