The British Music Experience tells the story of British Music through costumes, instruments, performance and memorabilia. Whatever age you are, and whatever you are into, there is something here for you.
We’ve got outfits worn by artists from Freddie Mercury and Dusty Springfield to Adam Ant, the Spice Girls and Mick Jagger and musical instruments played by some of the world’s most renowned artists from Queen’s Roger Taylor to the Sex Pistols and Ian Curtis. We even have handwritten song lyrics from Adele, the original statues from the Brits and the Apple Corp front door from Saville Row.
You can also get hands-on in our Dance the Decades studio, sing your heart out in our Vocal Booth, or play top guitars and drums in the Gibson Interactive Studio.
After the main event browse an exclusive range of gifts, clothing, books and memorabilia from the Merch Store and you can rest those dancing feet with a selection of delicious snacks and meals in the Star Café.
The current temporary exhibition is Live Aid 40: Music, Power & Unity. The exhibition looks at the legendary Live Aid concert 40 years later through some of the personal archive of organiser Bob Geldof.
It was the 13th of July, 1985 and the world waited with anticipation as the stage at Wembley Stadium was poised to launch Live Aid. BBC Radio 1 DJ Richard Skinner famously declared, “It’s 12 noon in London, 7am in Philadelphia and around the world, it’s time for Live Aid”.
The ground-breaking concert was planned as a “global jukebox” and a continued response from the music industry and fans to the famine in Ethiopia. The concert was truly global, advances in technology allowed for its broadcast to over 150 countries. 72,000 people attended Wembley Stadium and 90,000 packed into the John F. Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia. Estimates of the global TV audience vary, the highest of which (1.9 billion) would have equated to around 40% of the world’s population at the time.
Band Aid and Live Aid were conceived to help meet an immediate and pressing humanitarian need. For many, they will always be era-defining moments when music was used as the most powerful unifying tool. The story continued – Visual Aid for Band Aid, Fashion Aid, Sport Aid and then Live 8 - the global series of benefit concerts timed to precede the G8 conference in 2005 featuring more than 1,000 musicians and with an estimated 30 million viewers worldwide. Importantly, government policy change was sparked as the enormous power of unity shown by record-breaking audiences and viewers was harnessed into action. No longer was it possible to turn a blind eye.
Our merch store will be selling limited original, official Band Aid and Live Aid merchandise after 40 years locked in a storage time capsule, with profits going to the Band Aid Trust.
The exhibition will run from 5th June 2025 to 4th January 2026 and is included with all general entry tickets.