Stop this insidious propaganda that Queen was Live Aid's best band

The Herald Scotland

18-07-2025

At the time I thought Hall and Oates were the best performers on the day (mostly because they were joined by David Ruffin and Eddie Kendricks of The Temptations). Watching the concert again on BBC Two on Saturday night George Michael's performance of Elton John's Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me seemed to me head and shoulders above everything else on the day (and I'm as allergic to Elton John as I am to Queen). One wonders what might have happened if Wham! had played a full set.
Freddie Mercury, lead singer with the rock group Queen, during the Live Aid concert (Image: PA)
But as it is the legend goes that Queen were the standouts and I suppose there must be something to it. 'There's a reason why people still talk about the Queen performance or the U2 performance,' Midge Ure - who, along with Bob Geldof of the Boomtown Rats instigated the whole Band Aid/Live Aid thing - told Dermot O'Leary on Radio 2 on Saturday morning. 'They were standout moments. They will go down in history … If you want to play in front of a lot of people this is how you do it.'
And the thing is, he added, on the day Queen's singer Freddie Mercury didn't feel that great. But, Ure suggested, he responded to the audience.
'It was like watching Clark Kent turn into Superman.'
I guess Ure knows what he's talking about. His band Ultravox played Wembley that day too. But unlike Queen and U2, he said, 'we looked like rabbits in the headlights up there. It was just alien to stand in front of 80,000 people with a potential television audience of 2 billion. That's just petrifying.'
Midge Ure during the Live Aid concert (Image: PA Archive/PA Images)
Perhaps that's because, as he explained to Patrick Kielty over on 5 Live later in the morning, the band went onstage without a soundcheck. Because of the cutting-edge tech they used, they normally needed five hours to make sure everything was working.
Ure has always come across as one of pop's good guys; someone who never let a modicum of success go to his head. And he's a practised raconteur. Talking to Kielty about the making of the Band Aid record he admitted that on the day of the recording neither he nor Bob Geldof were sure anyone would turn up.
'There's Bob and I standing outside an empty studio on a cold, wet Sunday morning surrounded by cameras and microphones and we had no idea who was going to turn up because we'd spoken directly to the artists. Not an adult. Not somebody who might write down where and when they were required.
'So, yeah, there's just Bob and I standing there and Bob leans over to me and says to me 'if it's just the Boomtown Rats and Ultravox we're …' Well, he didn't repeat the expletive, but he probably didn't need to. " You can imagine … But they all turned up.'
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As for Live Aid itself, Ure recalled being in the green room before things kicked off. 'You could see the bands all clique together. The New Romantics were in one corner and the rock guys were in another corner and the moment Status Quo kicked off you looked around the room and all the heads were nodding.'
Talking about Live Aid must have become second nature to Ure over the years. But he shows no signs of getting bored of it and, better than that, he remains amused and amusing on the chaos of the whole thing. My favourite story was probably the one he told O'Leary about meeting Freddie Mercury at the Wembley Arena, which was acting as the backstage area for the Stadium during Live Aid. It was the only time he ever met Queen's frontman.
'I'm walking down the hallway of the arena and I see Freddie sitting perched on the edge of a fountain,' Ure recalled. 'And he spies me and he calls me over. 'Darling, darling, come here.' So I'm chatting to Freddie and he says, 'You're that lovely boy from the Boomtown Rats, aren't you?''
Listen Out For: Screenshot, Radio 4, July 22, 11am
Just a quick shout for Mark Kermode and Ellen E Jones's film show which this week tackles Scotland on screen. And so Frankie Boyle talks Trainspotting, Kayleigh Donaldson tackles Bill Forsyth and Brian Cox gets to speak about the greatest ever Scottish film, I Know Where I'm Going.