July 14, 2025

— A worker in a hotel in Montreal ...

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Feed the World

On October 23, 1984, the BBC aired footage from Ethiopia: starving children with distended stomachs, mothers too weak to cry, rows of bodies covered with cloth. A famine, the worst in a century, was killing thousands every day.

The segment aired during the early evening news in the UK. Most people watched in horror, some donated, and some, after a while, turned the page.

Bob Geldof couldn't do that.

Bob was no politician or diplomat. He wasn't even a household name in most places outside of Britain. But he was angry, and that was enough to start something.

"I couldn't believe what I was seeing," Geldof said later. "I couldn't forget it. I didn't want to forget it."

Geldof had grown up in Dublin, raised mostly by his father after losing his mother to a brain hemorrhage at age six. He wasn't especially religious or ideological, but he was loud, charismatic, and relentless. As the frontman of The Boomtown Rats, he'd spent the late '70s and early '80s sneering at politics through punk-tinged pop.

But this wasn't a song. This was real, and it felt unacceptable to him that the music world would just go on as usual.

So he picked up the phone and started calling everyone he knew who might be able to help with a crazy idea or two.

First came "Do They Know It's Christmas?"—a charity single Geldof co-wrote with Midge Ure of Ultravox, recorded in a single chaotic day by the biggest British and Irish pop acts of the day: Sting, Bono, George Michael, Boy George, Phil Collins.

The record hit #1 and stayed there. The proceeds went to famine relief.

The song also inspired Harry Belafonte to create an American equivalent: "We Are the World," which became one of the best-selling singles in history.

On July 13, 1985—40 years ago yesterday—Geldof's wildest, most audacious idea came to life.

This was Live Aid, a 16-hour concert broadcast live to over 1.5 billion people in 150 countries, held simultaneously in Wembley Stadium in London and JFK Stadium in Philadelphia.

Never before had so many people watched the same thing at the same time. Never had so many of the world's biggest acts—Queen, U2, Madonna, Elton John, David Bowie, Led Zeppelin—appeared not for money or fame (Geldof convinced them all to appear for free), but for something entirely outside themselves.

In that moment, music didn't just entertain. It moved people, raised awareness, and raised $127 million for famine relief—and sparked the creation of the Band Aid Charitable Trust, which still funds international development programs today.

In the years that followed, the story got more complicated. Some of the aid was misdirected. Some went to corrupt governments. Geldof was accused of "white saviorism." Critics accused his team of acting without enough oversight. Geldof himself admitted later that some of the results were disappointing.

Still, he stood by it.

"I don't care what anyone says," he reflected decades later. "We tried. We did something. That's more than most people can say."

He didn't regret raising the money but regretted not demanding more control over how it was spent. He wasn't a logistics expert or trained for the politics of food distribution in war-torn regions. But the urgency of the suffering had been enough to make him act.

That was always the core of it—not the fame, not the show, but the moral jolt of seeing something unbearable and choosing not to look away.

Live Aid didn't end global hunger or change the systems that enabled it. But it proved something that's easy to forget: collective action, even if imperfect, is still powerful. It showed that millions of people, unified by empathy and art, could do something vast and meaningful.

And it showed what can happen when one loud, stubborn, outraged man decides that this, right here, right now, is his problem.

That's what made Bob Geldof a global force that day—not his music, but his refusal to accept that suffering was someone else's business.

Last night, as I was putting the finishing touches on today's newsletter, I came across a New York Times interview with Geldof asking how people remembered Live Aid today. Last November, he was staying at a posh hotel in Montreal when an Ethiopian room service worker asked to shake his hand.

The man stood bolt upright and made a speech: he didn't know who his parents were, had been raised on Band Aid food in a Band Aid orphanage, studied catering in Paris, and was now working in Canada. He showed Geldof pictures of his Ethiopian wife and two children.

Then he suddenly rushed at Geldof and hugged him, laying his head on his chest: "Thank you for my sons, thank you for my life."

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Did you see ...

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