Gig that brought the bands — and the world — together

Paul McCartney played with Bono and Pink Floyd reunited. Mark Beaumont recalls dream lineups and backstage antics, with the help of Razorlight and UB40, 20 years after Live 8

- Mark Beaumont

Live Aid lied to us. It would be 20 years from that legendary transatlantic charity knees-up before an all-star Bob Geldof production would rock all over the world.

That happening - minus Status Quo themselves, who had opened Live Aid in 1985 with an iconic “Rockin’ All Over the World” but had other commitments this time - would be its follow-up, Live 8: a global cavalcade of major A-list concerts staged 20 years ago this week in Philadelphia, Edinburgh, Berlin, Moscow, Rome, Ontario, Paris, Johannesburg, Cornwall, Chiba in Japan and the concept’s hub in London’s Hyde Park. The event may not have the historic significance of its 1985 predecessor, with its table-thumping primetime swearing, its Freddie Mercury and its £100m raised for famine relief. But Live 8’s numbers far surpassed it.

Fifty thousand people watched the London show on screens outside Hyde Park, 150,000 inside the venue. Around a million flocked to the Rocky steps on Benjamin Franklin Parkway for the Philadelphia concert and - via 182 television networks worldwide - anywhere between 30 million and 2 billion people are estimated to have watched the shows. If the latter figure is anywhere near correct, that means more people saw Peter Doherty, chewing on a lighter and struggling to control a very wobbly military hat, slur his way through T Rex’s “Children of the Revolution” with Elton John than originally watched Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon.