Montreal - 1981

After their successful tour of South America in 1981 Queen arranged two concerts in Montreal, Canada (on 24th and 25th November). Both concerts are filmed for an obvious purpose: it's time to release the first Queen live video. Canada was chosen because The Game was highly successful there and filming was cheaper there than in the USA. However, the result is as usual very disappointing. While the sound & video quality is pretty good (or even brilliant on the recently released DVD), the audience is very weak. Queen were ready to offer their best but it's impossible to play a really good concert when the audience is not willing to co-operate! I personally think they should have shot such a concert video either in the Netherlands, Germany or Italy. In addition, the recording is incomplete and is a compilation of both nights.

Releases

There have been multiple official releases and numerous unofficial ones as well. The original release was called We Will Rock You while the recent ones are called Queen Rock Montreal. The last version has even the Live Aid footage as bonus - get it if you can. For some reason the picture of QRM seems to be worse than that of WWRY but the sound is brilliant and in the end that's what matters.

In 2024 the concert finally got a proper HD release: Blu-ray and 4K UHD (Mercury Studios, 10 May 2024), scanned from the original 35mm negative. Disc 1 is full-frame (the original camera ratio) plus the Live Aid set, newly upscaled to HD with a new stereo / 5.1 / Atmos mix. Disc 2 is the same Montreal show cropped to 16:9, plus an 11-minute Live Aid rehearsal featurette. The 4K discs offer HDR and SDR for Montreal; Live Aid stays HD. Montreal is presented with Atmos for the first time. There are matching CD and vinyl packages of the concert audio.

Note: Tracks marked with ^* don't appear on the original US release (1984, 60 minutes). The second VHS release (1992, 90 minutes) was then followed by at least three DVD releases (2x WWRY and 1x QRM).

Live Aid bonus