On This Day – July 13th

The Live Aid concert was held on 13th July 1985. The event was organised by Bob Geldof and Midge Ure to raise funds for relief of the ongoing Ethiopian famine. Billed as the "global jukebox", the event was held simultaneously at Wembley Stadium in London, England, United Kingdom (attended by 72,000 people) and John F. Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States (attended by about 100,000 people).

On the same day, concerts inspired by the initiative happened in other countries, such as the Soviet Union, Canada, Japan, Yugoslavia, Austria, Australia and West Germany. It was one of the largest-scale satellite link-ups and television broadcasts of all time; an estimated global audience of 1.9 billion, across 150 nations, watched the live broadcast. This was almost two-fifths of the global population at the time!

The event was a follow-on from the charity single "Do They Know its Christmas?" also created by Geldof and Ure, a hit single that spent 5 weeks as number one in the UK. As the original project for raising money to stop famine in Ethiopia, the song raised £8,000,000 – significantly more that the £70 000 that had been anticipated.

Queen's performance during the event has been voted – by more than 60 artists, journalists and music industry executives – the greatest live performance in the history of rock. Queen's lead singer Freddie Mercury at times led the crowd in unison refrains, and his sustained note during the a cappella section came to be known as "The Note Heard Round the World". (Ed: I was there, and whilst Queen were indeed very good, I preferred Bowie...)

Each of the two concert venues finished their shows with each of their particular continental all-star anti-hunger anthems, with Band Aid's "Do They Know It's Christmas?" closing the UK concert, and USA for Africa's "We Are the World" closing the US concert (and thus the entire event itself).

What song, though, and performed by whom, was the last main number performed at Wembley on the evening of July 13th?

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