Special thanks to ThisDayinMusic.com
On June 14, 1986, just under a year after giving the world one of the most stunning charity shows in rock history, Live Aid’s Bob Geldof was named in The Queen’s Birthday Honors List. The Irishman received an honorary Knighthood in recognition of his humanitarian activities.
It was an honorary knighthood, not because pop upstarts don’t merit the full award, but because Geldof is Irish and a full knighthood is only given to citizens of the Commonwealth. Recipients like Geldof are allowed to use the letters KBE (Knight of the British Empire) but cannot use the title, Sir.
Why was Geldof, an ex-pop star in the mid ‘80s, so honored? The answer is simple. The man’s heart and belief, his stubbornness and cunning, and (crucially) his pop star past allowed him to prove on a massive scale that humanity does indeed care and that rock and roll can still change the world.
Geldof left Ireland after college and worked as a music journalist in Canada before punk inspired him make his own music with the band, The Boomtown Rats. The Rats, more melodic and mainstream than many of their punk contemporaries, scored two #1 hits, “Rat Trap” and “I Don’t Like Mondays,” as well as a slew of top ten hits. Geldof was a sizeable pop star, especially in the U.K., until the mid ‘80s, when the band’s demise was in full swing.
Settling into life as an ex-pop star, Geldof was watching the TV news one night at the end of 1984. Shaken to his core by the suffering in Ethiopia, he went into action. As he recalled to Mojo’s Danny Ecclestone: “So I thought, ‘What can I do?’ I have a platform. I can write tunes but the Rats are not having hits. It's embarrassing - if I write a tune and the Rats do it, it'll look like we're trying to exploit the situation. Meanwhile [his then wife] Paula [Yates] bumps into [Ultravox singer] Midge [Ure] on [TV music show] The Tube - he's having hits. So we decide to write a song together. In the taxi over to see my mate I write the words to “Do They Know It's Christmas” and the chords: the basic C, F, G thing. Then of course it was clear I had to gather some people together. Through The Tube we'd got to be mates with Duran [Duran], so I rang [Simon] Le Bon. I saw [Spandau Ballet guitarist] Gary Kemp in an antiques shop at the end of the King's Road. Sting shares my birthday. Called Sting. So by lunchtime I had a band and most of the words.
Then there was this little kid who came to see the Rats in Dublin - he turned out to be Bono.”
Geldof kicked off the Band Aid charity with the all-star Christmas hit “Do They Know It's Christmas" and raised some $8 million for famine relief in Africa. Aware that a single was not enough, he badgered top U.K. promoter Harvey Goldsmith into helping him put on the biggest, most ambitious pop concert ever staged. Live Aid, with its dual concerts in London and Philadelphia, raised over $48 million.
Looking back on his motives, and where the spark to attempt such a project came from, Geldof recognizes that he always believed in rock and roll as a means to change, telling Mojo: “I go back to when I was 11. I wasn't interested in sports. The personal conditions of my life were awful. And into this non-world comes rock'n'roll, this liberated racket, which completely defines and articulates what I was thinking. A couple of years later I started an anti-apartheid thing with my mate Mick Foley. I was 13. I was reading Steinbeck, Studs Terkel, Woody Guthrie - so I was led to poverty by popular culture in a way. At 15 I couldn't be arsed going home, so I wandered around Dublin all night with a crowd called the Simon Community, making soup and serving it to homeless people and hookers. That was me. So when you get to Live Aid it's not that mad that I would reach for the one thing that I could always rely on - rock'n'roll.”
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