LIVE AND DANGEROUS

On a summer's day in 1985, some of the biggest names in rock and pop came together to perform at the USA leg of Live Aid. Despite the flood of goodwill and camaraderie, the lead-up to the event wasn't without some clashes of the titans.

- Mick Wall

Agroggy 9am on Saturday, July 13, 1985. The JFK Stadium in Philadelphia. It's the morning of Live Aid, the global charity event arranged hastily by Boomtown Rats singer Bob Geldof after an epiphany watching TV reports of famine in Ethiopia - now regarded as the defining musical moment of the 1980s.

The foundational Live Aid show at Wembley Stadium had begun two hours before - midday UK time - with Status Quo doing their cheeky-chappie version of Rockin' All Over The World. "I'd done a gram of coke and half a bottle of tequila before we even went on stage," Francis Rossi later told me.

In Philadelphia the earlier morning start is far more sedate, respectful - and corny. Officially, the JFK holds 102,000 people, and it is already nearly full. Clad in black from sunglasses to shoes, 48-year-old actor Jack Nicholson, the show's headline host, wanders on stage all Hollywood howdy-doody, just as the TV announcer intones solemnly: "You know, in the next sixty seconds twenty-eight people are going to die of hunger. Twenty-one of them are going to be children..."

Reading from hand-held notes, Nicholson delivers his rehearsed burble: "...a privilege... proud... international family of artists...", describing the show as "the Live Aid Concert for African Family Relief".

"I didn't know it was family relief," says one backstage onlooker.

"He said 'famine'," hisses another.

The multi-Oscar-winning greatest movie star in the world fumbles his lines again as he introduces the opening act, Joan Baez: "A woman who's always been heard... when a just... when... whose voice has always been heard... when a just cause needed her song..."

"Definitely 'family'," someone says.