Queen's Live Aid performance in July 1985 may have clocked in at just 17 minutes, but they were 17 minutes which would both make rock history and transform the band for good. Though they'd enjoyed continued success with their platinum-selling 11th album The Works in 1984, as the mid-80s beckoned, frontman Freddie Mercury found himself disillusioned and searching for something new.
“We were all forming a sort of a rut," Mercury said at the time. "I wanted to get out of this last 10 years of what we were doing. It was so routine. It was like, go to the studio, do an album, go out on the road, go round the world and flog it to death, and by the time you came back it was time to do another album.
