Live Aid: The Definitive 40 Year Story
$47.98
- Paperback
590 pages
- Release Date
15 September 2026
Summary
A Classic Pop Music Book of the Year
FEATURING A FOREWORD BY BOB GELDOF
The authoritative, official inside story of 40 years of Live Aid, from Band Aid to today.
In 1985, with £100+ million in his back pocket from Live Aid – the greatest rock concert the world had ever seen – Bob Geldof took a trip across Africa to decide how to spend the money he had raised for the Ethiopian famine. He asked Paul Vallely to g…
Book Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781917923422 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10: | 1917923422 |
| Author: | Paul Vallely |
| Publisher: | Putman Publishing |
| Imprint: | New Modern |
| Format: | Paperback |
| Number of Pages: | 590 |
| Release Date: | 15 September 2026 |
| Weight: | 502g |
| Dimensions: | 10mm x 129mm x 198mm |
Paul Vallely
Paul Vallely was covering the 1984–85 famine in Ethiopia for The Times when he and Bob Geldof first met. Inspired by his on the ground reporting, Geldof asked him to travel across Africa with him in 1985 to decide how to spend the £140 million raised by Live Aid.
He co-wrote Bob’s bestselling autobiography Is That It and wrote a number of publications on Live Aid and Live 8 for the Band Aid Trust. In 1990, he wrote a pioneering study Bad Samaritans: First World Ethics and Third World Debt, which set Geldof and Bono on the charity-to-justice journey from Live Aid to Live 8.
He also worked as Geldof’s adviser on the Commission for Africa, which laid the groundwork for the Gleneagles G8 to lobby world leaders to double aid to Africa and cancel its debts. He wrote the Penguin edition of the Commission for Africa report and was co-author of its full report, Our Common Interest.
He was chair of two international development agencies, Traidcraft and the Catholic Institute for International Relations and is a senior research fellow at the Global Development Institute, University of Manchester.
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