Sophia Michaels
Queen will make the 1992 Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert for AIDS Awareness available on the band’s YouTube page this Friday, May 15th, to raise money for the World Health Organization and its COVID-19 relief efforts.
The concert will stream live at 2 p.m. ET/11 a.m. PT and will be available to watch for the next 48 hours. For every dollar donated during the stream, YouTube’s parent company Google will match with a $2 donation as part of its ongoing Google/YouTube UN Foundation fundraiser.
The Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert took place at Wembley Stadium in London April 20th, 1992, several months after Mercury died from complications from AIDS. The show featured Queen’s surviving members, — Brian May, Roger Taylor and John Deacon — playing an array of Queen classics and other songs with artists like David Bowie, Robert Plant, Roger Daltrey, Tony Iommi, James Hetfield, Seal, George Michael, Elton John, Axl Rose and Liza Minnelli. The show also featured individual performances from Metallica, U2, Def Leppard, Guns N’ Roses and Spinal Tap.
The profits from the concert helped launch the Mercury Phoenix Trust, which has donated over £17 million (about $20 million) to myriad projects in 57 countries to assist in the ongoing fight against AIDS.
While COVID-19 forced Queen + Adam Lambert to postpone their Rhapsody tour to 2021, the band has kept busy. At the end of April, with each member in quarantine, they remotely re-worked “We Are the Champions” into “You Are the Champions” to raise money for the WHO’s COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund.
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