Queen: The Complete Works (28 page)

The rumours were confirmed via Brian’s website on 27 June 2004. Like the Wembley show before it, Milton Keynes had been filmed by Gavin Taylor and shown on television, albeit in a heavily edited form. Unlike Wembley, though, Milton Keynes remained unreleased to the general public, excepting those who had taped the original broadcast in 1983 (or those Americans who taped it from the showing it received on VH-1 in 1995). For years, it was assumed that the band had played an abbreviated set for television purposes, but when Greg Brooks’
Queen Live: A Concert Documentary
appeared in 1995, he enumerated all but ‘Sheer Heart Attack’ as having been performed that night.

Either way, this release would be a treat for casual fans to indulge in, and what emerged in October 2004 did not disappoint. There were only a handful of complaints, as there are with almost every release generated by any band. On the night of the original concert, Freddie’s voice cracked during ‘Fat Bottomed Girls’; for aesthetic reasons, this flaw was redubbed for the final release. Similarly, some of the dialogue between songs was also edited, including the oft-repeated line from Freddie, “It’s only a bloody record! I mean, people get so excited about these things.” But these are only minor quibbles since the overall presentation is spectacular, and to own a virtually complete concert is certainly desirable. Considering that the last true live release was
Live At Wembley ’86
in May 1992,
Queen On Fire: Live At The Bowl
is an excellent documentation of where the band were in their live career during what many have considered their creative nadir.

Reviews were favourable for the most part. The
Evening Standard
’s
Metro Life
magazine rated the DVD number four on the list of Top Five recent releases, glossing the title as “A vindaloo trauma, maybe? No, it’s the Milton Keynes Bowl, the year is 1982 and Freddie Mercury and the guys are at the peak of their game. All the hits, done about as well as you could imagine. Even this non-Queen fan was impressed.”
The Sun
completely missed the point: “Let’s get one thing straight: Queen are one of the best, if not the best, live British bands ever. But do we really need another post-Mercury two-disc greatest hits album? There are some great live performances on here including ‘We Are The Champions’, ‘Play The Game’ and ‘Love Of My Life’, but you get the feeling they flogged something pretty similar last year. The Queen estate continues to coin it in – Freddie must be rolling in it in his grave.”

Music Week
said, “This double collection ... captures perfectly one of the world’s biggest rock acts at their performing peak – a full three years before their Live Aid masterstroke.”
Mirror Ticket
gave the release three stars, saying that “this 1982 Milton Keynes show captures Queen in all their pomp and fury. Yet, despite Mercury’s vaunted showmanship and their elevated reputation in the era of The Darkness, this double set isn’t lost Britrock gold. For every gem they produced, Freddie’s crew churned out an equal amount of padding.”
On The Record
hit the nail squarely on the head: “Most Queen fans will admit that
Hot Space
wasn’t one of the group’s better albums. But the tour that followed the release of that album in 1982 was blistering hot. The concert from the Milton Keynes Bowl is released later this month as
Queen On Fire: Live At The Bowl
on DVD and CD. It’s an incredible 110 minutes of classic Queen live, featuring loads of their biggest hits ... It’s hard to believe that the concert is twenty-two years old. Freddie and the boys sound so fresh.”

The album is memorable for the ferocity with which the band launch into their rarer material. The opening salvo of ‘The Hero’ followed by the accelerated ‘We Will Rock You’ is a direct one-two punch, while more audience-friendly renditions of ‘Staying Power’, ‘Action This Day’ and ‘Back Chat’ completely transform those songs from the bland disco-funk of
Hot Space
into full-throttle rockers. The segment from ‘Now I’m Here’ until Brian’s guitar solo flags, but it’s redeemed by ‘Under Pressure’ and ‘Fat Bottomed Girls’, a song that was excised from the set list for the 1981 shows but enjoys a resurrection here. Overall, the release is a welcome and refreshing addition to the Queen discography, and a refreshing counterpart to the oversaturated representations of the
Magic
tour.

QUEEN ROCK MONTREAL

Parlophone 50999 5 04047 2 8, October 2007 [20]

Hollywood 000097302, October 2007

‘Intro’ (1’59), ‘We Will Rock You’ (fast) (3’06), ‘Let Me Entertain You’ (2’48), ‘Play The Game’ (3’57), ‘Somebody To Love’ (7’53), ‘Killer Queen’ (1’59), ‘I’m In Love With My Car’ (2’03), ‘Get Down, Make Love’ (4’45), ‘Save Me’ (4’14), ‘Now I’m Here’ (5’31), ‘Dragon Attack’ (3’11), ‘Now I’m Here’ (1’53), ‘Love Of My Life’ (3’56), ‘Under Pressure’ (3’49), ‘Keep Yourself Alive’ (3’29), Drum Solo (3’00), Guitar Solo (5’11), ‘Flash’ (2’11), ‘The Hero’ (1’51), ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’ (4’15), ‘Jailhouse Rock’ (2’32), ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ (5’28), ‘Tie Your Mother Down’ (3’52), ‘Another One Bites The Dust’ (4’00), ‘Sheer Heart Attack’ (3’53), ‘We Will Rock You’ (2’09), ‘We Are The Champions’ (3’27), ‘God Save The Queen’ (1’27)

Musicians
: John Deacon (
bass guitar
), Brian May (
guitars, vocals, piano on ‘Save Me’
), Freddie Mercury (
vocals, piano, acoustic rhythm guitar on ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’
), Roger Taylor (
drums, vocals, lead vocals on ‘I’m In Love With My Car’
)

Recorded
: 24 and 25 November 1981 at the Forum, Montreal, Quebec by Mack and Kooster McAllister

Producers
: Justin Shirley-Smith, Kris Fredriksson, Joshua J. Macrae, Brian May and Roger Taylor

The farcical, endless releases of
We Will Rock You
, Queen’s first theatrical concert presentation, is well documented (see Part Six), so that makes its release in 2007 as
Queen Rock Montreal
all the more confounding, considering this marks the fifth time the video was released in some format. But more substantial was the first release of the audio of this concert; while the spectacle of Queen’s live show should be viewed in all its glory on DVD (indeed, despite its familiarity,
Queen Rock Montreal
is stunning in hi-def), hearing the interplay of the last time that Queen were a four-piece live band is a rare treat. Again, the songs are all familiar, but the performance is white-hot. There are some new treats, too: ‘Flash’ and ‘The Hero’ are performed in full here, with Brian on piano and synthesizer on the former, and a leisurely take on the latter, far different from the
Queen On Fire: Live At The Bowl
performance. Additionally, ‘Jailhouse Rock’ is released here for the first time; though it was performed as an encore number (just before ‘Sheer Heart Attack’), it was edited to after ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’, due to Freddie’s insistence on deliberately annoying the director, who had demanded that the band wear the same outfits on both nights. For the encores on the first night, Freddie wore white jeans, while on the second night, he wore the shortest shorts ever to have been produced, thus potentially screwing up the continuity of the film.

Beyond that, there’s little else that’s a particular revelation, except that the sound has been superbly remixed by Joshua J. Macrae, Justin Shirley-Smith and Kris Fredriksson, making their already remarkable performance even better. As an album, it’s a good documentation of their live finesse at the time, though it treads far too closely to the
Live Killers
and
Queen On Fire: Live At The Bowl
sets for comfort. (It continues the long line of cringe-inducing live album titles; was something like Live In Montreal too obvious, and didn’t indicate just how much Queen rocked that night?) Considering Brian and Roger’s mild indignation over the multiple We Will Rock You releases, that they were able to wrest back control of the project and release it to their own standards is exemplary; considering the fans’ mild indignation over the multiple We Will Rock You releases, Queen Rock Montreal is the definitive version – until the next version, that is...

B. SOLO ALBUMS

The second part of this section concentrates on studio, live and compilation albums that Roger Taylor, Freddie Mercury and Brian May have released. The albums are presented chronologically instead of by band member, in order to present a broader overview of the solo work of Queen.

ROGER TAYLOR

FUN IN SPACE

EMI EMC 3369, April 1981 [18]

Elektra 5E-522, April 1981 [121]

Parlophone CDPCS 7380, August 1996

‘No Violins’ (4’33), ‘Laugh Or Cry’ (3’06), ‘Future Management (You Don’t Need Nobody Else)’ (3’03), ‘Let’s Get Crazy’ (3’40), ‘My Country I & II’ (6’49), ‘Good Times Are Now’ (3’28), ‘Magic Is Loose’ (3’30), ‘Interlude In Constantinople’ (2’04), ‘Airheads’ (3’38), ‘Fun In Space’ (6’22)

Musicians
: Roger Taylor (
vocals, drums, percussion, guitars, bass guitar, synthesizers
), David Richards (
synthesizers
)

Recorded
: Mountain Studios, Montreux, August 1979–January 1981

Producer
: Roger Taylor

Towards the end of the initial sessions for
The Game
in July 1979, while the others returned to their families in England, Roger remained at Mountain Studios to work on ideas for his first solo album. ‘I Wanna Testify’, released back in August 1977, had whetted the drummer’s appetite for solo success, though it was anything but: the single had failed. Although Roger was £5000 poorer from the experience he’d had a lot of fun along the way. During sessions for
Jazz
in 1978, he had started writing more and more songs, not so much intended for Queen use as his own.

“In the past, I have written so many songs,” Roger said, “that it was impossible to put them on a Queen album. So a solo album was the only possibility ... There were certain things I wanted to do which weren’t within the Queen format; in a way, it’s like flushing out your system, and until you’ve done it you just don’t feel fulfilled. If I get more ideas for songs I might eventually do another solo thing, but Queen would always get priority.”

Hence the extended recording period for the album: he was able to lay down a few ideas in the summer of 1979, but had to cut work short in order to tour with Queen. Sessions continued off and on during downtime while recording
The Game
in the winter of 1980 but band prorities meant that Roger had little time to focus on his own album until Queen worked on
Flash Gordon
in the autumn of 1980. Because most of the performances on the soundtrack were done separately, Roger was able to complete most of his album during those sessions, with the work stretching well into January 1981, in order to complete the album in time for an April deadline.

It’s interesting, then, though hardly coincidental, that Fun In Space sounds so much like Flash Gordon. Borrowing the darker ambience of that soundtrack and incorporating synthesizers to an extreme, Roger wrote more sombre, atmospheric and downright moody songs that belie his rock ‘n’ roll roots. “Yes, [the diversity of the material is] probably the only weak point, where the critics might accuse me,” he told
Popcorn
in 1981. “But on my first solo album I took the opportunity to show my whole spectrum. The second album will be more new wave.” In fact, Roger explores that genre throughout this first album: ‘Future Management’ is decidedly cod-reggae, taking a cue from The Police, while a pair of songs on the second side – ‘Good Times Are Now’ and ‘Airheads’ – sound like an amalgamation of punk and new wave. Only on the two more ambitious numbers, ‘My Country I & II’ and the title track, does Roger consciously stray towards Queen territory, while ‘No Violins’ and ‘Magic Is Loose’ could easily be outtakes from
The Game
.

Carrying on the tradition of ‘I Wanna Testify’, Roger played all the instruments himself, with “50% of synthesizers by David Richards” according to the liner notes. Why? “There are different reasons,” Roger explained to
Popcorn
. “First, I have my own ideas how the songs should sound. It’s more important to show several abilities of my own. In the end I don’t want to spend my life being behind the drums. There are lots of other drummers who show that solo albums are not only an affair of guitar-players, singers or keyboard-players.” Roger’s capabilities on guitar, bass and
keyboards are stellar, though it must be said that some of the bass is heavy-handed and laborious, making one yearn for John Deacon’s more fluid style. The guitar work is exemplary; it wouldn’t put Brian May to shame, but Roger does prove that he’s more than competent when it comes to laying down a good rhythm.

Roger was the group member who promoted the use of synthesizers, so it’s no surprise that the album is abounding with them. Layer upon layer of keyboards were programmed and played by Roger, with a lot of the trickier synth work given to David Richards. The material and the mood is spacy enough for the synths to work well, especially on the two epics, though they also create atmospheric tones on songs like ‘Magic Is Loose’ and ‘Laugh Or Cry’, and are absolutely essential for ‘Interlude In Constantinople’.

Reinforcing the tone of the sci-fi lyrics, the cover portrays an alien (“It’s called Ernie and comes from an American comic series,” he explained to
Popcorn
. “I like the little beast that much, that I use it as a logo”) reading a magazine with Roger on the cover, with the roles reversed for the back cover. “The title
Fun In Space
doesn’t mean that the album should be regarded as
Son Of Flash Gordon
,” Roger explained, “but in many ways it is nostalgic ... I’ve got some old sci-fi books and magazines which I browse through from time to time. Maybe there are things up there in space watching us. I wouldn’t find that surprising at all.” Incidentally, the alien creature was a model designed by Tim Staffell, who had no idea what project the monster was for or to whom it was connected. “In 1981, after I’d packed in music altogether,” Tim told
Record Collector
in 1996, “I made a model for an album cover for the Hipgnosis design team. It was of a little alien head with glowing eyes. I didn’t know what it was for, but it turned out – and I didn’t discover this until years later – to be the front cover for Roger’s
Fun In Space
album! I had no idea. That was peculiar.”