Twenty minutes that turned a stadium into one voice

Live Aid was Bob Geldof's answer to the famine in Ethiopia: two stadium concerts in one day, Wembley in London and JFK Stadium in Philadelphia, linked by satellite and watched by an estimated 1.9 billion people in around 150 countries. Every act got roughly twenty minutes and no soundcheck. Queen, whose commercial standing in 1985 was shaky after the mixed reception of The Works tour and a controversial run of shows in apartheid-era South Africa, were slotted into the early evening, between Dire Straits and David Bowie.

They treated the twenty minutes like a heavyweight title fight. The set opened with the piano section of Bohemian Rhapsody and moved straight into Radio Ga Ga, where the double handclap of the video became a stadium-wide gesture, 72,000 pairs of arms rising and falling together. Mercury then led the crowd through a wordless call-and-response, the "Ay-Oh" that has since been given its own nickname, before Hammer to Fall, Crazy Little Thing Called Love, We Will Rock You and We Are the Champions. The band had rehearsed the compressed set for three days at the Shaw Theatre, and their sound engineer is said to have nudged the house limiters so they were simply louder than everyone else.

What the broadcast captured was a singer completely in command of a crowd that had not come specifically to see him. It reset Queen's fortunes overnight: their back catalogue re-entered the UK charts the following week, the Magic Tour the next summer filled stadiums across Europe, and the set has topped polls of the greatest live performance ever since, including a 2005 poll of musicians, critics and industry figures.