‘Even if you tried to ignore it, it became a touchstone’

Live Aid took place 40 years ago this weekend and RM Clark meets the people who were there, or could hear it, and those who avoided it - all agree, it was an era-defining global event

- RM Clark

Forty years ago this weekend, two concurrent concerts were held in London and Philadelphia in aid of relieving a brutal famine that had taken hold of Ethiopia. The legend of Live Aid has grown exponentially ever since. But each retelling draws upon the same familiar names and faces, the cameras trained on the contemporary darlings of Geldof and Collins, Freddie and Diana.

The many millions who watched on from home are treated as a matter of scale, not depth. They are remembered as an amorphous blob of common opinion, a simplified version of the public that in reality can never exist. And yet four decades from the event itself, each individual person retains their own individual memory, full of colour and life and utterly unique to themselves.

Peter Collins was one of the lucky ones. He grew up in Belfast, playing in bands and exploring the punk scene, a devoted reader of Melody Maker and the NME. Early in the morning on 13 July 1985, he and his schoolmate Alan headed for Belfast City Airport, bound for Heathrow, then London and Wembley. Already, he had a hunch that it was a day that he’d be talking about for years to come.

Forty years later, he still remembers almost every detail. There was the young boy in the crowd who waited all day for David Bowie, only to suffer an epileptic fit at the very moment he took to the stage; the people with picnic blankets and baskets; the tray of room service sandwiches delivered up to their hotel room later that night. In fact, the only thing missing from Peter’s memory is the music.

“We were going to it not because of how good the bands would be,” he explains. “We were going to it because it felt like that was going to be the thing that was happening on that day, the thing that everybody in the world was going to be aware of.”