Queen remember iconic Live Aid performance: ‘We thought it was going to be a disaster – and it nearly fell apart’

As Queen’s guitarist Sir Brian May tells it now, only drummer Roger Taylor was enthusiastic initially, no doubt influenced by the voice of his pal Bob Geldof in his ear. The other band members – May along with lead singer Freddie Mercury and bassist John Deacon – were unconvinced. “We weren’t touring or playing, and it seemed like a crazy idea, this talk of having 50 bands on the same bill,” he remembers. “We thought it was going to be a disaster. 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.”

A few weeks later, thousands of tickets had been sold and anticipation was building. With Geldof back on the phone refusing to take no for an answer, May realised Taylor was right: the band needed to turn up to the party. “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, f*** it, we’ll do it.’”

Hang on, aren’t those the very same words Mercury is heard saying in Bohemian Rhapsody, the hit 2018 film about Zanzibar-born Farrokh Bulsara’s journey to stardom? May, 77, chuckles. “I gave Freddie that line. It’s better for him to come across in a positive way. And it’s more than made up for spiritually by the fact that, once he said yes, he led the charge. He jumped in like a lion.”

Legend has it that Queen were one of the few bands to rehearse for the event, something 75-year-old Taylor now plays down. He recalls: “We had three short rehearsals in a theatre on the Euston Road, but we weren’t exactly slaving. We just put it together and ran through it a few times. I’m sure most of the artists must have done the same.”

The hardest decision for such a short set was which songs to perform. For Taylor it was “obvious to open with the verse of Bohemian Rhapsody; it was so immediately recognisable. Then to finish with We Will Rock You and We Are the Champions was a no-brainer. We were told a strict 17 minutes was allowed, although I think it ended up at 21.” Why? “That was Freddie and his call and response…” Of course.

Even after years of playing in huge stadiums around the world, Taylor admits he was feeling nervous leading up to the big day. “We hadn’t been on the Band Aid single, and we felt relatively senior compared with a lot of the younger acts. It wasn’t necessarily our audience because we were a very late addition. And it was daylight, which we don’t like because the stage lights have no effect. Plus it was so thrown together on the stage, we just had to hope all the elements would come together. I wouldn’t say we doubted our own skills, but we had… technical apprehension.”

For May, all was calm until the actual day dawned and he was summoned with his bandmates to the royal box for the beginning of the concert at midday. “We were with Princess Diana and Prince Charles, as he was then. We watched Status Quo come on and play Rockin’ All Over the World, and I thought, ‘This is the biggest thing we’ll probably ever be part of, and we’re going to be there in a few hours.’” That’s when the nerves kicked in? “Yes, but nerves are very close to excitement. It’s scary but also exhilarating and inspiring.”

Slightly bizarrely, the band members then went their separate ways for a few hours. Taylor remembers walking around Kensington in “blazing sunshine, nobody on the streets and out of every single window I could hear Live Aid playing on people’s televisions”. Even more surreally, for May, then a father of three young children, time between duties in the royal box and playing on stage was spent on a family trip to a fair on Barnes Common. There, too, everybody’s radios were tuned to Live Aid.

Once they were back at Wembley, Queen hung out in what Taylor calls “our little caravan”, catching up with their fellow superstars. “Elton [John] had his own English rose garden with an actual fence,” chortles Taylor. “David [Bowie] was there. I think he was quite jittery.” May remembers backstage having “a kind of family atmosphere, lots of people popping in to say hi, lots of kids – pretty relaxing, strangely enough, for such a high-powered operation”.

At 6.41pm, scheduled between Dire Straits and David Bowie and introduced to the stage by comedians Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones, it was Queen’s time to shine. Or not, as was May’s fear at the time: “There were still a few doubts as to how difficult it was going to be to change over between groups. But the whole thing ended up running to time, which is unheard of. It was all thrown together, and it took a lot of goodwill to achieve that.

“Queen had a great trust in each other. We were perhaps lacking in oil, but we were a well-exercised machine. Then, from the moment we hit the stage, the response from the crowd was so deafening, it took your breath away. I ran on, which I don’t normally do, all due to adrenaline. From the beginning, we felt we were at home.

“At the end, I came off thinking, that went OK but also very aware of the places where it nearly fell apart. It came off the rails quite significantly at the end of Hammer to Fall. If you look at it, you might think that was on purpose, but it wasn’t, because there were little tweaks and nobody quite knew where we were. Live shows aren’t perfect. But most of the things we tried to do worked out. I came off very conscious of the flaws in our performance, but I also knew Freddie had been great.”

Even before they got to their designated big finale, We Are the Champions, Queen had effectively stolen the show with Mercury’s spontaneous “Ay-oh” call and response to the ecstatic fans who sang along. “We thought that might be on the cards,” May remembers. “We just didn’t know whether he was going to feel right about it. But he was so bold.”

That moment came straight after what remains the defining image of the day: the crowd of 72,000, arms aloft, clapping in time to Radio Ga Ga, just as they had seen in the song’s video that debuted the year before. “It wasn’t a Queen audience,” May marvels now. “So we went on not knowing if they’d even know what to do. But it was the beginning of the video age taking over the world, as predicted in Radio Ga Ga – funnily enough, that’s what the song is about. They didn’t think about it, they just did it. Every single hand seemed to be in the air.”

For Taylor, the moment when he knew Queen had triumphed came four songs later, following Hammer to Fall, Crazy Little Thing Called Love and We Will Rock You. “During Radio Ga Ga, it did seem that the whole stadium was in unison. But then I looked up during We Are the Champions, and the crowd looked like a whole field of wheat swaying.”

The drummer adds that he was brought down to earth immediately after the band came off stage and waited to have their photograph taken by David Bailey. “On the screen was this horrific footage of starving children in Ethiopia, with the song Drive by the Cars. I think that was one of the moments when the money started coming in. It was so effective. The combination of a great record and these terrible images was the most powerful thing I saw all day. It stopped everybody in their tracks.”

Both men are at pains to say it was never part of the plan to boost Queen’s earning power that day – “It was one of the few moments in anyone’s life that you know you’re doing something for all the right reasons,” says May – but sales of their records went through the roof after the concert. The following summer the band was back on the road, including two stadium gigs back at Wembley and one at a packed Knebworth Park in Hertfordshire, where the audience was officially 120,000 but reports suggest that the figure may have been nearer 200,000. “They just used to let people come in back then,” says Taylor.

The Knebworth gig in August 1986 proved to be Mercury’s last performance with the original line-up of the band. He died aged 45 in November 1991. “Those gigs would have happened without Live Aid, but it probably gave us confidence,” agrees May. “We went on without our equipment, our lighting, our costumes. It was just the four of us and we learnt that the songs and the artists were enough; that we did have something to offer.”

Neither May nor Taylor accepts the oft-made claim that Queen emerged as the champions of that glorious July day in 1985. But if, for a moment, they were to, what would they credit? “The songs were great, and so was the performance,” says Taylor. “I’ve spent my entire adult life as a member of Queen, I always wanted to be in a gang like that, and it’s a pretty cool gang.”

A pretty cool gang led by a singularly charismatic frontman. “A lot of it is Freddie,” says May. “He’d learnt this wonderful thing, which was how to involve everybody in a 100,000 audience. He had this magical ability to make everybody feel he was talking to them – and that, above anything else, rooted that occasion.

“We’d been to gigs; we knew what it felt like to be the small guy at the back of the room. Freddie harnessed that energy somehow and he made that person at the back feel like he could do it, too.” Forty years later, May still gets emotional at the memory and slips into the present tense to describe his friend: “He has this power. He’s not Farrokh Bulsara. When he walks on, he’s Freddie Mercury and he owns the world.”

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