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<\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\nWhen it came to organising Live Aid, Queen was high on Bob Geldof\u2019s hit list, but the band weren\u2019t immediately won over.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Lesley Ann Jones is the author of\u00a0Freddie Mercury: The Definitive Biography<\/em>, who went on the road with the band many times and covered Live Aid. She told me Freddie had been slightly miffed at not being invited to record\u00a0Do They Know It\u2019s Christmas?<\/em>\u00a0the previous November, and had to be asked extra nicely by Geldof to perform at Live Aid.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cEventually Bob called up Queen\u2019s manager and said \u2018Look, what\u2019s up with the old queen? It\u2019s the perfect stage for him. It\u2019s the entire world\u2019. When it was put to him that way, Freddie just got it, and said OK, because it couldn\u2019t happen without him. It was very much Freddie\u2019s day.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The band were renowned for their live performances \u2013 having just performed for 325,000 people at Rock In Rio earlier that year \u2013 but they were still on the verge of being a bit past it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cNobody knew at the time, but Queen were very much on the wane at this point\u201d, Lesley Ann says. \u201cThings weren\u2019t going that well.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Their 1984 effort The Works<\/em> hadn\u2019t been a huge hit, and Freddie had just released his solo debut in April 1985, Mr Bad Guy<\/em>, an implication that the band was on something of a break. 15 years into their career, and they were looking like more of a heritage act than a serious contemporary force.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Nevertheless, they were guaranteed to deliver the kind of showmanship Geldof was determined to deliver. Paul Gambaccini was one of the BBC\u2019s big hitters who was assigned to cover Live Aid from Wembley Stadium.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI went up to Wembley to interview the artists backstage for television and radio,\u201d he told me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cFreddie wouldn\u2019t give an interview on the day because he had vocal trouble. His doctor told him not to do the show, but of course he was determined to do it anyway.\u201d Gambaccini and Mercury were friends, but even he didn\u2019t see Queen\u2019s magic moment coming.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cAt the time you thought, \u2018Who\u2019s going to be the hottest?\u2019 Obviously, U2 and Phil Collins were really hot. And of course, Paul McCartney was going to be on the show, so I don\u2019t think anybody saw that the number one would be Queen. Everybody knew Queen put on a great show and would be really good.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Nobody knew they would throw anybody else in the shadow.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Weeks of excitement, stress and uncertainty came to a grand climax as Live Aid kicked off at 12 noon on that sweltering hot July Saturday. With a brass fanfare from the Coldstream Guards, and the arrival of Prince Charles and Princess Diana, Geldof\u2019s concept came together spectacularly for a global audience across 150 countries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Backstage, however, was chaotic. A sign told the stars to check their egos at the door, and dressing rooms had to be shared – as did just three press passes, which were switched between dozens of journalists waiting patiently outside.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It seems suitable that on a day that defined the ’80s, most attendees recall cocaine was in abundance behind the scenes. Freddie Mercury didn\u2019t arrive until about 5 pm, with his Irish boyfriend Jim Hutton. He was nervous but being his usual self, and was seen downing a couple of vodka tonics. Bono has said he hadn\u2019t realised quite how camp Freddie was until he had him pinned up against a wall, complimenting him on his singing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Later, upon encountering David Bowie, looking immaculate in a powder blue suit, Freddie purred, \u201cIf I didn\u2019t know you any better I\u2019d have to eat you.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n It was 6.41 pm in London when Queen strode out on stage; Freddie punching the air, egging on the crowd before the first note of music was even played. They were the last act to perform in daylight, which Roger Taylor told me was very odd for them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cLights are everything, but they do nothing in the daytime. We never performed in the daytime.\u201d But, he says, their hands weren\u2019t forced.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe didn\u2019t want to go on too late because we knew it would be a very long day.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The tea time slot not only caught most of Britain sitting down for the evening, but the U.S. audience had also just joined in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe had only been added to the bill quite late on, and the audience was not a Queen audience, so we were nervous,\u201d Taylor concludes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe knew it was going to be a big deal within the context of the day because we knew it was going to be something special, but we didn\u2019t have any great expectations of our performance.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sitting down at the piano, Freddie teased the crowd with a few bashed-out chords on the black grand piano before delivering the opening ballad segment of\u00a0Bohemian Rhapsody<\/em>, immediately setting the tone for the mother of all sing-a-longs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Just before slipping into the operatic section, the band simmered, and Freddie arose from the piano, fist in the air, before being handed his famous bottomless microphone stand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n With a theatrical turn, he proceeded to prance across the stage as the opening riffs of\u00a0Radio Ga Ga<\/em>\u00a0struck up. Within seconds, the microphone was being used as a sceptre, an air guitar, and a phallic extension.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Watching back, it\u2019s clear from this moment that he has the audience eating out of his hand, and he knows it. As he sings of \u201cthe girls and boys\/who just don\u2019t know and just don\u2019t care,\u201d the girls and boys of the audience \u2013 sweating and soaked from stewards\u2019 hoses \u2013 punch the air in total unison with him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Paul Gambaccini was backstage with the other artists in the green room, and his most clear memory of the day is their reactions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cEveryone looked up at the monitor and you could see it dawning on them… Queen was stealing the show.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Without even instructing them to do so, the 72,000-strong crowd spontaneously performed the now-famous overhead clap through the chorus of\u00a0Radio Ga Ga<\/em>\u00a0– first seen in the music video for the song the previous year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After a day of many acts who could never have dreamed of playing anywhere bigger than a regional arena, here was a stadium-worthy moment – the very kind Geldof was desperate to see – and according to some, the sight that led him to make his famous \u2018Give us your fucking money outburst, when he realised they still weren\u2019t generating enough donations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The sight delivered an iconic image; a sea of people, completely engaged, totally enthralled by one man: Freddie Mercury.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Curiously, for someone with such stage presence, Freddie was a vastly different person in real life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cHe had a way of pumping himself up,\u201d Taylor remembers. \u201cHe became a different person when he went on stage, and all of sudden he was magnetic, and the crowd loved it. He really was spectacular on that day.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Lesley Ann describes the transformation she watched him undertake at multiple gigs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWhen he was offstage, he was a very low-key bloke. He didn\u2019t even draw attention to himself, he had a quiet voice. He wasn\u2019t a mincing queen or flamboyant. The minute he went out on stage he seemed to double in size, and he suddenly became a gigantic rock star.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Just when it seemed like it couldn\u2019t get any better, Freddie took it up a notch. Standing centre stage, now super inflated, he launched into his \u2018Ay-oh!\u2019 call and response. The audience mimicked him (to the best of their abilities), and the moment again reflected the interactive mood of the day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Unlike many of the other artists, who were busy pretending that there weren\u2019t quite so many people watching them, Freddie was determined to reach every single person watching.<\/p>\n\n\n\n During\u00a0Hammer To Fall,<\/em>\u00a0he took a BBC cameraman by the waist, and danced with him, while looking straight down his camera, to a global audience that was anywhere between 1 and 2 billion people, tuned in through about 95% of the world\u2019s television sets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sonically, if Queen sounded a hell of a lot better than all the other acts, it was because they\u2019d given themselves a sneaky leg up in the audio department.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Lesley Ann was watching from the side of the stage, and shed some light on the technical side of things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cQueen had their sound engineer go out the front to \u2018check the system\u2019, but what he was really doing was whacking up the sound level, so Queen was actually producing a sound on the day that was much louder than all the other bands that had come before. So of course people stood up and took notice.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Freddie strapped on guitar for\u00a0Crazy Little Thing Called Love<\/em>, and spoke his only words of the whole set.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThis next song is only dedicated to beautiful people here tonight. It means all of you,\u201d he grinned, \u201cthank you for coming along, and making this a great occasion.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n When Roger Taylor dropped the famous drum riff of We Will Rock You<\/em>, things reached fever pitch, and to close out, Freddie led the audience, swaying en masse, through a rousing We Are The Champions<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n By the time he blew the crowd a farewell kiss, they were screaming in a sort of rock music ecstasy, and he was drenched in sweat – looking positively post-coital.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As the other members of Queen took modest bows and left the stage, a sunset was cast across Wembley Stadium, but it didn\u2019t reflect any sort of diminution for the band. It rather implied the light left with Freddie, and a little extra luck was needed for the following acts to shine \u2013 even though that did include David Bowie, The Who, Elton John and Paul McCartney.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201dQueen were slightly past their peak when they went on,\u201d concludes Paul Gambaccini, \u201cWhen they came off they were at a new peak.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Whether or not Queen realised it, they had not only delivered the performance of the day, not just the performance of their careers but possibly the greatest live performance of all time. Certainly, that was the consensus reached by a 2005 BBC poll of 60 journalists and music industry experts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When I put it to Roger Taylor, he\u2019s all too modest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cOh stop. Who decides this? Did they go to every single gig?!\u201d He feels the atmosphere of the day contributed hugely to the electricity of the moment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cYou couldn\u2019t fail,\u201d he says, \u201cBut you could fail to do it spectacularly!\u201d On Freddie, Taylor hasn\u2019t a bad word to say (\u201cWell we never fell out,\u201d he shrugs), and claims the rest of the band adored him as much as the rest of the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Looking back though, he admits, \u201cWe didn\u2019t fully appreciate how incredible Freddie was until we lost him.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Freddie was 38 when he entertained the world at Live Aid, and while it was undoubtedly the peak of his career, it also marked the beginning of the end of his short life. Just a year before he was diagnosed with HIV, it\u2019s likely that Freddie knew \u2013 on some level \u2013 that he had already contracted the virus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI can\u2019t say for sure that he knew on the day, he never told me that,\u201d Lesley Ann says, \u201cbut Barbara Valentin – an actress who he lived with in Munich at the time – recounted a few experiences to me of Freddie cutting himself in the bathroom and screaming at her to stay away from him, so it seems likely that he knew at that point.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Beneath the bravado of the Live Aid performance, Freddie was now harbouring two huge secrets about his personal life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Famously private, Freddie never publicly admitted to being gay, and most people were entirely unaware. Curiously, the \u2018Castro clone\u2019 image he presented to the world was hugely popular on the underground gay scene, but as yet entirely unknown to the general public.<\/p>\n\n\n\n His physique and moustache were seen by many as being strong indicators of his red-blooded, hetero masculinity, and his theatricality was simply that; he was, after all a performer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s hard to watch back the Live Aid performance and not see an alpha gay in his element, but in 1985, that was not how it was perceived.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe majority of the audience watching Live Aid would not have been aware he was gay,\u201d Paul Gambaccini confirmed, simply citing a more innocent contemporary attitude.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThey only thought that people were gay if they said they were gay.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n When Freddie was diagnosed with HIV\/AIDS, the information was not shared with anyone beyond the band.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cHe was tested in 1986 but no announcement was ever made, every rumour was denied,\u201d explains Lesley Ann.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Freddie was hounded for years by the press \u2013 The Sun in particular \u2013 who profiled his increasingly gaunt appearance and attempted to call him out on the true state of his health. Freddie maintained this privacy until the very end, only releasing a statement confirming he had AIDS the day before he died on 24 November 1991, aged 45.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cHe was keeping his personal life private because of his parents and other members of his family,\u201d Lesley Ann continues. \u201cHomosexuality is not permissible in their religion. It seems awful to me now that he was forced to conceal his true identity and hide his real self for the sake of other people\u2019s feelings. I know that he wasn\u2019t happy. He wasn\u2019t happy most of his life.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Although Freddie did have an on-off relationship with Jim Hutton until his death, Lesley Ann still feels his private life was one carried out under a blot of sadness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cHis mum\u2019s favourite song of his is Somebody To Love<\/em> and that was really the song that summed Freddie up. He never really found the true love of his life.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n Had he lived, Freddie would be in his seventies, and it\u2019s mind-boggling to imagine him alive and kicking in 21st century Britain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI sometimes think that he would love this,\u201d Paul Gambaccini tells me, as we discuss the immortality Freddie enjoys.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cHe would love the fact that he\u2019s current even though he\u2019s been dead for years. Obviously, he deserved a longer life, but nonetheless, because of the history, he does have a long-lived life.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Financially, the success of Live Aid has long been disputed, with many claiming not enough of the \u00a3150 million raised went to the people who needed it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Nevertheless, it invigorated the concept of musicians using their talent and profile to highlight charitable causes. Technologically though, Live Aid was an unbelievable triumph.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Happening in a world without the Internet or mobile phones, messages were sent on fax machines, every phone donation had to be answered by an actual human being, TV was analogue and there were only 4 channels.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Between sets, the artists had just minutes to switch over their equipment on a revolving stage covered in snaking wires, multiple extension leads and bulky BBC TV cameras. It was a health and safety nightmare, and a total mind fuck for anyone behind one of the dozens of control panels. The fact that the show ran for 16 hours without the whole screen going black at any point is nothing short of a miracle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cLive Aid should not have been possible,\u201d says Lesley Ann. \u201cIt was old-fashioned and archaic. Somehow or other, it came together on the day. But with the birth of digital technology, that kind of thing was no longer an amazing feat.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Likewise, never again could a performer hope to be given a global platform quite like it, let alone the opportunity to seize it as Freddie\u00a0did. There\u00a0has never since been an event with as many viewers, evoking as much heightened emotion, all engaging in\u00a0One Vision<\/em>\u00a0(a song Queen wrote about the event), and – because of the way we now consume television in the digital age \u2013 there never will be again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Live Aid brought the world together, and everyone shared the moment, at the moment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It just so happened to be Freddie\u2019s finest moment too – a moment in the gay community\u2019s history when one of our greatest heroes represented us at our absolute best \u2013 even if it was from within the closet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Watching it back on YouTube, Freddie\u2019s energy and spirit appear as symbolic of the gay community. In the face of adversity, he puffed up his chest and battled onward \u2013 not just to entertain people, but to totally electrify them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n All too often in the gay community, we idolise tragic heroism in our much loved female stars; perhaps the ultimate instance came from within our own ranks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n