Hello and welcome to season two of Queen The Greatest,
a year long celebration of Queen live.
Over the next 50 episodes we will go behind the scenes
to reveal what goes into creating a Queen show,
enjoying moments from some of their most iconic performances
and demonstrating why they are widely acclaimed as the greatest live act.
Our journey starts with a new and exclusive
interview with Brian May and Roger Taylor
to discover the importance of the first,
crucial aspect of any successful Queen tour.
The rehearsals.
“Rehearsing before tour is always a bit of a surprise
because you don't know how much you're going to remember and
you don't know if it's still going to feel the same.
But it's surprising how stuff does flow back into you,
into your veins once you start kicking stuff around.”
“Normally we play a song through and see if it works,
if we think it's going to work live, and they don't always work live.
Some of them just, they're not suited really for an exciting
or involving, engaging performance,
a live performance.
So we probably, there's quite a few songs we've never played live
that have been on albums and probably for good reason.”
“We’ll try a lot of stuff out and then very often we'll go,
‘Oh, well, we did this last time.
Well, maybe we'll do that’,
and you put a rough set together very quickly.
It’s about a lot of things.
It's also about looking at the sound and making sure that everything's in place
out front, for the people out front.
It's about looking at the monitor system,
making sure that we can be heard
between each other like I can hear Rog, he can hear me, etc., etc..”
“It's also about the lights, the whole production.
So you have an awful lot to do in that rehearsal period.
And it's easy for things to, I guess, be unfinished.
So you know you're going to go out on tour
on the first night and it won't be finished.
There will be work in progress,
but that's the nature of the game.
You can't be perfect. You can't hit the ground perfect.
You hit the ground, okay? And you evolve
to the place where you hopefully want to be.
So by the time you get to the end of the tour, you're really good.”
To ensure this evolution continues throughout a Queen tour,
a precious few hours on each show day becomes vitally important.
“Sound checking is the real kind of baseline of touring, really.
If you don't soundcheck while you're in the process of touring, you're static
and you're kind of dead.
That's my feeling. I know it's Roger’s feeling, too.”
“We just wouldn't feel happy unless we felt
we knew exactly where everything was - the set up the sound,
even if we're doing several nights in one place.
You want to go in the next day and kind of make sure
everything's sounding right. It's tuned right.
Everything's in the right… And there might have been something
you weren't happy with the night before.
You want to correct it, you know. And then we might just change a song,
and so we'll rehearse a new song to put in and just try things out, really.
But I think Brian and I are certainly not happy
with just going on cold.
We like to know that everything's right
and that hopefully nothing's going to go wrong.”
“The soundcheck. Normally at 4 ‘o’ clock,
I go first in the secure knowledge that Brian is going to take ages,
so I can do mine fairly quickly.
And then I'll vacate the stage and the other guys will be in there,
rhythm, bass, keys and they'll be running through stuff, technically
harmonies, stuff like that.
And then Brian will come on to get his sound
and then we'll get together as a unit and play ensemble.
Yeah, that's the way it normally works. Yeah.”
“We call it a soundcheck,
but part of it is to check the sound and it's always necessary,
but the rest of it is to just try stuff out, even if it's only a few bars.
Like ‘What happened last night? Oh, that happened.
What if we do this?’ And and you gradually, gradually
evolving the show, finding out little bits that didn't work
as well as they could. Maybe they could be improved.
‘Oh, let's try. We didn't try this song for ages. Maybe we try this?’
And if it works out well in soundcheck, you put it in the next night.”
“But it can be all sorts of little, small, tiny, little things.
Like ‘if I do this, you know, generally you do that which conflicts,
you know, so maybe we.. Oh yeah, okay I'll do this’.
And you adjust those little things which, which improve.
They call it Kaizen in Japan
and you improve tiny little things all along the way and suddenly
the whole show's an improvement.
And that's why the show's so good, I think.
I mean, I hope it is good. People say it's good.”