This is Queen The Greatest,
in which we head back to 2005 to celebrate
a collaboration that rocked the cosmos –
it’s Queen + Paul Rodgers.
[Taylor Hawkins] “I always held out hope,
because
Brian and Roger, you don't want to keep that Lamborghini in the garage.
You know, you got to drive that f*****g car every once in a while.
So I was hoping that they would find someone."
[Brian May] “We've done odd gigs, you know,
as Queen in a sense, you know, using guest artists.
It was just, I remember saying not many months ago when somebody said,
‘can you do a queen tour, can you call it Queen?’
And I said, ‘well, no, not really.
Not barring a miracle.
If there's a miracle that we find the right person to sing, then yes.’”
[Brian May] “Even though we were proud of what we'd done,
we didn't want to go out there and be Queen again without Freddie.
And it happened almost by accident at an awards show.
I played with Paul Rodgers, who was a hero of ours.
And I remember coming off stage
and Paul's lady said,
‘Oh, you guys seem to really have a great chemistry.
All you need is a drummer.'
And I went, ‘well, I think I know a drummer!’”
[Roger Taylor] “Brian and I find that we still have the magic on stage.
So it's great to be doing this with a different singer,
but the magic of Queen is absolutely still there.”
The first tour comprised of 41 dates across Europe, the USA and Japan –
seeing Queen return to famous venues
such as London's Hyde Park and the Hollywood Bowl in LA.
This was followed a year later with another North American tour.
[Brian May] “He enjoyed playing a lot of the Queen stuff.
Not all of it, you know, not all of it suited him,
but it was a good combination for a while.
We ended up going all round the world a couple of times with Paul.”
[Brian May] “I would still go to shows and think,
‘well, we used to do that, you know, we used to play in arenas or whatever.’
And suddenly out of the blue,
we are in the same arena again
and how incredible that we can still do that,
people still want to come and fill those arenas,
and we can still rock the hell out of them.”
[Roger Taylor] “He was his own man
and he belonged in the sort of blues soul field,
which there is no one no better.”
Roger, Brian and Paul next took their partnership into the studio,
which resulted in The Cosmos Rocks album.
This was to be followed by another massive tour
that as well as spanning Europe and South America,
we see Queen finally get to perform in Russia.
But to start things off, the band first went to Kiev’s Freedom Square
to perform in front of a staggering crowd of 350,000 people.
At the end of that tour,
Queen and Paul decided the time was right to go their separate ways,
having achieved far more than imagined at the outset.
[Brian May] “And again,
I think Roger and I thought, ‘OK, that's it.’
You know, we've done that, and we've done this, and there is nobody out there.
We don't want to employ someone to copy Freddie.
Why would we do that? It just wouldn't make sense.”
As it turned out, fate was about to play a hand
in introducing Brian and Roger to another remarkable singer.