The Day That Music Changed The World. "Live Aid - Against All Odds"

Live Aid: Against All Odds (2011) 

Not Rated

Starring Bod Geldof, Midge Ure,

Produced by the BBC

The Story:

After the success of Do They Know It's Christmas, Bob Geldof decided that Band Aid should try something even more impressive. Live benefit concerts in July 1985, both in England and America and other locations round the world, and beam it to everyone else via satellite. It had never been done before, and most skeptics said it couldn't be done, period. But with some hard work, elbow grease, and outright lies, the greatest concert in music history did indeed happen.

This is their story.

This amazing documentary is available in 2 parts on YouTube. Each part is 90 minutes.

It keeps you grabbed from the minute you start watching until it's over.

Then you wish for a few more parts to the documentary.

So unless you were lucky enough to catch this on the BBC a few years back, you've likely never seen it.

The documentary does a great job of getting just about anyone and everyone who had something to do with Live Aid for the documentary, and they still manage to squeeze in enough of the performances to really bring back the memories.

So brazen was Geldof to get people to appear, he listed them as performing, oftentimes without even checking with those acts to see if they were willing and able to play.

Then he would lie to each band and say "well, they're in, so why aren't you?" and vice versa.

It's an incredible amount of chutzpah on Geldof's part, and it's an event that will never be duplicated again.

Then there was the American side of things where so many artists were pulling out because the American promoter was a giant POS that everyone hated. :)

Pair that with hosts that have an absolute disdain for the musicians that will be appearing, and it was a recipe for disaster.

Or at least if they do, it will probably roll off a lot smoother than this one did.

So go behind the scenes and see how they pulled this concert off and all the headaches and heartbreaking moments that went into the greatest concert of them all.

Final Grade: A