Queen: Performances

Robert Ellis

Two decades of Queen in all their live majesty. A coffee table book of (almost exclusively) live photography sounds like the kind of thing you’d wedge under the door to keep it open during the summer. Not so veteran photographer Robert Ellis’s visual diary of a band that managed to look like superstars even when they were just a twinkle supporting Mott The Hoople.

Ellis pretty much tailed Queen through 20 years of live shows, and some of the photos here are fascinating: an angel-faced Brian May on stage at their first Rainbow headline show in London; a series of shots of Freddie Mercury where he literally looks as though he’s seeing just how little he can get away with wearing on stage. Ultimately, of course, it ends in the stadiums of the world, the band ultimate grandmasters of the great spaces.

Ellis’s prose may be a little thin, but it’s all there in the moment: Queen forever flooding the lens.