From the archive: Sixties legends come to life again | Live Aid JFK Stadium review

MORE THAN 90,000 young people and a few who were a middle-aged or older packed John F. Kennedy Stadium, Philadelphia, for 14 hours on Saturday as rock singers and musicians, ranging from international names to relative unknowns, performed free for the starving of the world while much of America watched on television.

The day was oppressively hot and humid and a thunderstorm threatened at one point, but nothing could deflate the spirits of those who paid $35 each to be there and they stayed to the end. It was a once-in-a-lifetime festival of song and music, some explained, and the cause was good. It stirred the conscience as well as the emotions.

"Good morning, children of the Eighties," said Joan Baez, the folk singer whose protest singing stirred American youth a generation ago. "This is your Woodstock and it's long overdue." Then she sang the hymn Amazing Grace, but few in the stands joined in despite her encouragement.

Ms Baez was still there under the stars when another figure of the Sixties, Bob Dylan, sang his ballad, Blowin' in the Wind, as the audience joined him. Neil Young, a more recent guru of folk-rock, had written a song especially for the occasion; it referred in passing to the American hostages released recently from Beirut. Mick Jagger and Tina Turner strutted and sang together before joining Harry Belafonte and troops of artists and children for the mass singing of We are the World. Then everybody went home.

The most emotional act of the day was Philadelphia's native son, Teddy Prendergrass, singing his own composition Reach Out and Touch Somebody from a wheelchair, because of a car crash. He hushed the huge stadium with the words "Make this world a better place." He ended the song with tears streaming down his face, and the cameras caught many in the audience weeping.

Throughout the day the 60-foot-high video screens in the stadium carried inspirational messages from the likes of Bishop Desmond Tutu, Prime Ministers Rajiv Gandhi of India and Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, Senator Edward Kennedy, Geraldine Ferraro, Mrs Coretta Scott King and actors and actresses by the dozens.

Also carried to the Philadelphia audience were other segments of the global concert ‑ from the Soviet Union, West Germany, Yugoslavia, Austria, Holland and Australia, as well as the big acts at Wembley such as the reunion of The Who and Paul McCartney's finale singing Let It Be. This last song ran into the only major technical difficulty of the day when it appeared that his satellite microphone was closed, and there were several minutes of lip moving without sound until it was corrected.

Dressed in T-shirts, running shorts, sun caps and hats , the Philadelphia audience sang and swayed with the performers, raised their hands in unison for the cameras, carried banners and waved flags - the Stars and Strips predominated, there were some Canadian Maple Leafs and British Union Jacks but no Irish Tricolours.

The take at the end of the day is still being counted. The American share of the worldwide total is likely to be the largest since there is more money here than anywhere else.

Most of the American contribution came in pledges to a toll-free telephone line set up by the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, which said early in the day that its 1,126 circuits were swamped and it could not handle the traffic.

Because of the volume of telephone calls, a mailing address in San Francisco was broadcast on television and radio. The mass response for the victims of famine in Africa led to talk here of an annual Live-Aid concert to raise money so that Africa may overcome its drought problems by irrigation and the building of dams.

Jay Morris of the US Agency for International Development, said: "See what USA for Africa and Band Aid have done. Marrying the two and involving this new technology is a very fast but logical evolution. The key is keeping up the public awareness after a happening like this.”

The event was overshadowed in news reports by the President's operation and the handing over temporarily of his Constitutional powers to Vice-President George Bush. But the message of the day was "Send Money to the hungry world”.

–  First published, July 15^th, 1985