Bob Geldof

Bob Geldof’s historical Live Aid organizing work connected concerts at Wembley Stadium in London and JFK Stadium in Philadelphia on July 13, 1985 with televised fundraising for famine relief in Ethiopia. The National Library of Ireland’s anniversary archive release describes him as spearheading the event and identifies the Band Aid Trust as donor of its photographic holdings. This profile concerns that dated organizing record, not a claim of current employment, ownership of either stadium or sole authorship of every part of the concerts.

The library’s exhibition describes two simultaneous concerts through images and stories from the Band Aid Trust Archive. That documentary format matters to concert history: a photograph records a particular scene, while an archive description establishes custody and event context. Neither alone is an audited account of ticket receipts, production expenses or the destination of every donation. A two-site televised benefit also has a different admission and financing structure from a single promoter’s ticketed touring show. Its historical significance here is the organization of concert and broadcast activity around a stated charitable purpose, not a speculative revenue or influence ranking.

The Old Vic’s November 24, 2023 historical feature describes the short planning period and the separate London and Philadelphia performances. It is a retrospective theatre feature rather than an original settlement record. Read alongside the National Library’s institutional archive account, it supports a dated benefit-concert history without establishing a current office, personal wealth or the detailed allocation of organizational responsibilities. Collaborator roles are not reconstructed from reputation or unsourced credits in this record. The portrait shows Geldof at the One Young World conference in Dublin on October 16, 2014, photographed by Stefan Schäfer, Lich; it is not an image of Live Aid in 1985. Its retrieved original and the cropped monochrome derivative retain CC BY-SA 4.0 attribution and license. Related free-performance institutional history and the live-music undercount methodology concern other financing and access models, not an inferred partnership.