JULY 13, 1985... LIVE AID... HOW IT CHANGED MY LIFE
13/07/2025
There are days that you remember more than others. July 13th 1985 is one of those days. Live Aid. What a day!16 hours of rock music, your favourite bands. Wonderful. Then that the music is doing something, standing for something, changing something. And the sun shone.
I remember it all. At 12 o'clock when Status Quo roared us out of the gate with Rockin' All Over The World I was in Ballywillan Primary School setting up Portrush CSSM 1985. As the first guitars crashed we were putting a banner high on the school fence. Radio blasting. My cassette tape rolling to record every single minute.
At some stage late afternoon I headed home to Ballymena. I was preaching the next morning in Ballykeel Presbyterian Church and had the excuse to leave beach mission set up to go and prepare a sermon as I watched the music unfold on TV. Cassette still rolling. I remember rushing out for a take away while George Thorogood was on.
There was so much to love. U2. I knew they were good. Now the world did. Bono in the crowd. Bad going on forever. Dire Straits and Sting were wonderful. Elton John was all celebratory - Saturday Night’s Alright for saving the world. Bowie was at his Rebel Rebel best. Jagger joining him for the video Dancing In the Street.
I even enjoyed Queen a band I lost love for shortly after. I really loved Bohemian Rhapsody. The Who rocked it too. Phil Collins playing Wembley and New York on the same day. There was that video to The Cars' Drive and the cry of that little child.
I’ll always be frustrated about Paul McCartney’s faulty microphone and Dylan’s set in Philadelphia was shambolic but closing Wembley with Do They Know It’s Christmas was poignant, even on a hot July night! Emotional and inspirational.
Bed at 4am, after a very jittery Bob Dylan set, I cannot have been too fresh for a 10am preach.
40 years on and I am aware of the dichotomy of that day. There was CSSM and a sermon to prepare. There was constant rock music. I recorded 5 cassettes that I still have somewhere!
On that day 40 years ago, those two things didn't meet. They were probably in tension. The sacred and the secular. How dare I let Live Aid distract me from the holiness of mission and preaching?
Yet, as I look back at the four decades of my life that have followed, discipleship, ministry and mission, that day was a game changer. Bob Geldof was like some kind of secular saint who helped transform my worldview and inspire me to a life that for me has been the life in all its fulness that Jesus invites us to in John 10:10.
I remember at the time, with a huge FEED THE WORLD poster on my Union Theological College bedroom wall, thinking that Geldof must have been sent to embarrass the church for not responding to African famines. I mean the scruffy foul mouthed punk from Dublin who sang, "Don't give me love thy neighbour/Don't give me charity/Don't give me peace and love or the good Lord above/You only get in my way with your stupid ideas" fed the world! Those who actually believed in loving your neighbour?
Geldof touches on this in his memoir Is That It? when he suggests that God looked down, asking who was the least likely and knocked on his door.
Less than a year after Live Aid I was in my college room with that very Geldof biography and the Old Testament book of Amos in front of me. Live Aid and the Bible were not in tension. They blended. This wasn't something that my Northern Irish evangelical formation was teaching me. I grew up with a faith that was limited to vertical relationship and that dismissed the horizontal relationships around me as a "Social Gospel".
Thankfully something else was happening. In 1974 evangelicals had met at Lausanne and the Lausanne Movement was born, looking at how best to do world mission in a modern time. Looking back at the Conference, leading Christian thinker and writer John Stott sensed that the lack of social engagement among evangelicals in mission was the greatest heresy of the 20th century. His book, Issues Facing Christians Today sitting between Geldof's and Amos on my table, became powerfully influential.
It was like God was doing something and I got caught up in the winds of that change. The last 40 years have seen me building houses in Cape Town, partnering with a school in Arua, Uganda, dabbling in peace making in my native Belfast.
If I look back on my ministry just beginning as Live Aid took place 40 years ago, I think of the Kingdom of God contributions of my grace lavished life and without doubt it goes back to a playground in Portrush. I had no idea when Rossi and Parfitt cranked up Rocking All Over the World at Wembley Stadium how my status quo was going to be shaken to its core and how my world would be rocked by that very special day.
Live Aid. July 13th 1985. It changed my life!