“Live Aid was the
perfect stage for Freddie”
How the event didn’t just resurrect Queen’s ailing career, but also propelled them to new heights.
T
he 17 minutes Queen spent on
stage at Wembley Stadium during
their Live Aid performance on
July 13, 1985 were 17 minutes
which would both make rock
history and transform the band
for good. Although the band had enjoyed
continued success with their platinum-selling
eleventh album, February 1984’s The Works, as the
mid-80s progressed Freddie Mercury found
himself disillusioned and
searching for something new.
“We were all forming a sort
of a rut,” Mercury said at the
time. “I wanted to get out of
this last 10 years of what we
were doing. It was so routine. It
was like, go to the studio, do an
album, go out on the road, go
round the world and flog it to
death, and by the time you
came back it was time to do
another album. After a while
it’s like a painter... you know,
you paint away, and then you
stand back and look at it in
perspective. That’s exactly
what we needed. We just
needed to be away from each
other, otherwise you just keep
going in that routine and you
don’t even know if you’re going down.”
The answer, it turned out, was Live Aid.
A benefit show pulled together by Bob Geldof
and Midge Ure in aid of the Ethiopian famine, the
concert – dubbed by the organising parties as “the
day music changed the world” – brought together
some of rock’s biggest stars over two venues in
London and Philadelphia. In a day filled with
memorable performances – here’s looking at you,
Led Zeppelin – Queen’s Live Aid performance
truly stole the show.
Kicking off with an abridged version of 1975
mega-hit Bohemian Rhapsody, Queen’s Live Aid
setlist tore through a medley of their best-loved
hits: Radio Ga Ga gave way to Hammer To Fall, before
Crazy Little Thing Called Love, We Will Rock You and
a rousing We Are The Champions closed their set.
This was all before Mercury and guitarist Brian
May stole the stage during the show’s grand finale
with their acoustic rendition of Is This The World
We Created? – a moment on which Mercury later
remarked: “It looks as if we wrote Is This the World
We Created? for this event, but we didn’t, although it
seems to fit the bill.”
Their show-stealing performance helped
transform them into a wonderfully camp, sleek
and ubiquitous rock band, and the biggest British
live act of the 80s. That their Live Aid performance
provides the start and end points of recent biopic
Bohemian Rhapsody further illustrates the pivotal
moment the band’s remaining members feel it
played in defining their career.
Admittedly, a renaissance of sorts had begun
with the videos for The Works singles Radio Ga Ga
and I Want To Break Free. But it was their
performance at Live Aid, where they were the only
band smart enough to work out how to play all of
their hits in miniature, that bought them back big-time – even though they hadn’t appeared on the
Band Aid single, and they had incurred the wrath
of Steven Van Zandt after they played in Sun City
in apartheid-era South Africa.
“I would have loved to have been on the Band
Aid record, but I only heard about it when I was in
Germany,” Mercury said later. “I don’t know if they
would have had me on the record anyway, because
I’m a bit old. I’m just an old slag who gets up every
morning, scratches his head and wonders what he
wants to fuck.”
Before the Live Aid event, Freddie was clearer on
his motivation for the show: “I’m not doing it out
of guilt. Even if I didn’t do it, the poverty would still
be there. It’s something that will always be there, to
be honest, when you think about it. All we can do
to help is wonderful things. I’m doing it out of
pride, pride that I’ve been asked as well as that I can
actually do something like that. And so basically
I’m doing it out of feeling that one way all the hard
work that I’ve actually done over the years has paid
off, because they’re actually asking me to do
something to be proud of. I’m actually in with all
the biggies and I can do something worthwhile. To
actually sing something that’s an integral part of
what’s going on, you know, and the song [We Are
The Champions] seems to convey that anyway,
without us thinking about it. That’s what’s magical,and I think that’s going to probably bring tears to
my eyes, I tell you, when I do it.”
Legend has it that Bob Geldof’s invitation to
Queen to play at Live Aid ran along the lines of:
“Tell the old faggot it’s going to be the biggest thing
ever...” Freddie, naturally, found that irresistible.
“I think Bob Geldof has done a wonderful thing,
because he actually sparked it off. I’m sure we all
had it in us to do that, but it took someone like him
to actually drive. And it is like a driving force, to get
us all to come together. We’re
going to do bits of Bohemian
Rhapsody [but] basically, you’re not
trying to put across your new
material or anything like that,
you’re playing songs that people
identify with, and just make it
a happy occasion. It’s not
a promotional thing, it’s a thing
where you just have sit back and
think what you can do.”
It was Geldof who best summed
up the mood of Live Aid 1985 and
Queen’s impact on it. “Queen were
absolutely the best band of the
day,” he remembered. “They
played the best, had the best
sound, used their time to the full.
They understood the idea exactly,
that it was a global jukebox. They
just went and smashed one hit
after another. It was the perfect stage for Freddie- the whole world. And he could ponce about on
stage doing We Are The Champions. How perfect
could it get?”
Freddie’s long-term lover, Jim Hutton, had never
been to a gig before Live Aid. In his memoir Freddie
And Me he described the aftermath of Queen’s
all-conquering Live Aid performance on that
historic day at Wembley Stadium: “When he came
off, he rushed to his trailer and I tottered behind
like a puppy. His first words were: ‘Thank God
that’s over!’ Jim ripped his wet clothes from him
and dressed him. Adrenalin still overflowing,
Freddie knocked back a large vodka to calm
himself. Then his face lit up. As we stepped out of
the caravan we met a grinning Elton John. ‘You
bastards...’ he said to Freddie.”
Mercury was so good that day that the Royal
Mail later put him on a commemorative stamp.
Just visible behind him in the Peter Blake design
is Roger Taylor, who, given Freddie’s more exotic
origins, became the first living Englishman ever
depicted on a British postage stamp.
Queen rotated around the stadiums of the
world after Live Aid 1985. After their jaded years,
they enjoyed an Indian summer of a career, having
cemented their place as one of history’s true great
rock’n’roll bands.
Live Aid: the day music
changed the world.CLASSICROCKMAGAZINE.COM 75