Live Aid at 40: Dubai's crucial role in 'the greatest show on Earth'

Gift of £1m from emirate's ruling family - dramatically announced on TV by organiser Bob Geldof - helped trigger avalanche of donations for Ethiopia famine appeal

7pm, 13 July, 1985: Wembley Stadium

A video of two of the world’s biggest rock stars, David Bowie and Mick Jagger, is playing on the big screen at Live Aid, the hastily put-together charity concert to raise money to ease the famine in Ethiopia.

While the song Dancing in the Street is playing to the Wembley crowd, concert organiser Bob Geldof – growing increasingly frustrated that donations are not coming in fast enough – is about to go on TV to appeal, to plead, to demand the audience put their hands in their pockets and “give me your money”.

That request made 40 years ago this weekend has gone down in TV history, even if slightly misremembered for the profanities he went on to use. However, it began with Geldof relaying a conversation he had just had that shows the remarkable part played by the UAE in one of the most important music and charitable events of the 20th century, which came to be called the "Greatest Show on Earth".

There are people dying now, so give me the money

Bob Geldof,
Live Aid organiser

After the song finishes, the BBC coverage reverts to the on-site TV studio, where presenter David Hepworth sits next to the notoriously dishevelled Geldof, who is perched on the edge of a cramped sofa flanked by his wife Paula Yates, comedian Billy Connolly and singer Ian Astbury, who is smoking a cigarette.

“Now Bob, you’ve just taken a rather special telephone call about 10 minutes ago,” says Hepworth.

Geldof, his hands fidgeting furiously, moves a cigarette packet covering his notes and replies that he has just spoken to the Dubai Government “who have just given us a million pounds”.

“So, thank you to the Dubai Government and the Al Maktoum family,” he says.

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  British pop acts including George Michael, Bono, Paul McCartney, Freddie Mercury and David Bowie gather on stage for the finale of the Live Aid concert at Wembley Stadium in London, on July 13, 1985. Getty Images

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  The huge crowd at Wembley Stadium. Getty Images

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  Freddie Mercury leads his band Queen on stage at Wembley, in a set that was later faithfully recreated in the film Bohemian Rhapsody. Getty Images

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  Former Beatle Paul McCartney salutes the audience. Getty Images

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  Princess Diana and Prince Charles arrive for the start of the concert. Getty Images

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  The finale of the Live Aid concert in London. All of the stars joined together on stage to sing 'Do They Know It's Christmas?' Getty Images

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  Madonna performs in the Live Aid concert at the John F Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia, which took place simultaneously with the London concert. Getty Images

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  Mick Jagger and Tina Turner sing together. Getty Images

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  David Bowie performs. Getty Images

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  Led Zeppelin bandmates, singer Robert Plant, left, and guitarist Jimmy Page, perform in Philadelphia. AP

Give us the money

Geldof goes on to say that the Dancing in the Street video was recorded with the intention that the profits would go to charity. “The other thing is that Mick and Dave did that video specifically so that you could give something, and it’s not happening enough. You know, you’ve gotta get on the phone and take the money out of your pocket. Don’t go to the pub tonight. Please stay in and give us the money.”

Slapping his hand on the coffee table in front of him, he says: “There are people dying now, so give me the money!”

He went on to argue with Hepworth about whether the address for sending donations should be given out or the phone numbers, swearing in the process.

Writing in the book Remembering Live Aid, author Andrew Wild says: “Had he delivered this jumble of words at 7.05 on any other evening, he’d have been hauled off air with a shepherd’s crook … but this was the tipping point. The tide turned ... and from that moment, the floodgates opened and the money came pouring in.”

Geldof was so grateful for the intervention that he has performed in Dubai several times since at annual St Patrick's Day parties.

The £1 million from Dubai was the largest single donation made not only during the marathon internationally televised concert – and its partner show in the US city of Philadelphia – but the largest donation among the estimated £30 million raised within the next few weeks. About £150 million has been raised by the charity since.

Hepworth told The National he was so wrapped up in the television presentation side of things on the day that he "couldn't speak with any authority" on how the donation happened.

A Dubai Media Office spokesman confirmed the donation to The National, so how did it come about?

Foreign Office inquiry

A letter from the archives, written 10 days after the concert, sheds some light on the situation.

Written by Peter Ricketts, private secretary to then UK foreign secretary Geoffrey Howe, to Charles Powell, private secretary to prime minister Margaret Thatcher, it is titled “Live Aid: Donation by the Dubai Ruling Family”.

A letter describing a donation to Live Aid by Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid in 1985

Following a request from the prime minister, Mr Ricketts had the job of finding out more about the circumstances surrounding the donation, so had spoken to Geldof’s office and UK diplomats in Abu Dhabi and Dubai.

He writes: “I gather that Live Aid and its mission had piqued the interest of Minister of Defence, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum. Over recent years, he has been deeply involved in relief efforts in Ethiopia and across the Horn. I gather he has been at the controls of an aid aircraft himself.

“Over the course of July 13 [1985], a television in his Majlis was showing the concert. As Geldof began to signal that fundraising was not going well, Sheikh Mohammed ordered his office in London to reach out with an offer of £1 million.”

The offer seemed too good to be true. Ricketts, who went on to become UK ambassador to France, chairman of the joint intelligence committee under Tony Blair, national security adviser under David Cameron, and who now sits in the House of Lords, adds: “Backstage at Wembley, when he received a call informing him about this, Geldof initially thought it a prank and put down the receiver. It took over an hour, amid the understandable melee of that day, before the legitimacy of the offer was fully established. He has since stated that it provided desperately needed impetus for what went on to be a record-breaking fundraising effort.”

Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid (light-coloured suit) is among the spectators in the royal enclosure at Royal Ascot in Berkshire, UK, a month before Live Aid in 1985. Getty Images

Diplomatic post

The donation may have made Geldof suspicious, but it was entirely in keeping with the generosity of the UAE’s leading figures, according to Sir Harold "Hooky" Walker, who was the UK ambassador to the UAE at the time.

Now 93, he told The National it was actually quite typical of the country’s rulers to show their generosity for good causes and overseas aid in particular.

Sir Harold ‘Hooky’ Walker, former UK ambassador to UAE and Ethiopia. Paul Carey / The National

After his five-year term as ambassador ended in 1986, Sir Harold was posted to Ethiopia just as it was beginning to recover through the Herculean efforts of Live Aid and humanitarian agencies.

He saw firsthand how the money had benefited the country torn apart by the famine, which some say claimed the lives of up to one million people.

He met Geldof when the Irishman, who was given an honorary knighthood for his fundraising efforts, visited the country.

Expectations were not high. “I'm ashamed to say that I had assumed that he would be a very well-meaning and effective fundraiser, but that he wouldn't know much about the complications of the aid process. I confess that I was quite wrong. He was extremely well-informed and I was really impressed by that.”

He recognises that a key decision made by Geldof and his colleagues at Band Aid, the overarching charity behind Live Aid, was to remain a fundraiser, and leave aid delivery to experts such as Oxfam.

When Sir Harold first arrived in Addis Ababa, a second drought threatened to cause another famine. This time, though, authorities and agencies were better prepared.

“The international community had learnt some lessons and they stopped that drought becoming another famine by a huge operation of importing and distributing grain, masterminded by the UN development programme," he said.

“The Ethiopian government was a nasty, Stalinist government, and my political relations with them were nil. But they had an organisation called the Relief and Rehabilitation Commission, which was to a degree approachable and efficient.

“Most of the work I did was aid-related rather than political. We were in the aid business, a sleeves-rolled-up kind of role.”

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  Children at a feeding centre in Korem, in Tigray region, northern Ethiopia, in 1984. All photos: Getty Images

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  A child suffering from severe malnutrition as a result of food shortages caused by civil war in Ethiopia, in 1984

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  Ethiopians walk away from a relief centre, after receiving food aid, in 1988

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  Journalists at Korem refugee relief camp in 1984

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  A nurse hands out supplies at a camp in Bati, northern Ethopia

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  Food and medicine donated by UK newspaper The Mirror, at Korem

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  A man suffering from the famine in Korem, in 1984

Aid drops

He recalls the difficulties of travelling to certain areas of the country to get access to the camps and villages where the government had made people assemble.

Air drops were made by Britain's Royal Air Force, pushing pallets of aid out of the back of a plane to reach their target. He was particularly impressed by the Belgian air force, which developed a technique of opening the rear doors then “upending” the plane so the deliveries simply slid out.

As a seasoned diplomat, he was able to ensure that emotions did not get the better of him despite the harrowing situation.

“If you're a diplomat being posted every few years, you have to be able to deal with all sorts and conditions of people and countries. You can't allow yourself to be swept up by the emotion of the particular country you're in,” he said. He also acknowledges the privileged and pleasant conditions in which he was operating, living at the British embassy's 35-hectare compound, which even featured a nine-hole golf course.

But what he witnessed has stayed with him. “For years after I got back to Britain, I felt a kind of guilt going into a supermarket, wondering why we need these prawns from Thailand, when I’d been living in a country where they have difficulty getting two bits of bread together.”

Forty years on, his time in “the beautiful country” remains one of the proudest moments of his career.

“The job was so fulfilling, I wasn’t just doing the diplomatic haggle,” he said. “We could say afterwards that we had saved six and a half, seven million lives by this huge operation."