'The Game' saw the emergence of a new Queen sound for a new decade, revealing a band expanding their horizons, for good or ill, depending on one's tastes. Not all fans were comfortable with that expansion. 'Jazz' had shown intimations of what was to come, and some were already complaining. On 'The Game,' the heavy rock which was still...
I'll spend some time discussing 'Live Killers.' I have a soft spot for the album, it having been the highlight of Christmas 1979 (for me, at least). The album is universally panned, not least by the band members themselves. Roger Taylor publicly disowned it. The album isn't properly 'live,' say the critics, but is full of overdubs. So was...
With 'Jazz', Queen arrived in the land of the Rock Gods and Immortals - not the Realm of Rhye, but tax exile. The 'Jazz' album was recorded in Mountain studio, Montreux, Switzerland and Super Bear, Berre-les-Alpes, France. The new location may have caused a change in sound and style, with the songs on the album having a very different...
Queen's timing was impeccable - the band made it big just as the next big pop fashion made a fetish of eschewing bigness, success, popularity, crowd pleasing, tunefulness, songcraft, musicianship, the lot ... Everything Queen stood for was publicly rejected by punk, and the music press and media, conformist to the core, predictably followed suit....
'A Day at the Races' is an overlooked masterpiece. It is the perfect realisation of all the styles Queen had explored on previous albums, perfectly performed and perfectly produced. It was that obsession with perfection that drew the ire of the critics.
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...
This album and its most famous song, 'Bohemian Rhapsody,' are now so familiar as to have been normalized as 'classic Queen.' It's 'classical' Queen, the Queen of the overt operatics, but not original Queen. In many respects, A Night at the Opera is a quite radical departure from their early sound, with theatrics to the fore and the...
Queen Live at the Rainbow 1974
It's an open secret in the Queen community of old that "Sheer Heart Attack" is the masterpiece album that "A Night At The Opera" is routinely proclaimed to be. "Sheer Heart Attack" is the perfect realisation of all of the band's early rock potentials, without the pretensions, no frills, with all lyrical and instrumental excess stripped back for a...
If 'Queen I' was the product of long, hard work grafting and crafting songs in the studio, then 'Queen II' was much shorter work making for an even grander and larger vision. If Tolkien's Middle Earth could ever be re-imagined as a rock album, then that album is 'Queen II.' Queen had quickly mastered the art of production and...
