Queen
Manchester AO Arena
Rock’s reigning monarchs belatedly mark their own Golden Jubilee.
Queen walked on stage at Live Aid on Saturday July 13, 1985 and played the hits, and it seems like they haven’t stopped playing them ever since. Sure, the band were hardly small fry before that momentous performance, and following Freddie Mercury’s death there was a decade or so where they didn’t exist, but thanks to musicals, movies, TV ads and good oldfashioned radio play, they’ve long been part of the wallpaper of life.
Fifty-two years after they began, Queen are as big as they ever were, maybe even bigger. This sold-out tour of the nation’s largest arenas was delayed by two years due to the pandemic, and as with so many post-covid shows the anticipation tonight is edged with a hint of delirium. Except this is Queen, so even that feels grander and more OTT.
The stage looks spectacular long before the show starts, with a gigantic, stage-wide digital crown lighting up the arena. As the opening riff to Now I‘m Here strafes out, the crown lifts to reveal a stage bedecked with gigantic video screens that will gradually and effectively toast the retinas of 20,000-odd people over the next two hours and 20 minutes with a series of vivid, colourful and occasionally emotive images.
Of course, there’s a band in there somewhere too. Brian May prowls the stage, looking leaner and more energetic than any 74-year-old has a right to, the health issues he endured during the pandemic apparently behind him. Roger Taylor, snowy patrician’s beard visible from the cheap seats, manages to make his presence felt even from behind the kit (he’s assisted, as he has been on the last couple of tours, by an additional percussionist, and there’s rightly no attempt to hide the latter).
And then there’s Adam Lambert, a man who, on tonight’s evidence, is made up of at least 92 per cent sparkle. Lambert is a neutron bomb of charisma in a diamante-encrusted black flared suit, and is equally at home vamping it up with a paper fan on the piano during Killer Queen or giving it the full on rock-god strut during steel-edged early 80s deep cut Tear It Up. And is that a cheeky grab of the crotch while singing ‘I got stiffness in my bones’ during an exultant Fat Bottomed Girls? It kind of looks like it.
Nearly 40 years after Live Aid, Queen are still sticking to Bob Geldof’s exhortation to “play the fucking hits”. And the fucking hits are indeed played, some in full, some in truncated form: Another One Bites
The Dust, Don’t Stop Me Now, Hammer To Fall, Bicycle Race, the latter featuring Lambert straddling a giant hog that makes Rob Halford’s Harley-Davidson look like a Raleigh Budgie. There’s the occasional deep-ish cut too, alongside Tear It Up: In The Lap Of The Gods,
’39, Taylor’s showcase I’m In Love With My Car; sadly, Machines (Back To Human) has been retired after an appearance on their last pre-pandemic tour.
The exhilaration of it all is punctuated by moments of real emotion. Mercury’s fleeting appearance on the video screen towards the end of the May-fronted Love Of My Life is both moving and perfectly judged, while Taylor quietly dedicates Under Pressure to Taylor Hawkins, a man who championed the band at a time when many of his contemporaries would rather have sawn off their own feet than admit to liking Queen.
It’s all wrapped up, inevitably, with the immortal one-two-three of Bohemian Rhapsody, We Will Rock You and We Are The Champions, songs that no one ever truly needs to hear again yet still manage to prompt a rush of excitement. May and Taylor stubbornly refused to mark Queen’s 50th anniversary two years ago. Tonight is finally the celebration they warrant.