There are certain musical moments that live forever. They’re iconic, timeless, and legendary. Kate Bush singing ‘Wuthering Heights’ on TV for the first time. Elvis’s comeback special. David Bowie’s final Ziggy Stardust show. And, of course, Queen at Live Aid.
You read the words and hear the music in your head; Freddie Mercury with the crowd in the palm of his hand, singing “Ay-Oh” and hearing 72,000 people sing it back. There were plenty of moments during Mercury’s career when he proved himself to be a master. His ability to capture and control an audience was part of the reason why the band got so successful in the first place. But in 1985, at Wembley Stadium while billions watched from home, he proved himself to be a kind of god. A true legend. His name was already written into history, but surely that performance put the font in bold and added five exclamation points.
Live Aid as a whole fostered many iconic performances, but none held a candle to Queen’s. Doing a sharp run of the hits, Mercury bounded about the stage showing the full length of his talent from the balladic opening of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ through to the huge rock moments of ‘Hammer To Fall’ and the crowd-shaking stomp of ‘We Will Rock You’. It was flawless, and given that, by this point, the singer was already beginning to exhibit symptoms of AIDS and getting increasingly sick, it was a personal triumph.
But that’s also exactly why it almost didn’t happen. When the band got the offer to do the show, Mercury didn’t feel like the kind of frontman it needed. “Freddie, in particular, said, ‘I haven’t got the right feeling for this.’ He wasn’t the leader of the band, but if he dug his heels in, there was no dragging him, so we parked it,” Brian May recalled of how early discussions about it all seemed to point to a no.
It didn’t help that Live Aid essentially required them to strip everything back. For a band who usually had big theatrics and lights at their show, that wouldn’t be possible at Wembley, adding to the nerves. “It was daylight, which we don’t like because the stage lights have no effect. Plus, it was so thrown together on the stage,” Roger Taylor said of the day.
“We thought it was going to be a disaster,” May added as the band at that time simply didn’t feel up to the scale of the show and weren’t sure they had the spirit to pull it off.
However, on the flip side, that’s precisely why it did happen. As they watched the event get organised and get bigger and bigger, the cultural significance of the day became clear. It was obvious that Live Aid was going to be something special as the all-star lineup came together, and May didn’t think they should miss it.
“I said to Freddie, ‘If we wake up on the day after this Live Aid show and we haven’t been there, we’re going to be pretty sad.’ He said, ‘Oh, fuck it, we’ll do it,’” the guitarist recalled, and that was that.
