Queen At Live Aid: “It’s my job to make sure everybody has a good time…”

For Queen, the early ’80s was the most testing era of their career, with the poor reception for the experimental Hot Space album, hostility in America to Freddie Mercury’s ‘clone’ image, and the group’s controversial decision to play apartheid South Africa. But, with 1984’s The Works reversing their commercial decline, and still revered as rock gods, Queen were prime candidates to perform at the charity event that made the world love them again: Live Aid. Forty years later, MOJO’s James McNair’s charts the band’s sometimes rocky road to Wembley and their show-stealing set...

By April 1983 Queen’s crown had slipped a little. Fatigued by lengthy tours of Europe, the US and Japan, and unsettled by the relative failure of their 1982 album, Hot Space, the group had opted to go on sabbatical for five months. “We realised that [Hot Space] hadn’t been what a lot of fans wanted or expected from us”, said Roger Taylor. “We thought a break would give us the opportunity to think things through a bit.”

With Freddie Mercury vowing not to record any more albums for Elektra, whom he felt were underselling Queen in the US, the hiatus would also give the band time to shop around for a new recording deal in the States. However, as Brian May noted, Queen also needed a break from each other: “We were getting on each other’s nerves, which happens periodically.”

John Deacon spent his downtime surfing, or jamming with tennis aces and would-be guitar heroes John McEnroe and Vitas Gerulaitis. Freddie travelled to Munich to begin work on his first solo album, Mr Bad Guy, and collaborated on the single Love Kills with Giorgio Moroder, the disco music trailblazer who’d produced Donna Summer’s I Feel Love five years earlier.

Roger Taylor, ever the playboy, ventured to the Monaco Grand Prix with Status Quo’s Rick Parfitt. While there, the rock star pals worked as interviewers in an unreleased documentary following the fortunes of Formula One teammates Derek Warwick and Bruno Giacomelli. But it wasn’t all work, and in the evenings Taylor and Parfitt partied with such gusto that on one occasion they were arrested and jailed for being drunk and disorderly.

“We were accused of something we didn’t do, but we sat in prison all night and it rained all the next day, so we didn’t see the race”, Parfitt recalled. “We had a thoroughly bad time, but we came home laughing!”

Like Freddie, Queen guitarist Brian May had been a little more productive with his time during the band’s sabbatical. It was wholly appropriate, moreover, that the former student of Infra-red Astronomy and sometime guest of Sir Patrick Moore on The Sky At Night should launch a project named Star Fleet.

May had lifted the name from a Japanese science fiction series. He and his young son, Jimmy, had religiously watched the animation together in the UK on Saturday mornings, and Jimmy had suggested that dad record a version of the Star Fleet theme tune.

“I thought, actually, that’s a rather good piece of music,” recalled May, and so it was that he made a rough demo of his own version. Armed with the tape, the guitarist then travelled to the US to assemble the Star Fleet Project players, a supergroup comprising himself, fellow guitarist Edward Van Halen, Alice Cooper keyboardist Fred Mandel, REO Speedwagon drummer Alan Gratzer, and then Rod Stewart bassist Phil Chen.

Brian May & Friends, as the mini-album would credit them, recorded their May-sung version of the Star Fleet theme at the Record Plant, Los Angeles on April 21; Roger Taylor later added backing vocals. The mini-album’s other two cuts, recorded on April 22, put the kibosh on any unified sci-fi theme. Let Me Out and Blues Breaker featured May and Van Halen trading old-school blues licks, the latter tune a lengthy nod to the 1966 John Mayall and Eric Clapton album that had much inspired Brian and Edward as teenagers.

Discussing the video for the single Star Fleet, May said, “My experience working on the soundtrack for Flash Gordon came in handy. I think I should go into this full-time.” Fun as playing a background narrator in a video featuring footage from the original animation had been, May knew that the Star Fleet Project had limited appeal beyond the world of other guitarists and his delighted son. “I want people to know that this is just a one-off thing, a piece of fun,” he told Guitar Player magazine. “It’s not like anyone’s leaving their group or anything; there’s no hint of that.”

While May’s assertion that Queen was still a going concern was right on the money, change was afoot. For while 1980’s The Game showcased consistently strong songwriting and its third single Another One Bites The Dust spoke of a spry, relevant, super-funky Queen, the follow-up album Hot Space had failed to cement this feisty comeback, and suggested that perhaps the ’70s rock giants weren’t adapting to the new decade quite so well after all.

There was no resisting the zeitgeist, though, and in September 1983, The Game became the first Queen album to be released in new-fangled CD format. As the group reconvened in Los Angeles to begin work on their tenth studio album proper, The Works, they were faced with a testing challenge: could they complete the makeover that The Game had kickstarted, retain a firm grip on the singles charts, and avoid alienating even more long-term fans?

In the interim between The Game and Hot Space, music fans had witnessed the birth of MTV on August 1, 1981. Of course, as the group who had arguably invented the promo music video with Bohemian Rhapsody, Queen hadn’t failed to clock this new medium, or to muse upon how its power might best be utilised.

Not that this meant that Roger Taylor, for one, was ultimately a fan of MTV. Indeed, the drummer maintained that it was when he had become bored with the channel that he – or more accurately his young son – had hit upon the phrase that would spark the writing of the first single from The Works, Radio Ga Ga.

“I wrote it after watching a lot of MTV in the States”, Taylor said, “and it seemed to me that there was far too much emphasis on a band’s visual image [and not enough on the music]. My son, Felix – he was watching TV with me and he started going around saying ‘radio poo poo’, which changed to ‘radio ka ka’, and then eventually to Radio Ga Ga.”

MTV critical or not, Radio Ga Ga got its own elaborate promo video, this drawing inspiration and incorporating scenes from the 1927 Fritz Lang film, Metropolis. Lang’s film was a work that Mercury had recently become reacquainted with; not least because Giorgio Moroder’s newly penned soundtrack for the original movie footage included the Mercury/Moroder co-write, Love Kills.

Directed by David Mallett, the Radio Ga Ga video reportedly cost £110,000 to make, and featured Queen in a flying car and scores of extras recruited from the official Queen Fan Club performing the massed double handclap section that accompanied the song’s chorus. This percussive ritual was soon to be repeated at Queen gigs the world over, and continues to spontaneously erupt whenever the group plays the song live.

Curiously, the signature handclaps were a studio embellishment and not, it seems, a part of Taylor’s original plan. In his 1998 biography, Freddie Mercury, the singer’s personal assistant Peter Freestone wrote that Roger’s original demo “sounded more like the Ave Maria from Verdi’s Otello”. The finished version, however, was built around Fred Mandel’s synthesizer arrangement and drum programming, and relegated May’s guitar to a subtle supporting role.

This was a whole other Queen, then – still anthemic, but embracing the mid-’80s trend for synthesizers and polished studio production. In the end, Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s Relaxheld Radio Ga Ga off the Number 1 spot in the UK, though it did top the charts in 19 other territories including Belgium, Sweden and Ireland. It also reached Number 6 in the Billboard Hot 100.

After the sessions in LA, work on the new album had continued at Musicland in Munich, Germany, before The Works’ release on February 27, 1984. Although it reached Number 5 in the UK and dented the Top 10 elsewhere in Europe, the band’s switch from Elektra to Capitol in the US did little to stop their commercial decline there, where the album peaked at a disappointing Number 23.

Worse than that, any hopes of the album’s next single turning the tide in the US were soon dashed when MTV opted to ban the video for I Want To Break Free. Did they genuinely believe that the sight of Queen dressed as female characters from the venerable British TV soap opera Coronation Street would corrupt America’s youth? Or had the station’s bigwigs perhaps caught wind of Radio Ga Ga’s blunt critique of MTV, and decided to punish the band? Either way, the ban on the video made Queen vow never to gig in the US again.

I Want To Break Free was another one of John Deacon’s out-of-nowhere smash hits, though it was Roger Taylor’s then partner Dominique Beyrand who came up with the cross-dressing wheeze for the video. “We wanted people to know that we didn’t take ourselves too seriously, that we could still laugh at ourselves,” Taylor said later. “I think we proved that.”

Taylor cast himself as a pigtailed schoolgirl; Brian May, clearly the Hilda Ogden of the piece, wore curlers, a pink satin nightdress and fluffy duck slippers; John Deacon, always the most reserved of the band, got off fairly lightly as an old lady whose black overcoat was set off by a fox-fur stole. But it was Freddie, of course, who really upset the censors, his camped-up vacuuming while dressed in a PVC miniskirt and tight, fake boob-padded top partially inspired by Coronation Street’s brassy barmaid, Bet Lynch.

“There was some discussion about whether or not he should shave off his moustache”, recalled the video’s director David Mallet talking to Channel 4 in 2005. “We decided it would be much funnier if he didn’t.”

Freddie’s antics were pantomime dame stuff but, in a Britain where prudish broadcasting standards campaigner Mary Whitehouse still had her acolytes, some seemed genuinely upset by the video. In Brazil, one interviewer from O Globo TV cut to the chase, asking Freddie if the song was a gay call to arms. “No,” he replied. But the song and the way that Freddie chose to perform it would soon see more questions asked of his sexuality.

On May 14, Queen played Switzerland’s Golden Rose Pop Festival, miming under duress to a backing tape, but reaching a TV audience of 350 million for their trouble. On June 25 Roger Taylor released his second solo album, Strange Frontier. One critic thought it Taylor’s attempt to “do a Bruce Springsteen”, and the work’s bombastic take on The Boss’s Racing In The Streets certainly signposted it as such.

Next came the European leg of The Works tour, a typically grandiose undertaking that began in Brussels in early August and wrapped in Vienna on September 30. The live set incorporated two giant, Metropolis-inspired cogwheels that turned throughout the show. As Queen performed in Austria, they had the satisfaction of knowing that their We Will Rock You concert video, filmed in Montreal back in November 1981, had entered the UK video charts at Number 1.

That October, however, Queen made one of the biggest blunders of their entire career when the band played eight shows at the resort of Sun City in apartheid South Africa. Not only did they in doing so break a United Nations cultural boycott, become music press pariahs and lose thousands of fans, but they were heftily fined by the Musicians’ Union. Brian May had attempted to defend his band’s position at an MU branch meeting, but both his speech and Queen’s sizeable donation to a school for black deaf-blind children near Sun City looked like somewhat desperate attempts at damage limitation.

“I’m sure a lot of people still feel we’re fascist pigs because of it,” May told Q in 1991. “Sorry, there’s nothing I can do about that, we have totally clear consciences. Of course, we are totally against apartheid. Our business manager, Jim Beach, went over to suss it out. We carefully considered all the pros and cons for a year before deciding we would be doing more to achieve the end of apartheid by going than by staying away.

“Sun City was the only place in South Africa then where a colour bar wasn’t operating. The audiences were mixed, the hotel we stayed in was mixed. We were able to speak against apartheid in interviews and play with black musicians in Soweto.”

Be that as it may, Queen were now on the UN’s list of blacklisted artists, and would remain there until South Africa’s apartheid laws were repealed in 1991. When the group charted with Thank God It’s Christmas in December 1984, the song’s title sounded like an exclamation of relief after the trials of the proceeding months. But far from bringing succour, the new year brought only more controversy. Playing Brazil’s first-ever Rock In Rio Festival in January, the band made another error of judgement.

“There’s a spot of trouble when Freddie decides to dress up in his best Bet Lynch gear for I Want To Break Free”, reported Record Mirror. “Some outraged Brazilians decide this just isn’t on and get very nasty. Instead of throwing beer cans at the stage, they decide that pebbles and bits of concrete are far more effective.”

Dodging these missiles, Mercury had been forced to sprint to safety, later saying, “I don’t know why they got so excited about me dressing up as a woman. There are lots of transvestites here.” It transpired that, unbeknown to Queen, I Want To Break Free had become a liberation anthem against Brazil’s military dictatorship. The crowd had thought Freddie’s drag act inappropriate and offensive.

In the same interview, Mercury made mention of the Band Aid single, Do They Know It’s Christmas?, on which the group didn’t appear. “I would have loved to have been [included]’, he said. “I don’t know if they would have had me anyway, because I’m a bit old. I’m just an old slag who gets up in the morning, scratches his head and wonders what he wants to fuck.”

Such flippancy around the delicate subject of aid for Africa perhaps gave further ammunition to those who felt Queen’s motives for getting involved in Live Aid weren’t the purest. But less than a year after the Sun City debacle, Bob Geldof’s charity colossus would give Queen a huge career and ego boost.

For many reasons, Live Aid was an event during which to expect the unexpected. Its unprecedented stature; its complex logistics; its necessary forgoing of artist soundchecks; the quick changeovers between acts; the well-meaning, but under-rehearsed (and in some cases unrehearsed) collaborations – these were some of the factors that led to several of the biggest names in showbiz coming unstuck for a good cause.

It had all gone swimmingly for opening act Status Quo. But then, what could go wrong with heads-down, no-nonsense boogie purveyed by a band whose joint front men had been doing largely the same thing for 20 years?

But as events at London’s Wembley Stadium and Philadelphia’s JFK Stadium unfolded, acts began to come undone. U2 went down a storm, but Bono’s bandmates were miffed when his sojourn into the Wembley crowd meant they’d had to extend Bad by several minutes and lose the rest of their set. When a specially reformed Led Zeppelin – augmented by a jet-lagged Phil Collins, among others – took the stage at 8pm in the US, they sounded ragged and out-of-tune. Worst of all, perhaps, was Bob Dylan’s 11th hour appearance with Keith Richards and Ron Wood, the impromptu trio hobbling through an awful version of Ballad Of Hollis Brown, and Dylan reportedly saying “sorry” to his manager as he walked, disconsolately, off stage.

Back at Wembley, even Paul McCartney had been wrong-footed. Microphone failure during Let It Be led the horrified former Beatle to keep cycling the tune’s intro until the crowd realised what was happening and began singing the song for him.

But no such gremlins befell Queen’s extraordinarily fine-tuned set.

The band’s triumph at Live Aid that day owed far more to preparation that it did to luck. They had hired the Shaw Theatre on Euston Road, London and rehearsed there solidly for a week. They had brought in tried-and-tested sound crew to oversee the rehearsals and handle the band’s sound on the big day.

“We didn’t have a sound-check, but we sent our brilliant engineer to check the system, so he set all the limiters for us,” Roger Taylor told MOJO in 1999. “We were louder than anybody else [at Live Aid]. You’ve got to overwhelm the crowd in a stadium.”

More than that, Queen had taken great care to ensure that their 20-minute set was a flab-free, stadium-friendly tour de force showcasing past and present highlights of their reign. And when they played that set – flawlessly and with tremendous style and vigour – Britain fell back in love with a quintessentially British band who knew exactly how to help a nation celebrate one of its better days.

In what initially seemed like an act of hubris, Queen opened with Bohemian Rhapsody. But segueing to Radio Ga Ga was a masterstroke, and the 80,000-strong crowd began singing and clapping along as one, just as the song’s video had taught them. A storming Hammer To Fall kept up the momentum, before a playful Crazy Little Thing Called Love and the surefire double-whammy of We Will Rock You and We Are The Champions. Queen, it was clear, had at least three Stairway To Heavens – and knew how to play them.

A 15-year-old Dave Grohl, still four years away from hooking-up with Kurt Cobain in Nirvana, was one of the 1.5 billion or so glued to TV sets around the world as Queen took the Live Aid stage around 8.45pm UK time.

“At that point I was just completely surrounded by punk rock and we watched Live Aid to laugh at everybody,” Grohl recalled. “After Queen were finished, all of us looked at each other and thought, ‘Oh my God! That was completely incredible!’ Everybody played that gig and Queen smoked ’em all. They walked away being the greatest band you’d ever seen in your life and it was unbelievable.”

Even Bob Geldof, whose recruitment of Queen for Live Aid had been driven by respect for their album sales, rather than a love of their music, conceded that Queen had been band of the day. “They played the best, had the best sound, used their time to the full,” he said. [It was] the perfect stage for Freddie: the whole world. And he could ponce about on-stage doing We Are The Champions. How perfect could it get?”

Chatting to The Sun six days after Live Aid, a triumphant Mercury said, “I have to win people over, otherwise it’s not a successful gig. It’s my job to make sure people have a good time.”

The following year, Queen would play their last ever gig, performing for 120,000 people at the Knebworth Festival. Shortly afterwards came the sad news that Freddie had AIDS.

Photo: Phil Dent/Redferns