We lived in a little village in Norfolk, and were being visited by my paternal grandparents (Nana Freda is still with us, and gets the occasional mention on this blog). Grandad Eddie was into pop music, and would bring blank cassettes with him to tape our records, (perhaps the most 1980s sentence ever written). On the day of Live Aid, he taped the Radio 1 simulcast*, as my parents videoed the television footage**.
*I still have one of the cassettes, but I don't think it still has the Live Aid radio footage, as I might have recorded over it. It does still have 'Live Aid' written on the sticker though.
**My parents had every bit of the UK concert on video, on short play, with all the tapes labelled 'Live Aid 1' and so on. It is a huge pity that those tapes no longer exist, (video tapes were expensive and to use a big amount for a rock and pop concert was an extravagance we could do without. This is a similar error to the many made by the BBC; Dad's Army, Doctor Who, Top Of The Pops, Not Only...But Also and a great deal more all victims of 'wiping').
Given that there was never a television repeat of the event, (Geldof originally didn't even want it recording and archiving), all I remember is watching a historical occasion with my grandad. For some reason, I can only picture my grandad in this memory and assume the rest of my family were around somewhere. It was a weekend so nobody was at work, my mum didn't work and had a four month old baby, a seven year old and me, a nine year old to look after, my Nana wouldn't have gone out alone, and my dad was probably outside building a car, (he was into kit-cars at the time, in fact he can't have been doing that, as my grandad would have been out there with him). When the film of my life is made, the director will save a fortune on cast members for the 'watching Live Aid scene', if he follows my memory and just puts me and my grandad there.
Although I remember a scattering of the London concert, without the benefit of repeat showings, (and the DVD came out in 2004, when nobody had been anywhere near YouTube), there were details that I had trouble with.
It is common knowledge that Queen did a blinding set, they rehearsed for weeks in advance, knowing that this could be their rehabilitation into the public good books for performing in South Africa. But I had a problem with the fact that they supposedly sang 'Bohemian Rhapsody', in daylight. Queen famously never performed the operatic middle section live, it was always a recording played to a light show with the band returning to the stage for what I'll call 'the headbanging bit'. Again it would be 2004 when I finally saw quite an obvious solution to the problem.
I bought my dad the DVD for Christmas in 2004, and we sat round on Christmas Day afternoon watching it. I was staying at my dad's with Emily as my marriage was on the skids, my brother Jack was there and I think that's everyone. We were in my dad's new flat, for the first Christmas after my parents split up. The viewing of Live Aid was an occasion as exciting as Christmas itself.
Obviously Queen rocked, although in my opinion David Bowie did a better set, The Who phoned in their performance, and the DVD technicians had restored Paul McCartney's lost vocal on 'Let It Be', (the microphone failed on the original show, which I remember from 1985, although as I was nine I imagine I watched it on video the next day), but there was a lot of guff there that memorable day.
Our memory of Live Aid was far kinder than the actual event.
