Bob Geldof: Live Aid creator calls Trump, Vance, Musk ‘thugs’ at 40-year concert anniversary

Irish pop singer Bob Geldof says his smash hit 1980s global charity concert Live Aid, which raised tens of millions for starving Ethiopians, could not be staged today.

The Boomtown Rats frontman referred to US President Donald Trump, Vice-President JD Vance and Tesla boss Elon Musk as “thugs” as he railed against the “death of kindness” in modern society.

Geldof made the the comments at a special performance of Just For One Day, a musical that tells the story of the Band Aid hit Do They Know It’s Christmas and the creation of the 1985 Live Aid concert, which has raised £140 million (AU$287 million) over the last 38 years.

Praising the writer John O’Farrell for telescoping the “madness and panic” of how the concert was produced, Geldolf said what it captured made him “panicked and sad”.

“That the society that was, as exemplified by the younger people and the cast in 1985, has been almost reproduced with those thugs like Trump, and Vance and Musk and this new death of kindness,” he said to applause.

“I’m constantly asked why not do a Live Aid for Palestine and stop the horror”, he said, referring to Israel’s bombardment of the Gaza Strip, which has led to tens of thousands of Palestinian deaths, with human rights groups accusing Israel of using starvation as a weapon of war.

The the International Criminal Court has issued warrants for Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s arrest citing the starvation in Gaza.

Geldof spoke about pop music once serving as a societal conscience, but added this had changed.

“Pop music back then was the spine of society, defined what we could articulate, what we were and where we should go,” he said.

“That’s been sublimated by social media these days, so a concert wouldn’t work.

“But the point about a concert is that you need to posit an end that’s achievable.

“The end to Palestine, my answer always is, what is the two-state solution.

“The end to Palestine is to just f...ing stop killing people.

“Pop music can’t do that, that demands proper politics but unfortunately, the bravery of that simply isn’t around now, so we just have to imagine those other times when you could tilt the world a little on its axis.”

Live Aid was held on July 13 in 1985 at Wembley Stadium in London and the now-demolished John F. Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia in the United States.

It sparked link-up events in other countries, including Australia, Japan, the Soviet Union and West Germany and was estimated to have been watched by 40 per cent of the world’s population.

It raised £40 million (AU$82 million) on the day, which is calculated to be worth around £150 million (AU$308 million) in today’s terms.

Geldolf was inspired to raise funds for the famine in Ethiopia after watching a landmark television report by BBC journalist Michael Buerk.

Mr Buerk said Live Aid had never been replicated and attributed it to Geldof’s ability to fuse the “sympathies and intentions” of the first world with the suffering of the third world.

“You just gave us the feeling that individually we could do something about it,” Mr Buerk said.

“It never happened before, and it’s never really happened since and I’m not sure exactly why that is.”

Buerk confessed to feeling “very ambiguous” about having built a global reputation from his reporting on the suffering of others.

Geldolf was particularly traumatised by seeing British nurse Claire Bertschinger having to choose which starving children would live and die.

She recalled having only 70 feeding allocations for 1000 starving children lined up.

“They all had just skin dripping off their bones, no muscle, no fat,” Ms Bertschinger said.

“We took the ones that had the spark of life in their eyes because the ones that were worst, we knew they would die within two or three days, if not sooner.

“Turning them away was terrible and that’s something I will hold aways and never forget.”

Midge Ure, Geldof’s creative partner and co-writer of Do They Know It’s Christmas said the purpose of creating the musical about putting together Live Aid was about inspiring new movements.

“You are the next generation, we are trying to hand on the baton,” Ure said.