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 countless teens (like me) who were glued to the TV broadcast via the planet’s first live intercontinental satellite hookup — heard songs that made us believe we could change the world. In 2018, at a time when technology dictates instantaneous point-and-click philanthropy, a concert literally “changing the world” might seem trite, outmoded, and naive. Yet, Live Aid’s more than sixteen hours of real-time rock and roll opened many eyes to the imbalance of Western wealth and extreme poverty for the first time, and in some cases, the concert’s influence led directly to fans’ future career choices in journalism, health care, or nonprofit work. The event also influenced the well-documented rise of international development organizations, think tanks, and celebrity charities.

U2, Elton John, and Paul McCartney gave historic performances at Live Aid, but Queen was the most effective act of the day. Why? Because the moment the band played that first note onstage, it…