Rachel Johnson’s Golden Oldies

‘I’m going to Queen tonight,’ I said, a few times, but this didn’t seem to mean much to people.

‘You’re going to see the Queen? In Sandringham?’ my husband assumed (he’s stayed there).

‘You’re going to Queen’s,’ said my doubles partner, thinking I meant the tennis club. ‘No,’ I ended up shrieking. ‘I’m going to see QUEEN tonight at the O2. Bohemian Rhapsody! We will, we will rock you! Fat Bottomed Girls!’

‘But Freddie Mercury’s dead,’ my daughter said when I asked her to come with. ‘It’s Deddie Mercury. No thanks.’

She has a point. We all remember the greatest frontman of stadium rock in his pomp, all codpiece and overbite and strutting sass. What do you do with a problem like the absence of Freddie? A hologram, as they did with Michael Jackson or was it Roy Orbison? The old rockers have found a way, but first, an explanation. I only knew that Queen were on tour because in December I was a reader at a charity carol concert. The other two readers were Anita Dobson and Jeremy Paxman. I could write a whole column about this event. To cut a long story short, we all walked out after an all-female fiddle band played a medley of TV hits, including Ski Sunday; and a Kurdish singer read a whole Paddington Bear book, as if at bedtime to children who didn’t understand English, pretending Paddington was a refugee from Syria. But there’s no room here.

Anyway, Anita Dobson was politely asking me about my husband and children, and so I asked her about hers. She laid a hand on my arm. ‘You honestly don’t know?’ she breathed in delighted relief. ‘I’m married to Brian May!’

And so there I was at the 02 at the gig called Queen Plus Adam Lambert. Yes, the way the band has replaced the irreplaceable is to sub in the American Idol runner-up; or, as the rock critic of the Telegraph put it, ‘the man who would be Queen’. And he’s pretty good.

‘I’m up here in the gayest suit you’ll ever see in your life,’ Lambert says, trying to outcamp his forebear, as he minces about in his pink lamé suits, sequins and leathers. ‘I know what many of you must be thinking: “He’s no Freddie, that American twat!”’ he said. ‘There will only be one rock God named Freddie!’

There was a touching moment when an image of the late rock god was projected onto a screen, and Anita’s other half sat – after gambolling up and down the sound-stage like a man half his age – and played Love of My Life.

And then, for a few minutes, it was as if Brian and Freddie were duetting again, and everyone took out their iphones and the O2 was like a black pincushion illuminated with tens of thousands of points of light, and that was a quiet moment of sweetness and remembrance.

Mercury’s been dead since 1991 and yet Brian May and Roger Taylor, plus the substitute, can rock out a stadium so well that you leave feeling satisfied the whole occasion was Queen Plus Adam Lambert, rather than Queen Minus Freddie Mercury. A triumph, in other words.