Live Aid, Live 8 and Ultravox

Short answer: Ultravox played Live Aid on 13 July 1985. Ultravox did not play Live 8 in July 2005. Midge Ure was a co-founder of both events, and at Live 8 he performed as a solo artist.

Band Aid and Live Aid

In November 1984 Midge Ure co-wrote and produced the Band Aid single, “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”, with Bob Geldof. That record led to Live Aid, which Ure and Geldof co-founded.

At Wembley Stadium on Saturday 13 July 1985, Ultravox were the sixth act on the bill, on stage at 13:17 BST, after the Coldstream Guards, Status Quo, the Style Council, the Boomtown Rats and Adam Ant. They played “Reap the Wild Wind”, “Dancing with Tears in My Eyes”, “One Small Day” and “Vienna”. It was the classic line-up’s last concert until the reunion opened in Edinburgh on 10 April 2009.

Live 8

Live 8 was a series of benefit concerts timed to precede the G8 summit at Gleneagles, Scotland, on 6–8 July 2005, in support of the Make Poverty History campaign. The main concerts, including Hyde Park in London, took place on 2 July 2005. Geldof and Ure are both named as its founders, and both said it was not meant as a repeat of Live Aid.

The last of the series, Edinburgh 50,000, was held at Murrayfield Stadium on 6 July 2005. Midge Ure performed “Vienna” there, with Eddie Izzard on piano and Troy Donockley on bouzouki. That is a solo performance by Ure, not an Ultravox appearance; no Ultravox line-up was active between 1996 and 2008.

Why this page exists

The old astradyne.org had a page about Live 8, and people still link to it. This page replaces it and states the facts plainly, because the mistake it guards against, that Ultravox reunited for Live 8, is easy to make.

Drafting note: the wording of this essay was drafted with the help of an AI language model from the sources listed below. Every fact in it comes from those sources, and it is published only after an editor has checked each statement against them.