QueenZone discussion #1332578
Why did Freddie give up the piano?
| Kahle33 10.12.2012 13:30 |
In the early Queen years his piano playing was amazing and he put in in a lot of songs but as time went on he phased it out. Even during live shows he seemed like he had no use for it anymore. His playing became very choppy it was as if he wanted nothing to do with the instrument anymore. It's a shame because when I watch live performance of songs like "White Queen" from 1975 it is really amazing how well Freddie's piano and Brian's guitar go together. |
| GratefulFan 10.12.2012 13:47 |
Somebody may have further information, but my recollection is that he eventually felt it tied him too much to one spot on the stage and inhibited some of the performance and audience engagement aspects he wanted to develop. I thought the mid career/pre Spike balance was perfect. |
| jones904 10.12.2012 13:57 |
repatoire was firmly sealed and now perfoming in big stadiums required Freddie to work the stage and synthisiers and background keyboards with pinano sounds did the job when needed plus all the older songs that had a lot of pinano on were not played even hardly ever on later tours and as for music in general stlyes change and long pinano riffs like long guitar riffs wenty out of queens fashion plenty on pinano on the works album and even other later infact always most always a bit of pinano Freddie wrote nearly everything on pinano anyway if i am not wrong |
| GratefulFan 10.12.2012 14:29 |
jones904 wrote: repatoire was firmly sealedThis is an anagram for 'A Arterialised Fey Sperm Owl', which can only be Fred's hearty blessing of the recent Baron Cohen interview as well as an official announcement that the casting is so awesome the movie will be 3D. Welcome aboard! |
| Holly2003 10.12.2012 15:04 |
pinano? It's spelt pie-nano! Also, see geetar, derums, quayboreds and bash. |
| waunakonor 10.12.2012 18:13 |
It seems like jones/MEDUSA/whatever sometimes has something useful to add to the conversation but doesn't seem to be able to speak English at all, intentionally or otherwise. |
| jones904 10.12.2012 21:38 |
Another reason was the smoke was bad for his lungs |
| una999 12.12.2012 12:52 |
i think this is where queen (freddie) put emphasis on putting on a show rather than more substance. they could have thrown in more piano songs like lily of the valley or you take my breath away to balance the shows. as an artist i would imagine it would have been nice to do those songs in a massive stadium. personally i'd prefer them than listening to hello mary lou etc... |
| The Real Wizard 12.12.2012 14:31 |
Most people who listened to the radio in the 80s hadn't heard the 70s Queen albums. They knew a dozen big hits. So they chose to play 50s covers - because people knew them. |
| tomchristie22 12.12.2012 18:43 |
50's covers weren't a new thing in '86 anyway, they just chose to do a bunch of them in a different format at that point. I would personally have preferred if those slots were filled by original material instead. I do quite enjoy their version of Big Spender though. |
| Farlander 13.12.2012 10:14 |
they could have thrown in more piano songs like lily of the valley or you take my breath away to balance the shows. as an artist i would imagine it would have been nice to do those songs in a massive stadium.I don't know if those songs would have worked that well in a giant stadium. They would have been great in smaller venues, but not in the bigger ones, I think. But I too wish Freddie had played more piano in the later years. I think he is an underrated pianist. And in concerts, I know he liked to move around and put on an energetic show, but I would have preferred less of that and more musical substance. That's why I have always loved Queen as a studio band and not cared for them as much as a live band. But, with just the four of them, or even five, they couldn't have reproduced the complex things live that they did in the studio anyway, so perhaps it's just as well they took a totally different approach live. |
| brENsKi 13.12.2012 16:24 |
damned if you do, damned if you don't frontman or singer/pianist? fact is, he still did it - when it was needed/called for one of my own highlights of milton keynes (as someone who was there) was the intro to Somebody To Love - he did the piano thing to get the audience involved in the intro but then morphed quickly into the frontman. it was the perfect blend of BOTH... |
| bobbyo 17.12.2012 01:32 |
Good shout brEnski. When the band were restricted to purely studio work the piano didn't really feature, which is a shame but that was the direction they took I suppose. For what it's worth, March of the Black Queen features my favourite piano playing. |
| Holly2003 17.12.2012 05:35 |
Whatever the reason, from an artistic and musical perspective Queen's live show suffered as a result of less piano playing. I'd much rather see Fred on the piano for STL than faffing around the stage as he had to do in an attempt to make ANOBTD interesting. |
| GratefulFan 17.12.2012 12:37 |
In the iPad version of 40 Years of Queen I'm currently going through there is a passage in the section on the first album where Brian is quoted as saying "I'd also mention 'My Fairy King' because that was a portent of things to come. That was an experimental thing: the beginning, really, of Fred playing the piano. He used to play for his own amusement but he was very against putting a piano in the stage act." It was interesting to me that Fred's ambivalence about the instrument then wasn't truly an evolution but something that was perhaps always present to greater and lesser degrees. |
| GratefulFan 17.12.2012 12:45 |
Holly2003 wrote: Whatever the reason, from an artistic and musical perspective Queen's live show suffered as a result of less piano playing. I'd much rather see Fred on the piano for STL than faffing around the stage as he had to do in an attempt to make ANOBTD interesting.Me too. In general the typically intense combination of tight focus on both an instrument and vocal delivery is very visually evocative. One of my favourite videos is a 70's Billy Joel performance of 'Just the Way You Are'. He's at the piano, bathed in blue stage lights and the shots are tight enough that you can see every bead of sweat. The introductory moments of Fred's Milton Keynes and Montreal versions of 'Somebody to Love' are similarly riveting. |
| tarkintheproud 17.12.2012 17:44 |
It seemed fred got bored of the piano or something in the 80s, he didnt really play all that much on the albums either in the 80s. I always wonder what the Innuendo album (and title song too) would have sounded like with more piano instead of synth (it's a great album and all, but still, personally I think more piano could have sounded pretty cool in some of the songs). Queen was pretty intent on using synths, but I wish they could have achieved a better balance between synth and piano, IMO, instead of phasing piano out all together. Even so, woulda been cool if Fred had at least played the synth parts live! For me, I felt that whole frontman, showmanship, aspect or whatever you call it for queen was kinda overrated I really preferred the band in the 70s when they seemed to more focused on the music. |
| Sebastian 22.12.2012 17:44 |
In the 70's, they played an audience three-plus times larger than Wembley Stadium, and they didn't need Ga Ga or Break Free for that (granted, it was free ... that played a pivotal role there...). They entertained such a huge audience with only three hits, and dared playing things like Flick of the Wrist, Prophet's Song, Leroy Brown and a then unreleased track which featured Freddie on his own. |
| PrimeJiveUSA 22.12.2012 19:00 |
Farlander...I soooo agree with you! I prefer Queen in the studio over Queen live. |
| Fireplace 22.12.2012 21:01 |
Blame it on stadium rock. From the 1981 tour onwards Queen were playing large stadiums where all subtlety got lost. You can hear it in the backing vocals (check out Now I'n Here through the years), the gradual diminishing of variety in Brian's guitar sounds, the omission of cute little moments like the triangle and the ukelele-banjo, and Freddie playing the piano less and less. What they gained in sheer numbers of concert goers, they lost in varaiation and subtlety. They were always very adamant about not wanting to recreate the album versions exactly on stage, but I sometimes wonder if that was an excuse for paying less and less attention to detail. |
| Sebastian 23.12.2012 02:17 |
Fireplace wrote: They were always very adamant about not wanting to recreate the album versions exactly on stage, but I sometimes wonder if that was an excuse for paying less and less attention to detail.Indeed. They were very clever, as the whole 'let's not replicate the studio version' approach was broad enough to cover things like the horribly stripped down Bicycle Race. |
| tomchristie22 23.12.2012 02:29 |
Fireplace makes a great point. It always upsets me that they started to pay less attention to the music and more attention to the showmanship and scale, I feel that the vocal harmonies on stage suffered from it too, and the vocal harmonies are one of their main distinguishing features in my opinion. That isn't to say they stopped harmonising well, there was just less emphasis and effort in it. |