One day to change the world?

40 years on, can Live Aid reckon with its legacy via the medium of musical theatre?

The cast of Just for One Day. Photo: Evan Zimmerman

I was six when Live Aid made broadcast and music history, streaming via satellite from two continents to raise, on the day, somewhere between £40-50m to fight the famine in Ethiopia.

What I’ve seen

Even so, I still clearly remember the horrific images that were shown on TV, of tiny children with flies crawling on their faces, skin drawing back from their little teeth as starvation withered them.

It made a huge impression on me, even then, and it was the initial impetus for Bob Geldof to firstly create Band Aid and the charity Christmas single Do They Know It's Christmas? and then embark on the insane enterprise of Live Aid, a cross-continental concert featuring most of the Western world’s biggest (mostly male, mostly white) pop acts.

Just for One Day, John O’Farrell’s new musical now playing at the Shaftesbury Theatre and booking to January 10, tells the story of how it happened. They don’t make use of those images (which would be deeply crass at this point), or indeed of any original photography or footage of the recording or concerts, on the big wraparound screen that makes up the simple backdrop.

Only a couple of the celebs are represented as actual characters – Geldof, of course, played with slovenly, coiled energy by Craig Els, and Midge Ure, lead singer of Ultravox, who wrote the melody and produced the single (he’s played by George Ure, who is rather good, and not related, apparently, though the resemblance is quite surprising). Julie Atherton has great fun doing a comedy turn as Margaret Thatcher. Her rendition of I’m Still Standing is very funny.

The story is told instead via the rather clunky conceit of a mother, Suzanne (Melissa Jacques), trying to explain to her daughter, Jemma (Fayth Ifil) why it mattered so much, assisted in the telling by a sort of ghostly Geldof (don’t think too much about it, it doesn’t actually make sense).

The point I think is to allow a Gen Zer to make a few necessary observations about a bunch of rich white dudes taking a charitable day off from snorting cocaine, and people describing Africa as if it were one country. The words “white saviour” are never uttered, presumably because of Geldof, who had the power of veto over the entire show. The charismatic, all-singing, all-dancing cast play multiple roles.

Look, it’s fine, fun even. Suzanne’s story, of getting together with her first love at the biggest concert the world had ever seen (her younger self is played by Hope Kenna, who looks plausibly like a teenage Jacques) is quite sweet.

But really this is all just window dressing for a jukebox musical of massive Eighties bangers wrapped up in nostalgia for a great gig, and that’s mostly why people are there. In the interval I saw a mother showing her daughter pictures of the crowds at the time, and overheard a couple discussing whether or not Bob Geldof had in fact gone to Downing Street. There was a guy a few rows back wearing a Band Aid T-shirt that said on the back, “I was there” and was definitely significantly tighter than it was when he first bought it. Everyone was loving it.

The music is excellent, skilfully arranged by Matthew Brind (though you rarely get a whole song) and the singing is great. I’d forgotten about Dancing With Tears in My Eyes by Ultravox. It’s now stuck in my head (along with, inevitably, Vienna).

The onstage band, led by Patrick Hurley, is fantastic, and Freddie Love, who does the Freddie Mercury Live Aid performance in the second half, completely steals the show with their astonishing vocal range and charisma. I have no idea why this performer is not better known, someone needs to snap them up as a band frontperson immediately.