Queen’s live performance at the 1985 Live Aid concert will go down as one of the greatest in rock history, but legendary frontman Freddie Mercury very nearly stopped the band from taking part in the benefit gig.
Why Queen turned down Live Aid
In an interview with British magazine Radio Times, lead guitarist Brian May and drummer Roger Taylor have revealed the band initially turned down Bob Geldof’s offer to be involved in Live Aid, which ultimately turned out to be one of the most iconic moments of their career.
“We weren’t touring or playing, and it seemed like a crazy idea, this talk of having 50 bands on the same bill,” May explained. “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.”
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Queen hadn’t performed on “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”, the Live Aid charity single which went to number one in the United Kingdom and a host of other countries (number 13 on the Billboard Hot 100), so few eyebrows would likely have been raised if one of the biggest bands of the time didn’t take to the stage.
Freddie Mercury’s Live Aid U-turn
However, Geldof persisted and, swayed by the buzz the concert was generating, Queen performed a U-turn.
“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,’” said May.
The rest, as they say, is history. “It wasn’t a Queen audience,” May continued. “So we went on not knowing if they’d even know what to do. But they didn’t think about it, they just did it. Every single hand seemed to be in the air.”
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