Live Aid 1985: The Fifth Man of Queen
I have definitely seen this clip from Live Aid on July 13, 1985 more than 100 times. And not once did I notice that the fifth man of Queen was visible in it from time to time. Queen and 5th man? His name is Spike Edney, and he’s still on tour with the rest of Queen today. Supposedly, he had even become aware of Adam Lambert and had given Roger Taylor the decisive tip. Of course, I had already wondered in 1985 who plays the synthesizer on Radio Gaga and operates the vocoder. Someone backstage. But if you look closely, you can see Spike Edney performing several times: In all those years, I had never noticed Spike Edney, I always thought he was just a stage mixer, and the instruments in front of him might have been from the previous act or the next. But the film crew had also done everything to get him on the screen as little as possible. After all, he was only there to complement the sound. A few months earlier, at Live in Rio, he was more prominently involved: Only later on in other recordings does it become clear that he also sang background, which explains why it always sounded like more than “just” Mercury and Taylor and sometimes May. Today Spike Edney is partly on stage as normal, for example here at ’39 in the background with the mini keyboard: That doesn’t mean that you actually have to see him as the 5th member, because there weren’t that many tours after Live Aid, and only there he was there. However, he was a permanent member of Roger Taylor’s solo project “The Cross”. Queen’s Live Aid performance is considered one of the best of the festival and of Queen himself. It feels like after all these years, you can suddenly see a ghost that was always there and had helped Queen create the sound they couldn’t have had without it. A strange feeling.