"Bad"

In the summer of 1985, U2 performed in England as part of the Live Aid concert for famine relief.  Their set was originally supposed to feature three songs, opening with “Sunday Bloody Sunday” and closing with their recent hit “Pride (In the Name of Love).”  Tucked in the middle of their intended set was a song that had appeared on their previous album The Unforgettable Fire as well as on that year’s four song EP Wide Awake in America.

The tune was called “Bad,” and its studio incarnation it had been criticized in the music press for being “unfinished,” “fuzzy,” and “unfocused.”  But onstage was a different matter.  The way U2 approached the song in concert made it more compelling and climactic.  On that EP, they made the live version of “Bad” the focal point.  Rolling Stone magazine sat up and took notice declaring the new interpretation a “show stopper.”

When U2 took the stage at Wembley for Live Aid, they were allotted just enough time to play all three tunes. But in the course of performing “Bad,” Bono’s attention was caught by an audience member in distress.  It was a 15 year old girl name Kal Khalique who had come to see Wham! (who ended up not being able to perform after all because Elton John’s set ran long later that evening).  Having worked her way to the front of the stage, Kal was in danger of being crushed by the throngs of people behind her.  When Bono saw this, he tried to get the security personnel to rescue her.  But they didn’t understand what he was trying to communicate.  So he jumped down and rescued the girl himself.  Through it all, Bono’s band mates, The Edge, Adam Clayton, and Larry Mullen, Jr., valiantly kept the groove going and maintained the energy without their lead singer.  By the time Bono returned to the stage, they could only finish the song and take their bows.  Given that they had to skip playing their most popular hit, the rest of U2 were not pleased with Bono’s antics.

But it turned out to be the right thing to do.

Twenty years later, Kal confirmed that just before she was rescued, she felt herself suffocating from the press of the crowd behind her.

For his part, Bono admitted that his attempt to inject a something visually memorable into U2’s performance did go awry.  As he put it, “I’d gone AWOL to try and find a television moment and forgot about the song.”

But while the other three members of U2 lamented what they considered the missed opportunity of a lifetime, most people who watched the Live Aid broadcast consider the two highlights of the concert were the performances by Queen and U2.

The Edge later concluded that what made that televised moment so memorable was “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.”