Mick Jagger & Tina Turner – State Of Shock / It’s Only Rock’n’Roll (Live Aid 1985)

The most talked-about moment of Live Aid was not improvised, and Tina Turner spent thirty-three years letting people believe it was before she explained

He asked her whether the skirt came off. That was the whole negotiation. Tina Turner wrote about it decades later in her memoir, and her account is that neither of them was capable of standing still and singing at each other, so something had to happen, and she watched an idea arrive on Mick Jagger’s face while he looked her over. She was in black leather. He asked slyly. By the time she thought to ask why, it had already started. What the world saw on July 13, 1985, and read for years afterward as rock’s great spontaneous act of chaos was a plan that two old friends made backstage at JFK Stadium.

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Jagger played Live Aid without the Rolling Stones. Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood were on the same bill and busy elsewhere, backing Bob Dylan through an acoustic set that has been described charitably ever since. Jagger’s backing band was Daryl Hall and John Oates, who had come on around ten in the evening with Out of Touch and Maneater and simply stayed on stage. He opened with Lonely at the Top and Just Another Night, both from She’s the Boss, his first record without the band. Then he did Miss You. Then he said four words into the microphone: all right, where’s Tina.

Nineteen years of history behind four words

She came out in stilettos, and the crowd at JFK Stadium reacted the way a hundred thousand people react to something they had not been told was coming. What they were watching had a longer history than most of them realised. Ike and Tina Turner had toured England with the Rolling Stones in 1966, when the Stones were still a singles band and Turner was a revue act nobody in Britain had seen anything like. They came back for the 1969 American tour, the one that ended at Altamont and produced Get Yer Ya-Yas Out! from the New York dates. Jagger has said for decades that the way he moves on stage came from watching her.

The first song was State of Shock, which Jagger had recorded the previous year with the Jacksons for Victory, singing opposite Michael Jackson. At Live Aid, Turner took Jackson’s part. The second was It’s Only Rock ‘n Roll (But I Like It), a Stones single from 1974 that Jagger was now performing without a single Stone on stage behind him. In the middle of it he pulled off his T-shirt, put on a yellow blazer, and then did the thing they had agreed on.

What she wrote about it

Turner’s version, published in My Love Story in 2018, is not the version the moment acquired. She was clear that she had known, that the two of them had discussed it in the seconds available, and that her only real complaint was the lack of time to think it through. She finished the song in a leotard. She was forty-five years old, eighteen months into the most improbable second act in popular music, with Private Dancer having turned a woman the industry had written off into the biggest live draw in the world. She was not a bystander in that moment. She was the reason it worked.

An estimated 1.8 billion people were watching across 150 countries, and the two Live Aid stadiums between them raised more than $125 million for famine relief in Ethiopia. Of everything that happened across sixteen hours in London and Philadelphia — Queen at Wembley, Phil Collins crossing the Atlantic by Concorde to play both — the Jagger and Turner set is among the handful people still describe from memory forty years on.

Turner died in Switzerland in May 2023, at eighty-three. Jagger’s tribute was short and about debt rather than loss: she had helped him enormously when he was young, and he would not forget her. A month before she died she had told The Guardian, without much embarrassment, that she had always had a crush on him. The footage from Philadelphia makes both statements look entirely reasonable.