Gary Lavery 🇾🇪

From Live Aid to Kill Aid. U2 were excited to play a small part in this gigantic moment forty years ago. We spotted a fair few white flags in the crowd (a theme from the War album still gathering pace on Unforgettable Fire) and sensed LIVE AID was a coming of age for our audience as much as our band. A day when everyone seemed to agree that where you live should not decide whether you live. In the next years, many of us would come to understand that if the first step in fighting the depravity of starvation was charity, then the hard yards and the long road would be fighting extreme poverty as injustice…we would learn to ask more demanding questions of how in a world of plentiful resources and intelligence so many sentient souls could perish for the dumbest of reasons… Bob Geldof and the spirit in Wembley Stadium and RFK that day sent our band (and our fans) to places and possibilities we would never have known to move from “agonising to organising” and exploring innovative platforms like Jubilee 2000, DATA ONE RED. Same spirit giving us instructions today louder than ever. As it says in the good book: have a mullet, will travel. Make Poverty History.