Welcome back to Queen the Greatest,
and the second instalment at our look back at Queen's sensational -
Magic Tour.
Having blazed a trail around Europe, Queen returned to London
to play two nights at Wembley Stadium –
the site of their extraordinary performance at Live Aid the previous year.
Yet despite the band's incredible popularity,
they weren't taking it for granted that the shows would sell out...
[Brian May] “We’ve been away a long time
and the tickets will go on sale for Wembley on Friday.
And it’s always a time when you sort of go
‘I wonder what is out there? I wonder if they still do want to see us?’
You never know.”
[Brian May] "And we’ll only know
once the applications start coming in”.
The tickets sold out in a matter of hours,
and these memorable nights were captured on camera
and remain one of Queen's best loved shows to this very day.
[Roger Taylor] “I think Wembley was a tough gig,
because of the actual physical size of it.
I think you'd better go down well there, you don't want a quiet audience,
I’ve seen people die there,
because you won’t hear them.
If it's a ripple, a ripple really won't register.
So you need a roar."
[Roger Taylor] “They call it the Wembley Roar don’t they.
And it was OK for us.
You knew you were going to have to work quite hard at Wembley."
Then as Queen hit the road once again,
a new adventure awaited them...
[Interviewer] "I think there's only one country you've never been to before?"
[Roger Taylor] “That’d be Hungary. Yeah. Budapest”.
[Interviewer] “So that is new ground?”
[Roger Taylor] “It’s great, yeah. We’re very excited about that.
There are people from all over the Iron Curtain bloc coming.
They’re selling tickets in… or whatever they do over there.
Do they sell tickets?”
[Interviewer] “I presume so?”
[Roger Taylor] “Or give them away?
I don’t know, I don’t know. Whatever they do.
The people are coming from Poland and Czechoslovakia,
and a lot of the Eastern Bloc, which is very exciting.
'Cos the Russians would never let us in.”
[Freddie Mercury] “I like doing places that we’ve never done before,
to see how they’re going to react.
‘Cos I mean, some places that we’ve already been before,
we have a certain idea of how, what they’re going to do.
But this is going to be great.
It’s going to be great to see if they do the same things,
if they have seen the films
and whether they’re going to do the same things for Radio Ga Ga
and things like that.
That should be very interesting, that’s a good challenge.”
And as the tour drew to a close,
the overwhelming demand back in the UK
prompted promoters to add one last massive show to the schedule –
at the famous Knebworth Park.
[Brian May] “We always believed that we had something special,
and that we could do anything that anyone else did.
That’s the kind of thing,
that’s the kind of belief that kept us going in the early days.
But I don't think we quite believed what would happen.
I don’t think we even knew what was possible.”
[Jim Beach] “I think that in some form or another
the music will always continue now,
I think they’ve reached that status that their music will be remembered.
How much longer they record…
goodness only knows.
Nobody knows whether Mick Jagger will be singing when he’s 65,
or Queen will be performing as Queen.
I think that the Queen structure will continue on,
and they will continue to make music.
How it will be… nobody ever knows that, really.”
[Freddie Mercury] “We’re the only sort of,
the four Grand Dames that have actually stuck it together.”
[John Deacon] “Yes you do ask how long it’s going to go on really,
and we’ve been doing it a long time now,
and I don’t know.
If I could tell the future,
life would be quite boring I think.”