Contentious viewpoint on Live Aid...it's not perfect.

My guess is HTF was chosen for pure noise, and to create a big impact. It was also a better representation of The Works to choose a heavy song and a pop song (GaGa), rather than two pop songs. Track times may also have been a factor. They had to make it fit into 23 minutes. Personally, I think it was a well balanced set.

They did shorten Hammer by having Brian play just the 2nd half of the solo like on the single. I thought it made sense that it followed the high energy of Radio Ga Ga. That said, it did that moment near the end where Roger missed Freddie's cue to end the song. I'd brush it off as one of those spontaneous moments.

Now that you mentioned TYMD, I guess if they swapped Radio Ga Ga with a shortened TYMD, it would still work.

Often the most popular shows of any band become overrated. Happens with Queen- many cite Montreal to be their best show of all time, when really- it's not even the best show of that year. Even in strictly objective terms, it has one of the weaker setlists.

My point with that is to say, I've listened to every single circulating Queen concert and I strongly disagree with this take. In fact, the MORE I learned about Queen's live history, the more amazing Live Aid seems.

First off, I think the setlist is perfect. There isn't a single song I would change. You have to keep in mind, now Hammer To Fall may seem like a strange choice over a Queen staple like Tie Your Mother Down or Now I'm Here, but you need to remember the context of the day. That was one of the singles for their most recent album at the time. It was fresh in the public conscience- atleast more fresh than Tie Your Mother Down, which was an 8 year old song. (Can YOU remember many songs you heard on the radio 8 years ago?)

That's all well and good, but the performance?

Again, to fully understand how good Live Aid was, I'd like to put you into the context of the time.

Before Live Aid, Queen were going through a very tense time.
They saw failure in North America so bad that they didn't even bother to tour there. They were the center of controversy because they played at Sun City during an apartheid-based boycott, the band were tired of each other, and these struggles came across on stage.
The Works tour (September 1984-May 1985) is often cited by many bootleg listeners as Queen's worst tour. There are of course some diamonds in the rough, and no Queen concert will be a BAD concert, but in general it sounds like the band is just going through the motions. Less inspired. More and more songs would get dropped from the setlist as the tour went on, and by the Australian leg, it just seems like the band wants to get the tour over. Freddie stopped caring about his vocal condition and that led to some very poor vocal performances as well. Queen were also fighting internally. Brian even made a goodbye speech to the entire Queen crew on the last night of The Works tour as the band were unsure whether or not they wanted to continue together.

So Live Aid? Holy fuck. It's one of the tightest sets in the band's entire career, ESPECIALLY for Freddie and Brian.
Bohemian Rhapsody features Freddie going for every single Bb4 in the song besides "carry on", an amazing rendition and the definitive medley version. If you're not familiar with Bohemian Rhapsody live- that's a huge deal.
To put it into perspective, Live Aid is the ONLY concert in 1985 where Freddie actually sings the original melody for "Now I've gone and thrown it all away." Up to that point, Freddie had only ever done that live 4 confirmed times. He only did that 4 times at concert from 1975-1985, and Live Aid was one of them. It's got the tightest intonation up to that point as well.


Usual live phrasing: (0:31)


Live Aid: (0:59)

Radio Ga Ga and Hammer To Fall are often considered the best live versions of the songs, for good reason. Freddie goes for some rare phrasings and notes that he wouldn't even dream of attempting during The Works tour. Hammer To Fall was also shortened significantly, to be more like its single version, and the tempo is FAST. Much faster than other live versions. So no, I wouldn't say that the Live Aid one "drags on for too long."


Usual live phrasing: (1:25)

Live Aid: (1:27)

We Will Rock You was never a huge vocal spectacle, but even that song gets something of note, as Freddie goes for one of the A4s for the first time in years. In the 70's he got them all the time, but he stopped doing them some point in the early 80's, with it only returning a handful of times within the hundreds of shows. It's slightly overshot, but the fact that Freddie even went for it at all is pretty damn special.

Usual '80s phrasing (0:34) 


Live Aid: (0:24)

The main thing here is We Are The Champions. TO THIS DAY, no version of We Are The Champions live even comes CLOSE to Live Aid's. Not even the legendary Crazy Tour.
Not only does Freddie go for the studio octave in a chorus, he does them in ALL THREE. There is NO other instance of this in the entirety of Queen's live history. From 1977-1986, there is not a single version where Freddie does this except Live Aid.

Usual live phrasing (octave low) 0:55

Live Aid phrasing (High octave, what Freddie does on the News Of The World album) 0:56

Not only that, he gets the "keep on FIGH-tiiing" C5 in the first chorus. INCREDIBLY rare, last done in 1981.

This version of We Are The Champions would already be the best version of all time because of this, but not only is Freddie fucking amazing, BRIAN is too. Brian does both of these two studio guitar licks for the ONLY RECORDED time in Queen's live history. He must have heard Freddie going all out and gotten some inspiration.


What Brian plays on News Of The World (1:42)


Live Aid (1:56)

Again just to reiterate. There's over 400 concerts with We Are The Champions, and the ONLY time that Freddie and Brian have ever done these was at Live Aid. 

Live Aid quite possibly saved Queen, too. It lit the fire that had gone out years prior.
    
John: "[Live Aid was] the one day that I was proud to be involved in the music business. A lot of days you certainly don't feel that, but that one day was fabulous. Elton John told us we were great, and Sting, who'd never seen us before, congratulated us. People forgot that element of competitiveness and it was a good morale booster for us too. It showed us the strength of our support in England, and what we still had to offer as a band."
Roger: "Live Aid was a shot in the arm. We were so jaded by that point. We didn't think we'd tour again for five years if at all - we'd just had it."
Freddie: "From our perspective, the fact that Live Aid happened when it did was really lucky. It came out of nowhere to save us. For sure that was a turning point. Maybe you could say that in the history of Queen, it was a really special moment."
    
To wrap it up, I genuinely just think your critique of Live Aid is because you've heard it too many times.
Of course any performance is going to get more dull/show more holes after hearing it a gazillion times, but that's not what the show was designed for. It was designed to show that Queen were true musicians, even without their grand lighting rigs or pyrotechnics. It showed the world that these aging Queens were still a mighty fine group, and that they were here to stay.
It did EXACTLY what it needed to do for Queen, and it did it damn well. 

No performance is perfect, but Queen at Live Aid may well be the closest thing.

HTF was their most recent single (that was playable in July) at the time.

..and was a bigger hit than TYMD, by the way...

...aaaand, they've effectively taken the last four songs from the main set at the time, plus the last encore. It's a 20 minute "big finish"

No one has mentioned about the ending of HTF at Live Aid!! Roger finishes early or Brian carries on too long…

Yeah it took me a while to realise after I read something that they nearly faltered. Could you imagine if they car crashed the song?! Freddie managed to keep everyone on track and saved the day. It was probably more problematic shortening the song when they are used to playing longer solos. 

It's not perfect, but it was literally THE best performance of the day - and I wasn't a Queen fan at the time it aired.
They were like an explosion in your face that woke everyone up after a long, boring, dull sounding afternoon and they gained MANY new fans that day.

Yep. But these multi-band sets are often tense for everyone involved, as it's a technical quagmire - and bands usually don't get soundchecks as a result. Roger Taylor has said countless times that his monitor mix was awful, so he probably didn't even hear a single word Freddie sang.

Musicians are pros, and they adjust. But usually they're not doing it in front of a billion people on TV.

I always thought that it was Crazy Little Thing that went on too long, cut two minutes off that one plus another one off HTF and there's room for an extra song in there. And yes, the ending is dodgy but it somehow cements the idea of a real live show, warts and all.

HTF is already cut incredibly short compared to other versions, and the tempo was taken much faster- probably to account for the time limit. It's already the shortest version of all time, I don't think there's any need for that.

As for CLTCL, that was their NUMBER 1 worldwide hit, it was absolutely huge and was only 5 years old. 

I seriously don't think anything needs to change with Live Aid's set. Sure, another song maybe could have been thrown into the mix, but I wouldn't say their set is worse without one. Quality over quantity, I'd say. 

The only way you could shorten Crazy is by doing like the video footage of Queen playing in Budapest; the first verse straight into the a-cappella which doesn't work so well. As others have already said Crazy is one of the biggest songs Queen had up to that point and Hammer was already shortened significantly. You could shorten Bo Rhap even more by making it one verse which was done once by Q+AL in 2013. (That show for iHeart was really interesting as they did 10 songs in 30 minutes, and they truncated versions of 8 songs.)

The only song that wasn't significantly shortened was We Are The Champions. It's pretty much the same length as it always is live. It's a shame they had to shorten We Will Rock You because it seems a bit cruel that they did one and not the other. 

But really it seems a shame to squeeze another song in if they had to trim others. I feel if they messed about with any of the songs more other WATC I think there would've been injustice. It felt and feels like a proper concert as they are doing full rendition of songs instead of a giant medley. That's not what a Queen show is about. 

The setlist was perfect and the performance was near damn perfect too. As others have said, no performance is ever perfect. 

Brian actually attempted that guitar flick in Stockholm in 1982 which can be heard on the audience recording

Live Aid version: 3.58
Studio version:   2.42

Try and anorak your way out of that. No one here says history should have been different, it was just a hypothetical discussion about finding a few extra minutes to slip one more song into the Live Aid setlist. 

If you read it again I said "live"... (and I was referring to We Are The Champions too...)

But it's still applicable to CLTCL. Queen never played the song live under 3 minutes and 20 seconds. Fact! The shortest versions of the song were prior the "fifth member" on stage and after this point, live performances were usually 4 minutes and longer. Remember the studio version has a fade out so no clear ending. And obviously Queen added a heavy section lacking from the studio version. There's no way they would perform the song without this jam, it's one of the fun and spontaneous bits in the Queen show. The fact they can do it with a song known to most people seems a no brainer to play at Live Aid.

Realistically, there's no obvious way of cutting down the Live Aid songs any more. I'd recommend anyone who's curious about this sort of thing to watch Q+AL doing 8 songs in just under 20 minutes here:



The songs here were:

Bo Rhap / Bites The Dust / Crazy Little Thing
Who Wants To Live Forever
Dragon Attack / Bo Rhap (Rock) / Rock You / Champions

Crazy Little Thing was performed in entirety even with the rock section at the end but there was no solo. So yes, this was the one time it was played live under 3 minutes.