“It Should Be All of Us”: Freddie Mercury’s Powerful Reflections on Live Aid, Wealth, and Shared Humanity
In Freddie Mercury: A Life In His Own Words, the Queen frontman offers a rare and poignant glimpse into the emotions that shaped one of the most iconic performances in music history—Live Aid. Speaking with honesty and gravity, Freddie addressed the criticism often aimed at wealthy performers who participated in the charity concert. “I’ve never felt guilty about being rich,” he stated. “And those feelings weren’t there when I decided to perform in Live Aid.” But what Mercury did feel was something far more personal and universal: sorrow. “What I felt was sheer sorrow and a deep upset that something like this was going on in our world, and I felt for a time, quite helpless.”
Live Aid, held on July 13, 1985, was more than just a musical event—it was a global humanitarian effort to fight famine in Ethiopia. For Mercury, it was a moment to step beyond the spotlight and into something far larger than fame. He saw the concert not merely as a spectacle, but as a wake-up call to the world. “The point of this concert is to wake people up to starvation and famine,” he said, “to make everyone realise just what’s going on, and do something positive that will hopefully touch people.”
Freddie’s words cut through cynicism with a profound message: that empathy and action shouldn’t require lived experience of suffering. “You don’t have to identify with poverty on that level to give money or to help people,” he insisted. “We shouldn’t have any kind of parallels. We shouldn’t be looking in terms of us and them. It should be all of us.” It was a call to dissolve the artificial barriers between rich and poor, between performer and audience, between comfort and suffering. “I think when people are starving, we are all humans, and we should be looked upon as such.”
In a world often divided by inequality and indifference, Mercury’s reflections remain deeply relevant. His performance at Live Aid—widely hailed as one of the greatest live sets of all time—was fueled not just by talent, but by a deep compassion that transcended stage lights and applause. At his core, Freddie Mercury was a man who used his voice not just to entertain, but to awaken something more vital in all of us: our shared responsibility to one another.