Sir Bob Geldof was left "mortified" when he read the script for the Live Aid musical, but wanted to make sure that it still remained "pertinent" in the current political climate.
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00:00It's extraordinary that, the musical is extraordinary, we're not familiar with this end of stuff and I've been to musical but I'm a sort of Rogers and Hammerstein guy and I was more
00:29mortified by the script, you know, you're reading a version of the self and my main thing was that it has to be, and again I'm sorry for boring people here, it has to be politically pertinent, it has to be again exactly what John Amish said, it has to be about what it was supposed to be about, which everyone 40 years ago understood, but these days it's about Freddie, genius and all of that and what the musical does for us is put it in a contemporary perspective.
00:58What happened 40 years ago at Wembley was to lay that to rest, that there is such a thing as society, that human beings do care about each other.
01:06We couldn't possibly know that 40 years down the track that the issue would be as vital, in Sudan as we speak 2.5 million children are being forced to starve as an instrument of war,
01:29that 5.5 million people in Africa, that 5.5 million people in Africa are in peril of their lives simply because they're suffering from AIDS, but what the musical does is exactly what Mish says, it brings it to a different generation and the possibility of what individuals can do together.
01:45And as John Kennedy said, it refutes Thatcher's dictum that there's no such thing as society.
01:53What happened 40 years ago at Wembley was to lay that to rest, that there is such a thing as society, that human beings do care about each other and that they rise above the contemporary political gestalt.
02:05It's a phenomenal piece of work, and it can only be, I've read something that it's another jukebox musical, dude, it is the global jukebox, it can't be anything else, that's what the concert was.
02:20We called it the global jukebox, we called it the global jukebox, it was hit after hit after hit, by definition it has to be, but the achievement is to make that sense of 40 years ago, that sense of it, to make that vivid and relevant to now, and that's what this has done.