The Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert: Wembley, 1992
1992 · music
On 20 April 1992 seventy two thousand people filled Wembley Stadium in London for a concert in memory of Freddie Mercury, who had died the previous November. The three surviving members of Queen played, and the songs were taken by a succession of guests who had asked to be there, among them David Bowie, Elton John, George Michael, Annie Lennox, Robert Plant, Liza Minnelli and the bands Metallica, Def Leppard and Guns N' Roses. It was broadcast live to an audience estimated at around a billion people in more than seventy countries.
Mercury had announced that he was living with AIDS one day before he died, and the concert was designed from the start to do two things at once, to remember a singer and to speak plainly about an illness that was still being discussed in whispers. Every ticket had been sold before a single performer was named.
The evening produced moments that have outlived the occasion. George Michael sang Somebody to Love with the Queen band behind him. David Bowie knelt on the stage and recited the Lord's Prayer in front of a stadium that fell silent. Annie Lennox and Bowie sang Under Pressure together for the first time.
The proceeds founded the Mercury Phoenix Trust, which has since supported hundreds of projects against HIV and AIDS around the world, many of them in countries where the subject remains difficult to raise. The concert is remembered as one of the last great communal broadcasts before the audience fragmented, and as an evening on which a stadium of people were asked to grieve and to pay attention at the same time.