Queen's performance at Live Aid
performance at Live Aid
The British rock band Queen had a 21-minute set at Wembley Stadium during Live Aid on 13 July 1985, which began at 6:41 pm. In 2005, it was voted as the best rock gig of all time.
The performance was recreated and is the focal point in the biographical film Bohemian Rhapsody (2018).
Background
Queen were not originally meant to perform at Live Aid. Organiser Bob Geldof believed "their star had risen and fallen", adding: "I was asked to call them and get them to do it. Frankly, I didn't care because if you want one word to explain why punk happened: Queen." Geldof reluctantly agreed to contact the band after being pushed by promoter Harvey Goldsmith. Lead singer Freddie Mercury was worried about their appearance being taken as a "political statement". Geldof managed to convince them otherwise.
Performance
The performance began at 6:41 pm, opening with an excerpt of "Bohemian Rhapsody". The song transitioned into "Radio Ga Ga", with the crowd clapping in sync with Mercury.
“Queen's performance at Live Aid” enters the record as performance at Live Aid. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Queen's, performance and Live can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q134374801. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1985, 2005 and 2018.
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This entry incorporates text from “Queen's performance at Live Aid” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.