Throughout their illustrious touring career,
Queen have always sought new ways to thrill,
delight and surprise their audiences.
So fans quickly learned that if you’re going to a Queen show,
you should Expect The Unexpected.
An early innovation which has evolved over the years
to still be an integral part of the show to this very day,
sees Roger Taylor step down from the drum riser
and join the rest of the band
as they go acoustic at the front of the stage,
to give the crowd an up close and personal experience.
“Well, we've done that in a number of ways for a long time.
We used to have a completely separate stage at the front,
which would then, it would actually descend with a little
mini bass drum kit on it.
And it actually had the front lighting under it,
but it used to descend and there'd be a set up there,
two mic stands and a small drum kit.”
“So we'd come down the front
and it just the more intimate parts of the show.
And so that's the thing.
And now these days with this sort of,
you can reach out with this long catwalk thing
and really get out into
the audience with people, which is very good in arenas.
You're surrounded by audience then and it's great.
You really feel like you're in touch with people you know,
and you can actually look at people and, you know.”
In addition to those moments,
and with the intention of giving the crowd full value
by packing as much into a show as possible,
Queen found a well constructed medley
would keep the audience on their toes
as one song suddenly takes a very different direction into another.
“Yeah. There's a moment when you think, ‘Oh, isn't it a shame?
Can't do this song, this song, this song’.
It's hard to know what to leave out, you know,
the thing of too many hits, you know...
So what if we could just do a little piece of this and a little bit of that,
just a little hints of stuff.
So people feel like they heard the song.
So we used to do quite a long medley of Killer Queen and
all sorts of other stuff.”
Interestingly, as Brian explains,
merging songs in this way is not a task to be taken lightly.
“Very often I don't like other people doing Medleys, I wonder
you know, it kind of puts me off doing them.
. I see people doing a medley. I think,
‘why don’t you just sing the bloody song?’
’ Because you do deprive people of the structure of the song
and the narrative of the song,
So you don't get the beginning of the story and the end of the story.
You go into another song which can be frustrating.
So you've got to be quite careful with medleys, to be honest.”
But perhaps the most unexpected moment of any tour
would be when Freddie, Roger, Brian and John,
despite having a wealth of their own songs to choose from,
would spring a surprise on their fans
by finding the space to cover someone else’s song.
Take this moment from the Magic Tour as an example…
“Why do we cover other people's songs? It's just an instinct. .
Sometimes you just want to give it that thing
which you loved when you were a kid.
Maybe like Heartbreak Hotel.
And every now and again we would want to go into that area.
Just I suppose it refreshes us
and sometimes it's quite refreshing for the audience.
It's out of the blue. They don't expect it.
It just brings something out of you can be a bit more reckless
than with your own sometimes.
Fun. It's just fun, I guess.”
“Yeah, absolutely. Those things like Tutti Frutti, Little Richard.
Yeah. Kind of telling people this is why we love rock and roll,
because these songs really influenced us. You know.
Yeah, that was just
Just a little aside. Really.
Yeah. it's nice to do those.
It keeps our interest up and and kind of broadens the show a bit.”