Credit: Far Out / Daniel Hazard
October 21st, 2026 · 10:30pm BST
When it comes to Live Aid’s top three performances, most will plump for U2’s afternoon slot after David Bowie and Queen’s immortal sets that day.
The bumper benefit gig proved crucial in launching U2 from Dublin post-punks to the biggest band on the planet. They weren’t quite as mammoth as The Joshua Tree would catapult them to in two years, but the 1985 concert finally offered a platform for their widescreen anthemic sermons to truly realise themselves, as well as score Bono’s frontman cum preacher rock and roll sermon.
The Unforgettable Fire marked a decisive pivot in U2’s evolution. Dropped the previous year, the final embers of new wave bristle were finally shaken off when heading to Ireland’s Slane Castle for the bulk of the album sessions, enlisting the help of Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois to craft a sonic expanse for The Edge’s chiming guitar ripples. Such new alchemy yielded a surefire pop stirrer like lead single ‘Pride (In the Name of Love)’, yet the chart fodder wasn’t too obvious on the rest of their fourth LP effort.
It’d still top the UK charts and fare well over on the Billboard 200, but the issue with weaving such atmospheric canvases as songs is that some may struggle to ever arrive at any defined shape. Case in point was ‘Bad’.
Never released as a single but a live staple, Bono looked with anguish at the heroin epidemic blighting the Irish capital during a nasty economic downturn early in the decade, subsequent tours revealing the song’s central character as ‘Guck Pants Delaney’: the brother of The Virgin Prunes’ Derek ‘Guggi’ Rowen and his younger brother Peter, the child shot for the Boy and War covers.
Taking an impressionistic approach to the subject of heroin addiction and imbued with U2’s characteristic lyrical communiques with a divine power, ‘Bad’s’ allusive reportage would prove difficult to pin down in the studio. An atmospheric number with exhortive gravitas and coated in Eno’s Oberheim DSX sequencers and The Edge’s complex digital delay set-ups, the band would long deem the track undercooked on record but coming alive on stage, nebulous enough to respond to the energy in the crowd at any given moment.
It took Live Aid, however, for U2 to understand the live gem in their bag. Every band, no matter how big, was given strict instructions by event organiser Bob Geldof to leave ego backstage and play their 15-odd minute to serve the Ethiopian famine relief initiative, and U2 were no different. Taking the stage at 17:19 for a three-song set, the band tore through ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ as scheduled, yet ran out of time to round off their slot with ‘Pride (In the Name of Love)’ ahead of Dire Straits taking over.
Further reading: From The Vault
Well, ‘Bad’s’ strange life on stage bloomed the most epic, extending itself for 12 minutes and winding through lyrical nods to Lou Reed and The Rolling Stones. The grand emotional scope born from Bono’s spiritual anchor to Dublin’s addiction woes found a new electric context with the backdrop of Live Aid’s humanitarian charge, and the rush to free a young Wham! fan crushed at the front row offered U2 and ‘Bad’ the dramatic optics money could never buy.
From then on, the song would always hover near a U2 setlist, a rock homily at the ready when the band ever felt like injecting some gospel energy into the crowd, even as recently as the 2020s. Still, despite such a crucial performance in U2’s world conquest, The Edge initially harboured misgivings about their Live Aid moment.
“It really took us by surprise when people started talking about U2 as one of the noteworthy performances of the day,” he confessed to Rolling Stone, “I thought they were joking. I really thought we were crap. But looking back, as I did a week later, I started to see what it was. It was the sense of real, total jeopardy, which is always very exciting for a live event, and Bono’s complete determination to make physical contact with the crowd and eventually getting there after two minutes of struggling over barriers. I think there was something about the effort he had to put in to do it that somehow made it even more powerful.”
