The Real Story Behind Queen’s Iconic Live Aid Performance

On July 13, 1985, some of the greatest pop-music talents of the 20th century convened at London’s Wembley Stadium for the historic Live Aid concert, raising more than $100 million to help famine victims in Ethiopia. When the English rock band Queen took the stage that day, between Dire Straits and David Bowie, frontman Freddie Mercury delivered an electrifying masterclass in showmanship and vocal power—a 20-minute set widely hailed as one of the most legendary performances in rock-’n’-roll history.

Ironically, in the run-up to the gig, the band was seen as past its prime. Their iconic hits like “Bohemian Rhapsody” and “We Will Rock You” dated back to the previous decade. They had a lesser hit with the 1984 song “Radio Ga Ga,” but their disco- and funk-infused 1982 album “Hot Space” didn’t even crack the top 20 in America. What’s more, the self-proclaimed “non-political” group had caught flak in the press—and been blacklisted by the United Nations—when they played a run of shows in apartheid South Africa less than a year earlier. 

On top of all that, Mercury had been road-testing a solo career with his 1985 debut album Mr. Bad Guy, leaving bassist John Deacon, guitarist Brian May and drummer Roger Taylor wondering what would come next. “Our personal relationships had all suffered,” May later told music journalist Mark R. Blake. “Freddie had stepped so far away, I thought we might not get him back.”

The concert may have even saved the band. “They were on the verge of breaking up—or taking a serious break,” says Blake, author of the 2022 book Magnifico! The A to Z of Queen, which was based on numerous interviews with band members. “The success of Live Aid prompted them to carry on.”

Given the band’s disarray in 1985, they were handed no small opportunity when Boomtown Rats frontman Bob Geldof invited them to perform in the mega-concert he was organizing with Ultravox vocalist Midge Ure. The 16-hour marathon would feature titans from Bob Dylan and Led Zeppelin to Paul McCartney and Madonna taking the stage at both London’s Wembley Stadium and Philadelphia’s John F. Kennedy Stadium for what was being billed as a “global jukebox.” Each performer or group was allotted just around 20 minutes.

Queen almost didn't accept Geldof’s invitation. For one thing, they were worn out from touring all spring. When Geldof and Ure left Queen off an earlier fundraiser, the Band Aid single “Do They Know It’s Christmas?,” Mercury remarked to his bandmates, “I’m a bit old,” according to Blake’s book. May recalled to Blake, “We definitely hesitated about doing Live Aid. Not just Freddie. We had to consider whether we were in good enough shape to do it. It would have been easier not to do it as the chances of making fools of ourselves were so big.”

Against that backdrop, their motivations appear not to have been purely philanthropic. “I don’t think they were there purely for charity reasons,” says Blake, quickly adding, “but I don’t think other bands were either. If you had a good Live Aid, that did wonders for your career.” In fact, when a BBC interviewer asked Queen later if they were playing to support the cause or because they didn’t want to miss out, Mercury replied candidly, “A bit of both.” 

Meanwhile, Mercury had bigger concerns: Though he wouldn’t be diagnosed until 1987, the singer had in 1982 sought medical treatment after he began showing symptoms of HIV. (It’s been widely reported that he performed the benefit concert against his doctor’s orders while suffering a severe throat infection; Blake isn’t quite so sure of that, saying Mercury might have played it up for the sake of drama.) At the time, the disease was still a death sentence, so Mercury would have known that his days—and performances—were numbered. He would die six years later from bronchial pneumonia resulting from AIDS. 

Once they accepted Geldof’s invitation, the band left nothing to chance. Over three full days at London’s Shaw Theatre, they painstakingly rehearsed their set, opting for a medley that would deliver maximum crowd satisfaction—namely, the high moments of six of the band’s hits: “Bohemian Rhapsody,” “Radio Ga Ga,” “Hammer To Fall,” “Crazy Little Thing Called Love,” “We Will Rock You” and, the grand finale, the über-anthemic “We Are the Champions.” 

When the day came, some 70,000 fans (including Prince Charles and Princess Diana) packed into Wembley, while an estimated 1.5 billion watched the television broadcast—on the BBC in the UK, on ABC in the U.S., and on upstart network MTV. If their spring tour had left Queen depleted, it didn’t show. Mercury took charge from the start, bounding joyfully onto the stage and commanding the audience from the opening grand-piano strains of “Bohemian Rhapsody.” From there out, they executed the medley flawlessly, with a sneaky boost from their sound engineer, Trip Khalaf. In a 1999 interview, drummer Taylor revealed that Khalaf had tweaked the sound system so that “we were louder than anyone else.”

And Mercury was not only loud, but proud. Sporting tight, high-waisted jeans and a white tank top, accessorized with matching studded black leather belt and armband, he strutted, preened and fist-pumped, owning the stage with a high-octane, camp energy. He wielded a cut-off microphone stand as an air guitar, as a baton and occasionally, in much more suggestive ways. At one point, he led the crowd in a rousing 30-second a cappella call-and-response sequence, starting “aaay-o,” that dramatically showcased his four-octave range. It has come to be called “the note heard around the world.”

“It was a bit of old-school show business,” says Blake, who watched the concert live on TV in a London pub. “They did an act on stage, whereas a lot of other bands didn’t. I stayed up for Led Zeppelin [who played in Philadelphia]; they broadcast it here. They were terrible. Queen had rehearsed it down to the minute.” 

With more than a billion people watching around the world, “it was a huge advert for them,” says Blake. “And people were talking about it the next day: ‘Wow, did you see Queen?’”

Some two decades after the applause died down and the fans went home, a 2005 poll of more than 60 music industry insiders deemed those brief 20 minutes to be the world’s single greatest rock performance ever—beating out, among other contenders, the Rolling Stones, the Sex Pistols, David Bowie, Bob Marley and even the legendary Jimi Hendrix set at Woodstock. 

The concert was powerfully recreated in the final scene of the hit 2018 biopic Bohemian Rhapsody, starring Rami Malek as Mercury in an Academy Award–winning turn, cementing the iconic performance in the minds of new generations. And as great as the rest of the band may have been, Mercury’s performance proved key to Queen’s reclamation of its status at the top of the rock-‘n’-roll heap. Even May, whose guitar prowess was fundamental to the band’s outsized sound, would later recall, “The rest of us played okay, but Freddie was out there and took it to another level.”