QUEEN PUT ON KILLER SHOWS AT COLISEUM
Diehard fan was front row with camera in hand at Vancouver stops
Bohemian Rhapsody, the 2018 biopic about Queen frontman Freddie Mercury, is racking up the accolades.
The film won big at the Golden Globes, with awards for best actor and best dramatic picture, and is in line to repeat the feat at the Oscars. It’s not hard to see why. Rami Malek’s performance as Mercury has earned rave reviews, and the music of Queen is delightful in any context.
But the film is not without its flaws. Some critics complain that it plays fast and loose with history, while others have noted it glosses over important aspects of Mercury’s life and left a lot out. For instance, and perhaps worst of all, Bohemian Rhapsody doesn’t even mention that Mercury and Queen performed at Vancouver’s Pacific Coliseum four times between 1977 and 1982.
This cannot stand, according to the diehard Queen fans in charge of the Vancouver Sun archives, and thus, we have remedied the filmmakers’ damnable error by putting together this brief look back at Mercury and company ’s quartet of visits to the West Coast.
Many of these photos were taken by Postmedia’s Doug Bower, a serious Queen fan from the moment he first heard 1974’s Sheer Heart Attack, which he said is still his favourite Queen album.
“The great thing is I was able to take in an SLR camera to two of those three concerts, hence that’s how I was able to get the pictures,” Bower explained. “They turned out to be reasonable quality.”
Nowadays, most concertgoers are barred from bringing highquality cameras into the venue, and it’s difficult to get anywhere close to the stage with that kind of equipment.
But in the late ’70s and early ’80s, when the rules were far less strict, Bower did both with relative ease, and the result is an impressive collection of Mercury photos, snapped from the front row by an adoring fan.
Bower said he and his friends, “devout Queen nuts,” were even close enough to the stage to come away from the 1978 concert — a stop on The Jazz Tour — with an incredible piece of music memorabilia: Freddie Mercury’s tambourine, which the frontman hurled into the crowd during the show. One of Bower’s friends caught it.
“He got Freddie Mercury’s tambourine and he still has it to this day,” Bower said.
No tambourine for Bower. But at least he had his cache of front-row photos, which would only grow the next time Queen returned to town two years later.
By the 1980 concert, when Queen kicked off its historic The Game Tour in Vancouver, promoting the best-selling album of the same name, Mercury had shaved his long hair and settled into the look for which he’s probably best-known: short hair, no shirt, a moustache to offset the giant teeth, and red leather pants. It’s a look seen often in Bohemian Rhapsody. But Bower and other Vancouver Queen fans saw it live 40 years earlier.
“I noticed in the movie, they did a lot of footage with the lead actor wearing basically no shirt and red leather pants,” said Bower. “That is my favourite picture — where Freddie’s in front of the drum kit.”
Even in still images, it’s clear that few could command a stage — or rock a pair of red leather pants — quite like Mercury.
Bower didn’t make it to the 1982 concert, a stop on the Hot Space Tour that would be the original lineup’s final visit to Pacific Coliseum, as well as Mercury’s last concert performance in Canada.
But Postmedia photographer Mark Van Manen was there, and even in black and white, Mercury ’s magnetism shines through.
When Bohemian Rhapsody was released, Bower got together with some of his high school friends to relive the old days, watching Freddie Mercury dazzle them one more time.
“We all totally enjoyed it,” he said. “With me being a bit of an over the top Queen fan, I noticed quite a few errors, but it didn’t take away from the movie because to me the resounding thing about the movie was the music.”
In his review of the 1982 concert, Sun music critic Neal Hall praised the show, both for its futuristic lighting and for Mercury’s “sensual megalomania,” which sounds about right. (He also panned opening act Billy Squier, who had the misfortune of going on before one of rock’s greatest performers.)