re: Did anyone here attend the 1985 Live Aid concert, or watch it live on television?

Eric Clapton attributes his smokin performance at Live Aid 1985 as getting his career back on track in the mid 80’s.

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(If you're thinking of the movie where he tells the band he had AIDs right before, I think that was revisionism for dramatic effect - perhaps conflating both those things into a single event. I'm just talking about a throat infection here for Live Aid.)

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He may have had a throat infection or issues from just completing a long tour, and I've just never read about it...couldn't find it online either.
But I do know that the whole {Timeline/Not having his voice one week before LIVE AID/band being broken up before live aid/Coughing up blood before going on stage/even knowing he had AIDS at that time} was fabricated for the movie.

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He may have had a throat infection or issues from just completing a long tour, and I've just never read about it...couldn't find it online either.

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He was a private guy and a lot is speculation. The reason why 1984 is iffy is that he was clearly in pretty good health until around mid-1985 (Live Aid).

ETA: Now,around 1984 he started noticing the now telltale Karposi sarcoma, which he initially attributed to bruising. Over time, that became harder to ignore.

The tests were poor for HIV/AIDs back then and he may or may not have gotten a positive ELISA (an early, imperfect HIV testing protocol) test as early as 1984.

Even if that happened, what would it have meant? Doctors might have said, "We just don't know. This test gives false positives. This is uncharted territory for a lot of us." But, in 1985, Rock Hudson died on October 2nd. With Freddie's lifestyle and concerns, I believe he had received at least one positive test around that time, with however much certainty it conveyed.

Certainly after that, Freddie suspicions about his health narrowed to this focus. Swollen lymph nodes are a very common symptom, so voice problems are almost expected. Also, Freddie's behavior and carousing were significantly curtailed from late 1985 onward.

So, did he "know" at Live Aid? Maybe not. Probably not definitively, in any case. Did he suspect it? I would say almost certainly. Obviously, the tests got better until early 1987 when Western Blot came out. Freddie certainly knew by the end of the Spring that year, as he also had a lymph node biopsy.

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I just don't remember that level of pyrotechnics being used back then

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Huh? Yea, all the bands had back then was musical ability which I guess is boring.

With that said, I watched some of it on tv but those bands were considered bloated old people's music by '85 so i wasnt really impressed. Plus I had grown up listening to them and seeing them on Night Flight, Midnight Special, Don Kirshner, etc. so they were nothing new.

I've read that he wasn't diagnosed until 1987, but it was obvious before then that something was wrong with Freddie. Also, the point about him telling his fellow band mates about his condition was indeed fabricated for the movie in an attempt to raise the stakes of the Live Aid concert for plot purposes. The movie also omitted the tour that Queen went on preceding Live Aid.

Something else I found interesting is that he didn't tell the rest of the band until a short-ish time before his death. I don't know exactly when, but it wasn't long before his death that they received the news.

For someone with a very outgoing stage presence, he certainly had a bit of an introverted personal life. There's a good YouTube documentary on Queen if anyone is interested.

Queen Documentary

Even if the Plant/Page set was considered "bad," I still watched the shite out of it on a worn VHS cassette.

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To anyone that saw it live/on TV - what was it like?

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On TV. Mono and shitty resolution.

I saw most of it. I was on vacation at my sister's place in
St. Petersburg, Fl. I do remember I didn't really know a lot about Led Zeppelin at the time, but I remember being underwhelmed after all the hype, and then also thinking Queen kicked arse.

I was only 14, so I didn't appreciate it as much as I would have if I'd been a little older.

I watched Live Aid. I spent the whole day watching it. It was awesome (except for the Zeppelin train wreck).

I liked Queen's hits, and really loved the whole News of the World album. I lost interest in the 80's. To this day I don't own any of their albums after The Game. I liked Flash Gordon but that was kind of cheesy. I was not a fan of their latest single Radio Ga Ga at all. My first exposure was Killer Queen. They were moving in a direction that didn't appeal to me and I had pretty much written them off. I was only interested in hearing their older tunes.

I've never seen anything before or since like the way Freddie took over that stadium during Radio Ga Ga. I was in awe. I don't even like the song and I still get caught up in it. I'd never play it on the jukebox. But I've watched that performance dozens of times. I've never seen anyone own a crowd like Freddie did that day. Greatest performance in rock history as far as I'm concerned.