A Night at the Odeon

A Night at the Odeon 1975

The 24 December 1975 gig at the Hammersmith Odeon was the final date of Queen's UK tour in support of the album A Night At The Opera. Queen had played four shows at the Odeon earlier in the tour, to a number of positive reviews in the press. Sounds Magazine declared that "everything about them says that they are more important than any other band you've heard."

Although the album A Night at the Opera was out and had gone platinum (and was still in the album charts), and although 'Bohemian Rhapsody' was at number one in the UK charts at the time of this concert (Christmas Eve, 1975), only the ballad section of 'Bohemian Rhapsody' and the tape of 'God Save the Queen' to end the show came the 'Opera' album. The concert, therefore, captures a moment of transition for the band, the triumph of the 'early' giving way to the 'classic' Queen. A Night at the Odeon is a perfect document of the 'early' Queen at the very pinnacle of their powers. As with the 'Rainbow' album, this set was released on the fortieth anniversary of the concert (20th November 2015). The album is the first official release of the band's Christmas Eve performance at the Hammersmith Odeon, London, UK in 1975, filmed by the BBC. It is the band's most popular bootleg.

The setlist draws mainly drew from the first three albums which were tried and tested on stage. The album thus shares a dozen tracks in common with the Rainbow set, plus May's solo guitar spot in the middle of the show, and a medley of old rock'n'roll songs towards the end. For that reason, non-Queen fanatics and casual fans might be included to see two live concert recordings with much the same set to be excessive. The fans, of course, will love both, not least because they are excellent shows capturing the band at the peak of their prowess as a rock band. Queen enthusiasts know this and many of the rock diehards among them still pine for the days when Queen were a heavy rock band characterised by a unique blend of Led Zeppelin, The Who, Glam, and their own distinctive operatic rock style. The concerts at both The Rainbow and the Hammersmith Odeon are superb documents of this 'early' Queen and both of them essential. I'm just intrigued to know why the band chose not to perform more songs from A Night at the Opera at the Hammersmith Odeon. We can only speculate that they were playing safe with a style they had by now perfected, knowing that the complex studio based creations of 'Opera' might be difficult to reproduce on stage.

The band are on their A-game, with the musicianship fluid, creative, dynamic, and powerful. This is potent and peerless seventies rock. The set includes an excellent version of "See What a Fool I've Been."

The Queen performing at the Odeon is not yet the 'classic' band they would become as a result of A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races, much less the pop band they would become after Jazz in 1978. The band is still heavy rock, raw, visceral, but also imaginative. The band were already masters of live performance, making their concerts incredibly exciting even before they came to be dominated by chart hits. That observation is important, since it makes the point that it was the band's craft and creativity, showcased in live performance, that produced the hits, rather than the hits that made the band popular. At the Odeon, Queen demonstrated everything required to take the world by storm. This is a superb document on account of the presence of classic early songs which would soon be displaced by the tracks of the band's 'classic' and 'popular' periods - "Ogre Battle," "Liar," "White Queen," "The March of the Black Queen," "Seven Seas of Rhye," and several others, absolute hard-as-nails rock gems, some of which would make occasional returns. In the end, the fact that the "Rainbow" and "Odeon" setlists are similar doesn't matter - both concerts are so good as to be essential, and impossible to choose between. Both show a band powering - and planning - their way to the top in a very knowing, ambitious, and triumphant manner. The band knew they were good long before they had the sales figures and chart records to prove it. And how anyone could have been surprised by the fact that Queen took Live Aid by storm beggars belief, since the band had been the best live act around from the very start of their career - they knew how to do it.