It’s the fortieth anniversary of Live Aid this month and Roger Taylor and Brian May have been recalling Queen’s show-stealing set and have revealed that the band originally had serious doubts about doing the gig at all.
“We thought it was going to be a disaster.” May has told Radio Times. “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.”
“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**k it, we’ll do it,’” said May.
Roger Taylor too was apprehensive about doing the show. “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,” he said.
“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.”
Nevertheless once they committed, they committed, and over three rehearsals at a theatre on the Euston Road, Queen hammered out a tight 17 minute greatest hits set, that was extended to 21 due to Freddie Mercury’s ‘ey-oh’ audience participation segment.
On the day, it was only once they got to Wembley that nerves kicked in, according to May: “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.’”
The band went their separate ways for a few hours – Taylor wandered around Kensington, while the guitarist actually took his family to a fair on Barnes Common. They returned to Wembley and took to the stage at twenty to seven, as planned. “Queen had a great trust in each other. We were perhaps lacking in oil, but we were a well-exercised machine,” says May. “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. I came off very conscious of the flaws in our performance, but I also knew Freddie had been great.”
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