Live Aid - Wembley Stadium, London, Britain, 7-13-1985, Part 4: Dire Straits, Queen, and David Bowie

This is the fourth of five albums of the London portion of the 1985 Live Aid concert.

Generally, I had at least four musical acts for each part. But this time, it's only three. That's because they are three very big acts at the time, so they were given longer time spots.

First up was Dire Straits. They only played two songs, but together those totaled nearly twenty minutes. For "Money for Nothing," the band was joined by Sting on backing vocals, just as it was on the original studio recording.

Queen was up next. Many say that this was the best set of all the Live Aid acts. Amazingly, in 2004, a poll of music industry insiders called the "World's Greatest Gigs" voted this as the best concert of all time! I think that's a bit much. It was only 21 minutes long, so it's hard to compare with great full-length concerts. Much of what was great about it was the visual performance of lead singer Freddie Mercury, which obviously can't be captured in an audio recording. But it was so impressive that Queen's albums jumped back up the charts after Live Aid, just like U2's did. And the 2018 movie about Queen, "Bohemian Rhapsody," made their Live Aid performance the emotional peak of the film, and recreated it with great attention to detail.

It must have been tough to follow an act like that, but David Bowie did a commendable job. He would have a rough late 1980s, but in 1985, he was still riding high from his smash 1983 album "Let's Dance." Rolling Stone Magazine later noted that his performance was "arguably Bowie's last triumph of the 1980s," and that "as approximately two billion people sang along to 'Heroes' ... he still seemed like one of the biggest and most vital rock stars in the world."

This album is an hour long.

070 talk (Tommy Vance)
071 Money for Nothing (Dire Straits with Sting)
072 talk (Dire Straits)
073 Sultans of Swing (Dire Straits)
074 talk (Griff Rhys Jones & Mel Smith)
075 Bohemian Rhapsody (Queen)
076 Radio Gaga (Queen)
077 Audience Participation (Queen)
078 Hammer to Fall (Queen)
079 talk (Queen)
080 Crazy Little Thing Called Love (Queen)
081 We Will Rock You (Queen)
082 We Are the Champions (Queen)
083 talk (Andy Peebles)
084 TVC-15 (David Bowie)
085 Rebel Rebel (David Bowie)
086 Modern Love (David Bowie)
087 Heroes (David Bowie)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15749024/LveAidJFKStdiumLondnPA__7-13-1985_Part4.zip.html

As usual for this series, I split the cover into four parts so I could include photos from more of the acts. This is pretty much the only album in the series where there were only three acts: Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits in the top left, Freddie Mercury and Brian May of Queen in the top right, and David Bowie in the bottom left. That left me one more spot to fill. So I chose a crowd scene, since I had one of those for the Philadelphia concert but none for the London one.