Queen movie soundtrack to use unreleased legendary Live Aid audio
The long-awaited Queen movie Bohemian Rhapsody, confirmed for release in Australia on November 1, uses real audio from the band’s most classic performance – at the famous Live Aid concert.
The greatest names were brought together on July 13 1985 by Bob Geldof to raise money for famine-struck Ethiopia.
These included U2, Sting, Mick Jagger, Dire Straits, David Bowie, The Who, Simple Minds, Elton John, Eric Clapton, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and Bob Dylan with Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood.
It is generally accepted that Queen’s 6pm performance at London’s Wembley Stadium before 72,000 people blew everyone off the stage. (The second show with US bands, at the John F Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia, drew 99,000).
Four songs from that 20-minute performance — Bohemian Rhapsody, Radio Ga Ga, Hammer To Fall and We Are the Champions as well as singer Freddie Mercury‘s “Ay-Oh” crowd singalong before Hammer To Fall — will be on the record.
They were chosen by the band at Live Aid for maximum audience participation, including the synchronised hand clapping inspired by the Radio Ga Ga video.
They have never before been released in any audio format.
Rami Malek, who plays Mercury, on a September 4 appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live revealed that the massive Live Aid sequence was the first to be shot.
“We shot the most iconic performance in rock history – Queen playing at Live Aid – on day one,” Malek said.”Our first shot was the four of us coming out onto Wembley Stadium stage as the members of Queen.”
Malek was chosen personally for the role by Queen guitarist Brian May and drummer Roger Taylor – and that their frequent presence on the set boosted his confidence in playing the charismatic and outrageous singer.
The 22-track soundtrack produced by May and Taylor will also include a version of Fat Bottomed Girls from a 1979 Paris show, Now I’m Here from the 1975 Christmas Eve show at London’s Hammersmith Odeon and Love of My Life from the Rock in Rio festival of January 1985, where Mercury and May performed it as a duet in front of 300,000 people.
We Will Rock You starts as the studio version and then blends into a live take, with audience participation, a mix created especially for the film.
May also recorded new guitar parts for the version of Don’t Stop Me Now that appears on the soundtrack, to bring the song closer to how the band plays it today.
The original rendition of Doing All Right, done with May-Taylor’s pre-Queen band Smile (they cut it again for the first Queen album) has the pair reuniting with Smile’s singer Tim Staffell to recreate the lead vocals on the song, 50 years after it was originally recorded.
Directed by Dexter Fletcher, the cast also includes Gwilym Lee as May, Ben Hardy as Taylor, Joe Mazzello as bassist John Deacon and Lucy Boynton as Mercury’s lifelong companion Mary Austin.
Bohemian Rhapsody has its world premiere in London on October 23.
Australia is the first to get it afterwards, with most of the world only getting a day after its November 1 local premiere.
The soundtrack is released on October 19.
Universal Music released the track listing on September 5, which would have been Mercury’s 72nd birthday.