Artist | Queen + Paul Rodgers |
---|---|
Date | 19.04.2005 |
Venue | Festhalle |
City | Frankfurt |
Country | Germany |
Setlist | 01. Intro: It's A Beautiful Day Ross Robertson / DJ Koma 2005 techno mix [tape] 02. Intro: Lose Yourself [tape - Eminem] 03. Intro: Reachin' Out (Paul on vocals + Spike keyboards only) 04. Tie Your Mother Down (Paul on vocals) 05. I Want To Break Free (Paul on vocals) 06. Fat Bottomed Girls (Paul on vocals) 07. Crazy Little Thing Called Love (Paul on vocals + guitar) 08. Say It's Not True (Roger on vocals) 09. '39 (Brian on vocals & guitar) 10. Love Of My Life (Brian on vocals & guitar) 11. Hammer To Fall slow/fast (Brian and Roger on vocals) 12. Let There Be Drums 13. I'm In Love With My Car (Roger on vocals and drums!) 14. Guitar solo 15. Last Horizon 16. These Are The Days Of Our Lives (Roger on vocals) 17. Radio Ga Ga (Roger and Paul on vocals) 18. Can't Get Enough (Paul on vocals) 19. A Kind Of Magic (Paul on vocals) 20. I Want It All (Paul on vocals) 21. Bohemian Rhapsody (Freddie and Paul on vocals) 22. The Show Must Go On (Paul on vocals) 23. All Right Now (Paul on vocals) 24. We Will Rock You (Paul on vocals) 25. We Are The Champions (Paul on vocals) 26. God Save The Queen |
Support band | none or unknown |
Attendance | 10000 |
Audio recording | Length: 121:46 Quality: VG [an average audience recording] No download link available |
Video - information | Two audience recordings - one is complete, the other one covers the first half of the concert. |
Bits and pieces | After Say It's Not True Roger said: "Remember, you all should wear a condom. I'm wearing one right now." :-) From now on he was joking about condoms on every concert. Brian got really angry during his guitar solo before the opera section of BoRhap and stopped playing earlier (later he said that he couldn't hear his guitar at all so he gave up). Just like in Leipzig, Brian sang both verses of '39. |
Line-up | Paul Rodgers (lead vocals, acoustic guitar) Brian May (electric guitar, acoustic guitar, lead/backing vocals) Roger Taylor (drums, congas, lead/backing vocals) Jamie Moses (electric guitar, acoustic guitar, backing vocals) Danny Miranda (bass guitar, acoustic guitar, backing vocals) Spike Edney (keyboards, backing vocals) |
Photos supplied by: Hangman
Queen are on tour for the first time for 19 years – and in the Frankfurt Festhalle, singer Paul Rodgers is a splendid successor to Freddie Mercury.
That won't do of course. No, not at all. "Put your cigarette out!" a misery- guts from security grouched at us while we were waiting in the ranks at the Frankfurt Festhalle for the start of a concert which to all appearances had been feverishly awaited by a huge and loyal fan base for nearly two decades. Queen, that loud British glamour band, which in the 70s and 80s knew, like hardly anyone else, how to encode the monstrosity of the rock business in a positive way and amalgamate it with artistic finesse, are back on tour again for the first time in nineteen years. The protruding, domed building was chock-a-block, the mood, readily conjured up on such occasions, was expectant and festive, with an inkling of a papal election.
No, that won't do at all. You can't separate smoking and rock music; they belong together like salt and breakfast eggs, like water and swimming. But the frowning watchman is adamant. "Go outside and smoke, into the hallway! The guitarist doesn't want it". What has become of rock music? Where is the excess, at least when it comes to puffing up smoke? Outside, next to an ash tray, an American woman – an American woman! – asks for a light. The six Queen concerts in Germany are all sold out – she explained how she had travelled over especially from Minnesota. Whoever has fans like this can make unreasonable demands of them. But having said that, Brian May, the guitarist who doesn't allow smoking, is himself anything but an unreasonable demand: a good-natured and astonishingly ageless person and on top of it, a musician whose incomparably humming, whirring, singing, twanging sound, which in melodies threatens a deluge at times, has, to this day, been emulated by nobody. That may result from the guitar which, with his father, he once glued together from a selected piece of wood, or from the fact that May uses coins rather than plectrums, or that both in the studio and live he always sets several guitar tracks on top of each other, slurring them with the help of a whole battery of effects. His extended solo part in the middle of the programme showed that this concept of sound is within it.
Brian May does not want to age, he has to go out – on the road. For some time he and drummer Roger Taylor have been searching for a successor to the singer Freddie Mercury who died fourteen years ago from Aids, to that 'diva' who appeared to be irreplaceable. George Michael and Robbie Williams were both mentioned. How fortunate that we were spared that. Because, in Paul Rodgers, previously Free and Bad Company frontman, who intermittently worked with Jimmy Page, they could probably have engaged the greatest rock singer of any pop era next to Ian Gillan.
A Piece for Pitch-Training
Everything started up well after Brian May, slipping through the curtain which at first covered the stage, opened the show with one of his famous riffs to an Eminem rap babbler. Even in that type of solid chord, in such a sound wall, there is more warmth to be felt than in the most delicate melodiousness of a Rossini aria. Paul Rodgers, as proved by the opener Tie Your Mother Down, possesses a vocal colour and a technique that, despite its grounding in Blues, and despite the dreaded milky acoustics of the Festhalle, had the effect of bringing people to their knees that came close to that of Mercury's vocal acrobatics, even on a piece for pitch-training like 'The Show Must Go On'.
On the one hand, the set perhaps lays a bit too much store by the stadium pounders and brutish hits of the 80s, by A Kind of Magic and I Want To Break Free, and on the other on longer quiet sections where the rock event became a requiem; completely so when Freddie Mercury, was 're-incarnated' near the end via video for Bohemian Rhapsody and was able to make his contribution to the festival of pomp and power.
At the end Brian May held his instrument triumphantly above his curly crown - in the hallowed, smoke-free air. The real star was, however, the splendid Paul Rodgers.