I’d heard of U2 before Live Aid and was familiar with a few of their hit songs, but hadn’t been paying them close attention. Then, at Live Aid, they did “Bad,” which completely blew me away. I immediately began educating myself on their earlier songs and became a longtime fan.
It wasn’t particularly confusing. They announced ahead of time that Phil Collins was going to do his Wembley set, jump on a Concorde, then do a late set in Philly. They gave us frequent updates as to his progress as well. And when he played “In The Air Tonight” the place went nuts - Miami Vice had just come out a few months before, which gave that song a huge bump.
You did the same 
. Tracy Chapman’s sensational breakthrough happened at the Mandela concert at Wembley in 1988.
I assume, today there would be quite a bit of (environmental) pushback for what was ultimately a PR-stunt
It was a scheduled Concorde flight Heathrow to JFK, so it was going anyway. Then a helicopter from JFK to Philadelphia airport, that was likely chartered. Utterly inconsequential compared to the environmental impact of the 100K attendees getting to the concert, which was pretty much just a huge PR stunt anyway.
you are of course right … I had a few seconds of doubt if it was Live Aid, but could not come up with another concert of similar characteristics. The Mandela Concert was of course that!
Her, Suzanne Vega and a couple of other fine ladies (Tanita Tikaram, Edie Brickell, Michelle Shocked…) did create a bit of a “girl-and-guitar” fad/current back in the late 80ies pop scene, didn’t they?
You remember that correctly, and I liked that music (still do). I bought the Tracy Chapman debut album the week after the Mandela concert, and it was in my heavy rotation for months. It was a mega-seller in Germany, I just read an interview with her for Spiegel while doing research for this thread where the interviewer mentioned that it sold more copies here than “The Wall” or “Thriller”.
No band would have wanted to come on stage right after a video of Queen’s Wembley set was played.
Especially one that had not rehearsed, Robert Plant’s voice was off, Tony Thompson had been called in to play drums in case Phil’s Concorde Adventure didn’t go off, so why not let both of them play together? Neither of them had rehearsed at all. Phil couldn’t even pull off the intro to “Rock and Roll”, at least by Jimmy-not-my-fault Page’s opinion. He blamed Phil, the two drummers blamed each other, I think Plant took some blame for not singing well.