Queen’s Brilliance at Live Aid: Here’s What Bohemian Rhapsody Missed

Neither the film nor recent media coverage about the band recognizes the most important element of Live Aid.

Bohemian Rhapsody, the Queen biopic named after one of the British rock group’s most famous songs, opened in theaters two weeks ago. The movie’s re-enactment of the band’s appearance at Live Aid, the 1985 concert to benefit Ethiopians affected by famine, is a triumphant climax in an otherwise standard retelling of Queen’s formation and meteoric rise to fame in the 1970s and 1980s.​ Actor Rami Malek’s uncanny portrayal of singer Freddie Mercury during the Live Aid scenes, in particular, has sparked renewed interest in the London and Philadelphia shows that were broadcast to one-third of the earth’s population more than three decades ago. Publications such as The New York Times and USA Today have done an excellent job parsing Bohemian Rhapsody and original concert footage for insights into Queen’s set that day at Wembley Stadium, where guitarist Brian May’s power chords and Mercury’s voice and sexually-ambiguous dance moves mesmerized the masses. However, neither the Queen biopic nor recent media coverage about the band recognizes the most important element of Live Aid: the fans.

Why the fans mattered most

On July 13, 1985, hundreds of millions of music lovers in dozens of countries — including 72,000 at the U.K. show, 100,000 U.S. attendees at JFK Stadium, and…