Freddie Mercury’s 2018 biopic Bohemian Rhapsody, climaxes with Queen’s famed performance at the Live Aid charity concert. Mercury’s finest hour is fully recreated with meticulous, loving care. Lead actor Rami Malek turned in a performance so startling that the one-to-one copy of Queen’s indispensable frontman earned him a well-deserved Oscar.
Queen’s Live Aid performance not only earned first prize amongst the concert’s many luminous performances, but has since been rightfully described as the best concert performance in pop music history. Their set was perfect, but that naturally begs the question: WHY?
Why was it so perfect? What did Freddie and co do right? How did they exceed expectations?
Some proposed answers are banal and do not fully capture the magic of Freddie Mercury gracing a stage. For instance, this article claims the band’s extensive rehearsal period was a contributing factor to their success. Yes, but surely the other artists rehearsed too? Even a performance of one or two songs requires a rehearsal. Other sources claim Mercury’s towering, charismatic presence was the defining factor. This is more plausible because Queen is the best live act in history (I brook no dissent here). Freddie’s stage presence was, and remains, unmatched.
Clearly something worked for Queen on the Live Aid stage, but what.
To me, the cause is obvious.
Let’s Give That A Second Look
To give the uninitiated some context, we need to understand what Queen and the other artists were doing that day at Wembley Stadium—how it contributed to Queen’s unrivalled contribution to the history of live entertainment.
On the 13th of July, 1985, dozens of bands and musical artists were booked (some against their will but that’s a story for another day) by Boomtown Rats frontman Bob Geldof for a very, very special charity concert: Live Aid. The purpose was to raise funds for famine relief in Ethiopia. Eight months earlier, in November 1984, Geldof gathered many of those same artists together in a Notting Hill recording studio to sing a new charity song he composed with his friend, Ultravox singer Midge Ure. Geldof and Ure’s song was Do They Know It’s Christmas, and it was released under the delightfully punny moniker Band Aid. Do The Know It’s Christmas was, in retrospect, a dopey song with a few questionable lyrics, but its purpose was little more than to give the public a way to donate to a good cause.
Geldof’s gamble worked, and he took the next stage (no pun intended) of his charity relief efforts by announcing two simultaneous benefit concerts on two continents, one in London, the other in Philadelphia, via satellite link-up. The group of artists Geldof shanghaied into performing remains unsurpassed and no subsequent music festival has offered a better billing. On the London set, The Boomtown Rats (duh) would be joined by, among others, The Who, Phil Collins, Queen, a then up-and-coming U2, Elvis Costello, Elton John, David Bowie, and Paul McCartney before everyone gathered on stage for the final sing along of Band Aid’s smash hit. The Philly concert featured Madonna, Bob Dylan, Tina Turner, Mick Jagger, Bryan Adams and even a reunited Led Zeppelin with Phil Collins (arriving via Concorde) filling in for the late John Bonham on drums. Artists had a 20 minute slot for their performance. The concerts would run 10 hours…each. Queen were slotted to perform in London at 6:41.
Immediately, we can see the first obstacle Queen, and indeed every artist, had to overcome that day: stiff, stiff competition. For charity gigs of this kind, participating performers usually have room for two or three songs to make an impression. Indeed, most artists took this approach, but that strategy came with risks.
Case-in-point, an hour before Queen majestically pranced onto the stage, the young and serious U2 performed what they thought would be a three-song set. They started with their then biggest hit, the whomping Sunday Bloody Sunday. They then moved into the fan-favourite Bad, which went gloriously off the rails.
Mid-performance, frontman Bono leapt down from the stage to rescue a woman being crushed to death in the audience. He then pompously danced with her in the stage pit. The other members of U2 couldn’t see where their frontman buggered off to and were on the verge of panicking as they continued to play Bad’s hypnotic rhythm. Bono returned to the stage and improvised the last two minutes of their set. U2’s performance boosted their career, despite the fact they lost the opportunity to play the third song, the insta-classic Pride (In The Name Of Love).
For their set, Queen decided against the usual route of playing a few of their greatest and instead did something so perfect that in retrospect I can’t believe nobody else thought of it: a medley (key word) based off their already immaculate concert roster.
18:41
Queen’s success at Live Aid derived from their thematically structured set-list, aimed at the highest level of audience participation. They had some experience in this area; in 1981, Queen conducted a South American tour held entirely in large football stadiums similar to Wembley. This proved a key difference between Queen’s performance resting in the history books while consigning the other performances to mere immortality. To see how they pulled it off, let’s review Queen’s performance.
At 18:41, Queen took the stage, frontman Freddie Mercury charging out with the enthusiasm of a man who was delighted to be there and whose doctor gave him the go-ahead to perform (neither of which were true). After waving to the crowd, Mercury plonked himself at the grand piano and banged out the iconic opening chords of Bohemian Rhapsody.
On first glance, Queen’s decision to lead off with The Rhapsody is baffling. After all, the song usually came 2/3rds of the way through their full-scale concert setlists, and even then they never bothered performing complex middle operatic section. Instead, the studio-recording would be played through the stadium while the band took a break before their final encore. So what was it doing in the lead-off position at Live Aid?
The answer was 72,000 persons strong. Unlike their own concerts, Queen were not playing to their specific audience at Live Aid. Sure, many in the audience liked Queen, but there were at least fifteen other artists competing for the audience’s attention. But the monster hit Bohemian Rhapsody, a song rubbing shoulders with Hotel California and Back In Black as rock best ever song, was Queen’s most recognizable song by a million miles. There was no better overture to the band’s setlist. For Queen to put their biggest hit anywhere else would have been breathtakingly stupid. The correctness of the decision can be heard on the audio playback, where the audience is singing along with such fervour that sometimes they can be heard over the band.
Mercury led the crowd through Bohemian Rhapsody’s opening ballad section before letting guitarist Brian May run wild with a scorching rendition of the song’s famous guitar solo. In a typical Queen show, May’s solo would end on a somewhat subdued note so the sound crew could properly queue up the pre-recorded operatic section. But at Live Aid, May concluded the solo with a thunderous power chord against drummer Roger Taylor’s cymbal-crashing bonanza. Mercury then rose from the piano bench while Taylor and bassist John Deacon worked through the complex musical transition from May’s power chord to the opening notes of song number two, Radio Gaga.
Radio Gaga (yes that’s where Lady Gaga got her name) was, in 1985, Queen’s most recent hit single. In the years leading up to Live Aid, Queen suffered a popularity dip after 1982’s Hot Space, their ignominious attempt to make a synth-heavy disco record. The album was, predictably, a disaster, and the band retreated to safer territory with their 1984 album, The Works. The lead single from The Works was the melodic masterpiece Radio Gaga. For a 1985 audience, this would have been a pleasantly familiar tune.
But the band took their performance of this now-most iconic of Queen songs to a new level. Liberated from the confines of the piano bench, Mercury was handed his signature bottomless microphone stand and he began prowling the stage. It should be noted that Queen performed all of the songs in their setlist at a slightly faster tempo to meet the tight timetable.
As Mercury sang through the opening verses, he got the audience to mimic Radio Gaga’s most famous component, taken straight from the extremely popular music video. In the video, Queen are standing on an elevated platform against a white background. As the band raise their hands and clap in time with the song’s drum fills [“(all we hear is/Radio Gaga (cha-cha, cha-cha)/ Radio Googoo (cha-cha, cha-cha)”], a large group of factory workers standing in front of the band raise their hands and clap in unison.
At Live Aid (and indeed all live performances of Radio Gaga), Mercury slapped his microphone in time with Taylor’s drum fills and the audience, with awe-inspiring precision, raised their hands over their heads and clapped in unison with the band just like the music video. During each chorus, Freddie Mercury guided the audience through the claps with exact timing—a feat even more impressive because he was guiding the general public, not a Queen audience.
Not only was this spectacle of 72,000 people clapping along stupefying to the eye, Mercury’s theatrical gestures ensured the audience was a participant in the performance, something Live Aid’s other acts never nailed. Queen always gave their audience something to do.
To drive that point home, Mercury took a one minute break after Radio Gaga concluded include the best part of every Queen live show, the vocalzied call-and-response game. Mercury would begin these improvised segments by calling out a vocal note (AAAAAAAYYYYAYAYAYAYYA-OOHHHHHHH!). The audience would respond with the same note (AAAAAAAAYYYYYYYYYAYAYA-OOOOHHHHH!). Mercury would then guide them up-and down his titanic vocal register in the most epic version of the game Simon Says.
After giving his bandmates a moment to prepare, Mercury bellowed out “HAMMER TO FALL!” Brian May then charged in with the blistering opening riff of, as expected, Hammer To Fall. Queen’s third song was then their newest single. An acknowledged Queen classic today, the hard-rocking Hammer To Fall was a ballsy inclusion in 1985 because it was the single they were then actively promoting. But Queen being Queen, they wouldn’t miss the opportunity.
Shameless plug for their new song or not, Hammer To Fall’s roaring guitar tones kept the tempo way up for the middle of the set. As the audience in the stadium had already participated in Queen’s concert, Mercury next took served the audience at home. He did so by conducting a ballet of sorts with the BBC cameraman filming him on the stage for the television audience. As roughly a billion people were tuned in to the concert that day, Mercury’s up-close and personal dance with the cameraman was as close as anyone would get to joining the band live on stage. It was an act of cheeky charisma nobody but Freddie Mercury could have pulled off. Brian May then turned in Hammer To Fall’s shredding solo and the band squeezed in a short live jam before rushing headlong into the climatic conclusion.
With three songs down, Queen might have left the stage, but the unrelenting tempos meant they were only halfway through the set. For their fourth song, Mercury was handed a cream-white electric guitar, a dangerous move considering he knew exactly three chords and played the instrument with little precision. After receiving his guitar, Mercury announced, “This next song is only dedicated to beautiful people here tonight!” Lest the audience start to panic about their attractiveness, he added, “It means all of you. Thank you for coming along and making this a great occasion!”
He then moved into the first chords of Crazy Little Thing Called Love, another popular mainstay of any respectable rock radio station. By this point, the band was just showing off. For this Elvis-esque rockabilly tune, Brian May played no fewer than three guitars during the song, one for the first verse, a second for the solo and a third for outro. The song’s inclusion was a smart choice for this slot as it filled out the set with a famous cut while keeping the pace up. The studio recording isn’t even three minutes long, so the song’s inclusion gave the band an opportunity to play a third track in full. But more importantly, including this fourth song meant the band’s set morphed into a true structured concert rather than a batch of unrelated tunes.
But including a fourth song also meant Queen was pressed for time, and so they needed to bring this great occasion to close.
Along gravity and entropy, it is an immutable law of the universe that a Queen concert, no matter how short, ends with We Will Rock You and We Are The Champions. One must not be played without the other. Queen duly fulfilled this obligation by ending their set with those songs. As they were racing against the clock, the band elected only to use the first verse of We Will Rock You and the final guitar solo. This was sufficient as the audience received their opportunity to stamp their feet, clap their hands and sing the chorus, which Mercury let them do without him intervening.
After May’s abridged solo, Mercury dashed over to the piano for We Are The Champions. The performance was soaring and the audience, to quote Roger Taylor, went “bonkers in unison”. Mercury sang the song’s triumphant chorus with sublime power and staggering dynamic range. When he got to the lyric “I thank you all”, he spoke it directly to the audience, sending the charged atmosphere into overdrive.
As Mercury and the band guided the audience through the final two verses by constantly repeating the refrain “We are the champions/ WEEEE ARREEE THE CHAMMMPPIONS!” it dawned on all those present that the band were announcing their victory in the competition of “best performance of all time”. The performance ended when Mercury sang out the final line, “of the woooooorrrrrrlllldddd!”, while Taylor smashed his two splash cymbals with cheerful abandon.
One power chord later, Queen’s Live Aid slot had finished.
Perfection Is A Structure.
As I hope my literary re-enactment demonstrated, Queen’s performance was pure bliss, not only due to their extensive rehearsals but also from a combination of song selection, setlist running order, and maximised audience participation. Limited to six songs (four full and two half songs if you really think about it) and an audience that may or may not have been enthusiastic about seeing them, Queen hit a home-run every step of the way. They ensured that every person present was involved and excited.
Queen would tour with Freddie Mercury only once more after Live Aid before his untimely death in 1991. But Live Aid gave the band a morale boost so large that resulted in four more Mercury-led albums being released before mortality finally caught up him. Queen at Live Aid remains a fitting tribute to rock concert perfection and sets a standard no artist will ever match.
AAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYY! OOOOOHHHH!