SUPREME EYEBROW ARCH – ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
The Drama
It’s 2025 – a mere 40 years since Live Aid – and Jemma is leaving home to attend university. Her mother, Suzanne, has slipped the Live Aid picture book into her backpack. Just as something to help Jemma remember her mum.
But Jemma knows nothing about Live Aid. The event may live within Suzanne’s soul. She was there! But Jemma knows nothing of the good intentions which motivated a bunch of drug-addled musicians to try and do some good. Even if just for one day.
Thankfully, in this fictionalised world, a 1985-era Bob Geldof is on hand to explain to Jemma what it all meant. A denim-clad, foul-mouthed, scruffy Bob Geldof.
Soon, the audience is taken behind the scenes.
Geldof and the Boomtown Rats on the slide. That fabled BBC report from Korum, Ethiopia, in October 1984. A biblical famine. Now, in the 20th century. Geldof liaising with Ultravox’s Midge Ure to write a Christmas single for charity. Geldof lying, coercing and bludgeoning the pop stars of the day to record Do They Know It’s Christmas. Bob travelling to Ethiopia to give the public comfort that the funds raised by Band Aid are reaching the starving. Bob learning that much of the food funded by Band Aid is tied up at the port because a trucking cartel is profiteering from the need to get the food from the port to Korum. And Bob having another outrageous idea. A concert beamed worldwide to raise funds to break the trucking cartel and deliver more aid.
But this is not a documentary. The songs of the day – all sung at the Live Aid concerts – help tell the story. Everything from Heroes to Radio Ga Ga. From My Generation to Bohemian Rhapsody.
And, of course, Geldof belting out I Don’t Live Mondays has it’s time in the spotlight. The lesson today is how to die! And Bob Geldof stands still, his clenched right fist high in the air.
Perspective
Some may fear that Just For One Day is a one-sided ego-trip. It is not.
Geldof says, early in the first Act, that Live Aid belongs in history. He accepts criticism from Jemma that some of the lyrics to Do They Know It’s Christmas are problematic. Tonight, thank God it’s them instead of you? Yikes!
A nurse on the front line in Korum provides a thought-provoking counterpoint. A Christmas single and a rock concert to end world hunger? That’s just naïve.
And perhaps, in a concert to help Africa, maybe a few Africans might warrant some time on the Live Aid stage?
Just For One Day does not pretend that Live Aid was perfect. If anything, it’s bashful in its self-criticism.
But Just For One Day also captures the idealism of the time.
A group of people – pop stars – known more for their self-indulgent, bohemian lifestyles than for caring about dying children on another continent, coming together to try and make a difference. To do some good. To save even one life. And the youth of the world spending their pocket-money, or digging into their parents’ wallets, in support of a global movement. To Feed the World.
It may have been naïve. It may have been only partially effective. But the intention was good. They tried. And that, surely, is a worthy subject for a jukebox musical.
What My Eyebrows Told Me
I was 16 years old on 13 July 1985. I stayed up all night to watch the Live Aid concerts from Wembley and Philadelphia. It was one of the seminal moments of my teenage years. When the world came together to try and do something when the naysayers said that nothing could be done. When people like me – teenagers who enjoyed the music of the time – were heroes, even if just for one day.
Just for One Day took me right back to those heady times. I loved every minute of it, as exemplified by the Supreme Arch formed by aging my eyebrows.
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