Queen - A Night At the Odeon

Queen – A Night At The Odeon

(Released november 20^th 2015)

The performance:

On Christmas Eve 1975, Queen arguably ended its A Night At The Opera Tour in a bang. They were scheduled to play a sold out show at the famous Hammersmith Odeon in London. Finally finding some commercial success with their breakthrough single Seven Seas Of Rhye, and even more so with their third album Sheer Hear Attack, they were entering their golden era, both in terms of artistic creativity and of public recognition. After the release of A Night At The Opera, jokingly titled after a Marx Brother's movie, the band went nearly immediatly on tour. Their tight schedule didn't allow them to record a performance to be broadcasted on the BBC : therefore, they deciced to record a mimed performance of Bohemian Rhapsody, to ensure sufficient promotion while they were touring. This led to what people like to describe as the first ever music video -an assumption that is, to be honest, quite debatable.

They decided to take advantage of the fact that the Odeon show was the last stop from the tour to broadcast it live on the BBC. The pressure was huge on their shoulders, as it was to be their first ever live performance on TV, not to mention the show was taking place at home, in London.

Brian May and Roger Taylor confessed that they were increasingly pressured by the event as the hour was coming. The beginning of the show was apparently delayed for a couple of minutes, as the camera crew from the BBC was having technical difficulties. But once the starting signal was given to them, the band stormed on the stage with a blistering rendition of Now I'm Here. I must confess, I was never a fan of the song. I discovered it with Live At Wembley '86, and rocky-voice moustache and yellow jacket Freddie honestly didn't do the song justice. The studio version always seemed a bit “lightweight” for me, and I was never fond of the lyrics. But I have to admit that this particular rendition is really great, and it works pretty well as an opener.

The band then takes us “to the battlefield”, with “Ogre Battle”. Here, there's no doubt about the heaviness of this great cut from their second album. This story telling of a song features some nice guitar playing from Brian and really, really good drumming rom the oh -so -underrated Roger Taylor.

We stay on Queen II territory with the next song, but things slow down a bit. “White Queen (As It Began)”, the strongest song from the first side of the album was written by Brian May about a girl he fell in love with, but never managed to gather the courage to talk to. This song has always been one of my favorites from the album, and this particular rendition is strong, if not as good as the Rainbow performances. I find myself in disagreement with lots of Queen fans who don't really like the guitar solo on the studio version, and greatly prefer the extended playing from the live versions. I think the original solo contributes greatly the the overall atmosphere of the song, but I have to say that I really love the delicate piano accents Freddie adds on our Odeon performance.

Then we get into the amazing and sadly soon to be abandoned “piano medley” starting with the first half of “Bohemian Rhapsody”, up to the first guitar solo. This choice was first motivated by the impossibility for them to replicate the famous trial opera segment with its dozens or mutlitracked vocal harmonies. They tried to play it live a few times -it obviouly couldn't do the song justice. Before famously leaving the stage to return after the tape playing this part to do the hard rock, uptempo section; they decided to integrate the song into a medley. And boy doe it work well, with a very fluent transition to their most successful single to date, “Killer Queen” (Bohemian Rhapsody would reach the top of the charts three days after the Odeon show). This very simple, yet finely crated songs is without of doubt one of their very best, and this particular rendition is absolutely flawless. After an extended guitar solo, they break into a short snippet from “The March Of The Black Queen”, before returning to the ending section of “Bohemian Rhapsody”.

The medley seemingly stops, but they play a brief intrumental snippet of “Bring Back That Leroy Brown”, with tasty ukelele licks from Brian which grants a satisfactory roar from an amused audience.

In a way, this serves as a perfect introduction for a very guitar oriented part of the show, with the opening song off Sheer Heart Attack, “Brighton Rock”, and its linked guitar solo.

We're very far from the boring 10 minutes delay wankfest from Live At Wembley. Here the effect works well, and the solo is perfectly timed, clocking in at 6 minutes. The next song, Son And Daughter, keeps on with the heaviness.

We go back in time for the following songs. "Keep Yourself Alive" was the opening song from their eponymous first album. While it was certainly a bad choice for a single, it's still a pretty good song. But it clearly in the shadow of "Liar", which received moderate success in America when the album was released. The performance here is mostly strong, even if, truth to be told, the ending is a bit of a mess. But this amazing riff excuses nearly everything.

The band concludes the main part of the show leaving its audience “In The Lap Of The Gods (Revisited)”. It worked really well as the ending of a Queen show up to News Of The World -as Roger Taylor would put it, with its great singalong sections, it was “Champions before Champions”.

They come back on stage with a rock n' roll medley featuring "Big Spender/Jailhouse Rock/Stupid Cupid/Be Bop A Lula". I was very surprised to see so many dislike for this part of the show. I think the band is obviously having fun and plays very well, so I really love it. But I can understand the idea that they could've played one or two of their own songs instead. "Seven Seas Of Rhye" and the blues b-side "See What A Fool I've Been" nicely conclude the show with an uptempo feeling, before the audience sings along to the band's rendition of "God Save The Queen".

The release:

Considering that this show was professionnaly recorded and broadcasted on TV, it's no surprise that it has always been the most bootlegged Queen concert ever. An official release was long overdue, but most fans know this show really well and it didn't receive as much applause as the Rainbow shows when it was announced. But it's nice that Queen prod seem to be moving away from the idea that only moustache Freddie Queen is intersting.

A complete restoration was finished in 2009, with a remixing of the whole concert. This version was to be released that year, but the date was indeinitely postponed without explanation, in classic Queen Productions style. An abridged version was broadcasted on a Bristish TV channel, and a longer one on Japanese television.

When the band moved to Island Records, their whole studio back catalogue was remastered and expanded to “celebrate” their 40^th anniversary in 2011. Every album received a bonus EP featuring remixes, B-sides, live versions and so on. Two Odeon tracks surface on this reissue campaign, namely White Queen on Queen II, and Now I'm Here on Sheer Heart Attack. Comparing these 2011 versions to the 2015 release shows no difference in terms of mixing, and the only variations are due to the mastering stage; We can reasonably suppose that the whole mixing process was completely done in 2011. That said, there are instances of mixing differences between the 2011/2015 release and the 2009 broadcast, so there has been additional processing and editing (with noticeable and unnecessary autotuning) between 2009 and probably 2011. The liner notes, as usual with Queen Productions, are of no help.

The 2015 release features both a video and an audio version of the concert. The video version is not complete, because the camera crew from the BBC packed their equipment after the rock n'roll medley. Video for Seven Seas of Rhye and See What A Fool I've Been simply doesn't exist, but audio thankfully does. The concert was videotaped, and not filmed, which means the quality is bottlenecked by the original resolution it was shot in; That's what explains the “SD Blu Ray” mention on the packaging: the video is upscaled to 1080p (full HD resolution), in its original 4:3 aspect ratio. Considering the limitations of the source, we simply can't attain the same level of visual clarity as Queen Rock Montreal and Hungarian Rhapsody; These show were filmed, which means the negatives can be scanned at higher resolutions to bring out more details and to clean up tears and dust. It's probably fair to consider that the show looks as good as it ever will, and it looks okay. Nothing stellar, but nothing to be ashamed of.

The sound quality is more subject to debate. I don't like the overall mix. Poor John Deacon is totally buried in a mix and often impossible to hear. It's quite funny (or sad) to hear Brian and Roger talking about how locked the drums and the bass were during Queen shows, when this release features a bass player totally muted by a clearly overmixed bass drum. Seriously, has anyone at Queen prod listened to the show and couldn't hear how ridiculously LOUD this bass drum is?

The mastering is compressed, but not as much as the Rainbow shows. And as you can see on the waveforms here, there's thankfully no instances of audible clipping. I guess that's sadly the best one can hope for in 2015.

The bonus material is a total disappointment; Why didn't they release a 2 disc version of it with the full show on the first one, and the complete rehearsals on the second? Instead, we have to buy the most expensive “Super Deluxe Edition” (God does that name sounds dumb) only to get one single rehearsal track, “Now I'm Here”, stupidly pressed on a gimmicky 7” record.

The bonus footage from Japan 75 looks like ****. It sounds a bit better than it looks, but it isn't saying much; The looking back at the Odeon “documentary”, which is simply an interview with Brian and Roger, is absolutely pointless. They keep on rehashing the same stories we heard thousand of times and offer nothing of interest.

A word to conlude on the cover. I didn't know how to react when it was unveiled. I thought it was a temporary placeholder. I would've prefered it to be joke. It's absolutely awful ,something even a 4 year old without hands and a functioning brain would be ashamed of. Bu then again, we have to go back to Queen On Fire (2005) to get a decent cover; Bypassing the fact that, once again, they're marketing Queen as a one man band; it is amazingly bad and amateurish. Cross that, even amateurs do better than them: 

 

Long story short, get the release, throw away the cover ;-)