QUEEN

[Bertrand]

Dernier message de la page précédente :

RESPECT.
Maintenant, raconte tout et en détail.

[Dave Smallwood]

Et bien, il se trouve que je rencontrais (professionnellement) Nigel Bates, producteur de renom outre manche mais installé à 12 km de chez moi, aujourd'hui même. Nigel est ami avec Brian May et ce dernier lui a demandé de remasteriser les bandes en numérique.
Nigel était sur ça lorsque je suis arrivé et du coup il m'a fait écouter l'ensemble puis pistes par pistes certains passages de l'enregistrement original.
C'est là qu'il m'a fait écouter l'intro et m'a dit : it seems to be piano but it's guitar, played in harmonic.
Et effectivement en écoutant très attentivement, avec un gros volume et sur un matos monstrueux, on reconnaît des harmoniques.
De même la voix de Roger Taylor, sans l'orchestration autour est assez moche, on sent le gars qui force pour faire une voix de tête, qui n'est pas parfaitement juste.
Le solo même sans les autres autour est juste superbe
la voix de Freddie a un poil de vibrato qu'on entend pas sur disque.
Et on entend en bruits de fonds, des commentaires que je ne suis pas parvenu à identifier.
Un vrai panard que cette expérience.

[Thrashos]

[Dave Smallwood]

Le gars a des références, et du coup je comprends mieux ses tarifs

[Bertrand]

Et bien, il se trouve que je rencontrais (professionnellement) Nigel Bates, producteur de renom outre manche mais installé à 12 km de chez moi, aujourd'hui même. Nigel est ami avec Brian May et ce dernier lui a demandé de remasteriser les bandes en numérique.
Nigel était sur ça lorsque je suis arrivé et du coup il m'a fait écouter l'ensemble puis pistes par pistes certains passages de l'enregistrement original.
C'est là qu'il m'a fait écouter l'intro et m'a dit : it seems to be piano but it's guitar, played in harmonic.
Et effectivement en écoutant très attentivement, avec un gros volume et sur un matos monstrueux, on reconnaît des harmoniques.
De même la voix de Roger Taylor, sans l'orchestration autour est assez moche, on sent le gars qui force pour faire une voix de tête, qui n'est pas parfaitement juste.
Le solo même sans les autres autour est juste superbe
la voix de Freddie a un poil de vibrato qu'on entend pas sur disque.
Et on entend en bruits de fonds, des commentaires que je ne suis pas parvenu à identifier.
Un vrai panard que cette expérience.

encore une fois RESPECT.

[Dave Smallwood]

Gros coup de bol surtout mais je vais garder ça en mémoire très longtemps !!!

[olivier64]

Nouvelle sortie officielle le 20 novembre, dans tous les formats : le fameux concert du 24/12/1975 du Hammersmith Odeon de Londres.


"This November, Virgin EMI will officially release the much-bootlegged concert film Queen A Night at the Odeon – Hammersmith 1975 across a wide number of audio and video formats including a limited super deluxe edition box set.

The Christmas concert (24th December) in the famous West London venue was the culmination of the 26-date ‘Queen invite you to A Night At The Opera’ UK tour of 1975.

The show was originally broadcast on BBC 2 and BBC Radio 1, although the TV crew clearly didn’t understand about encores, since they’d packed up their cameras before Queen played Seven Seas Of Rhye and See What A Fool I’ve Been – hence no film footage of those songs!

This will be issued on individual CD, DVD, blu-ray and gatefold 2LP editions as well as combo CD+Blu-ray and CD+DVD sets, although fans will be tempted by the super deluxe edition which comes in a lift-off lid box with the following content:
• 1 CD of A Night at the Odeon – Hammersmith 1975
• 1 SD blu-ray of A Night at the Odeon – Hammersmith 1975
• 1 DVD of A Night at the Odeon – Hammersmith 1975
• 12″ single of Bohemian Rhapsody with unreleased soundcheck of Now I’m Here
• 60 page hardback book containing previously unseen photographs
• Reproduction of ticket from the concert
• Concert programme
• Conference badge
• Reproduction of the tour itinerary
• Six button badges
• Reproduction of the 1975 tour poster
• Reproduction of the sticker stage pass
• Reproduction of 2 balloons dropped into the crowd at the end of the 24th December 1975 Hammersmith show

A Night at the Odeon – Hammersmith 1975 is released on 20 November 2015."

[the fab]

J'y connais pas grand chose en Queen. Qu'est ce qu'il avait de fameux ce concert?

[olivier64]

Il est très connu des connaisseurs.

[the fab]

Hum, ça devait être fameux alors !!!!

[Dark Avenger]

J'y connais pas grand chose en Queen. Qu'est ce qu'il avait de fameux ce concert?

C'est un concert de la tournée en support de l'album A Night at the Opera(1975), soit l'album le plus mythique de Queen. C'est du Queen des années 70, leur meilleure période, mais la moins bien documentée, puisque c'est seulement leur 2eme DVD officiel qui en est issu(le 1er étant l'immense Live at the Rainbow, sorti l'année dernière).

Pour résumer, si t'es fan de hard rock, il te faut ce live(ainsi que le Live at the Rainbow). Sinon, tu peux toujours te rabattre sur du Sabaton,du Alestorm ou du Epica.

[Bertrand]

ça fait plus de 20 ans que j'ai ce concert en bootleg, ça me permettra de l'avoir officiellement.
Du QUEEN 70's on en trouve des extraits dans les VHS Rare Live et Magic Years mais ce ne sont pas des concerts complets.

[Bertrand]

une historique de chacun des albums de QUEEN avec des anecdotes: http://www.udiscovermusic.com/essentials/queen
Très intéressant pour les fans.

[Graptemiss]

Oh le beau cadeau de Noël!

[Everflow]

Le bon temps...

[Everflow]

La prochaine réédition collector de Miracle comprend une chanson totalement inédite à ce jour! La première depuis 8 ans, en écoute ci-dessous. Et le frisson quand Freddie se met à chanter.

QUEEN rediscovered track featuring Freddie Mercury ‘FACE IT ALONE’ arrives as digital single release Thursday October 13
Precedes arrival of Queen ‘The Miracle Collector’s Edition’ coming November 18

Pre-order The Miracle-Collector's Edition: https://Queen.lnk.to/TheMiracle
Download/Stream Face It Alone: https://Queen.lnk.to/FaceItAlone

Having generated a media firestorm back in the summer when band members Brian May and Roger Taylor first leaked news of a rediscovered Queen song featuring Freddie Mercury being considered for possible release, the highly anticipated ‘lost’ track, ‘Face It Alone’, drops as a simultaneous worldwide single release Thursday 13 October, 11.15am BST.

The track’s existence was first revealed by May and Taylor in a BBC radio interview at their appearance at this year’s Royal Jubilee concert at which they performed the opening with their regular singer Adam Lambert, with Roger Taylor describing it as “a little gem from Freddie that we’d kind of forgotten about”, with Brian May saying “it’s beautiful, it’s touching.”

The track’s arrival as a single leads in a November 18 release of a new revisiting of the band’s 13th album, The Miracle, the band’s penultimate to be released in Freddie Mercury’s lifetime, which now becomes available in a lavish 8-disc Queen The Miracle Collector’s Edition box set format.

Among its contents, the expanded set includes The Miracle Sessions: an hour-plus disc of further previously unreleased recordings, including six unpublished songs. Just as tantalising for fans, the audio includes the band’s candid spoken exchanges on the studio floor in London and Montreux, giving the most revealing window yet into the four members’ creative process and the joy, in-jokes and banter on their return to working together.

‘Face It Alone’ was originally recorded during the band’s historic 1988 sessions for that album, a prolific period which saw the band lay down around 30 tracks, many of which were never released, but remained among those that didn’t make the final album cut. It was rediscovered when the band’s production and archive team returned to those sessions to work on The Miracle box set reissue.

“We’d kind of forgotten about this track,” admits Roger Taylor, “but there it was, this little gem. It’s wonderful, a real discovery. It’s a very passionate piece”.

The single will be the first new song featuring Freddie Mercury released in over 8 years. On 2014’s Queen Forever album the band included three previously unheard tracks with Mercury, including ‘Let Me in Your Heart Again,’ ‘Love Kills’ and ‘There Must Be More to Life Than This.’

Speaking of the rediscovered track, Brian May says: “I’m happy that our team were able to find this track. After all these years, it’s great to hear all four of us … yes, Deacy is there too … working in the studio on a great song idea which never quite got completed … until now!”

[Everflow]

Ils viennent de monter une vidéo pour la chanson.

[Gandalf]

Chanson anecdotique mais la voix... qui surgit....

[Dark Avenger]

Chanson anecdotique, mais pas forcément plus anecdotique (voire moins anecdotique) que pas mal de chansons qui ont fini sur l'album The Miracle.

[Everflow]

J'ai toujours aimé celle-ci, qui bénéficie d'une nouvelle vidéo.

[Everflow]

Playlist sans Freddie au chant.

[Dark Avenger]

Je dirais, histoire de pinailler, que sur Rock It, et sur Sail Away, il y a quelques parties chantées par Freddie...

[Everflow]

Si vous avez des sous, ça sent le bel objet (6 CD + 1 LP + livre de 108 pages!) que cette réédition luxueuse du premier album :

Over half a century since its release and a vital chapter in the band’s story, Queen’s self-titled 1973 debut album has been remixed and restored by Justin Shirley-Smith, Joshua J Macrae and Kris Fredriksson to sound the way the band always wanted it to. A new tracklisting, alternative takes, demos and live tracks have now been added to create the most complete version of this pivotal work. This is the very first time that a Queen album has ever received a new stereo mix.

The 6CD + 1 LP Queen I box set contains 63 tracks with 43 brand new mixes, comprising the original album with its intended running order restored, intimate fly-on-the-wall audio of Queen in the studio, demos, rare live tracks, and previously unheard recordings from Queen’s first-ever live performance in London, August 1970. Absent from the 1973 release, the song “Mad The Swine” has been reinstated to its original place in the running order. A 108-page book containing handwritten lyrics and memorabilia accompanies the release.

“This is not just a remaster,” writes Brian May in the CD sleeve insert notes, “this is a brand new 2024 rebuild of the entire Queen debut album, which, with the benefit of hindsight, we have re-titled Queen I.”

May continues, “All the performances are exactly as they originally appeared in 1973, but every instrument has been revisited to produce the ‘live’ ambient sounds we would have liked to use originally. The result is “Queen“ as it would have sounded with today’s knowledge and technology – a first.”

“Queen I is the debut album we always dreamed of bringing to you.”

Queen began life in early summer 1970, but took their first steps in the studio after vocalist Freddie Mercury, guitarist Brian May and drummer Roger Taylor recruited bass guitarist, John Deacon, in July 1971.

“The first three years were really faith and fumes,” says Roger Taylor. “We were penniless but we had a lot of belief in ourselves and a lot of energy.”

While Queen struggled for recognition, their music and stage act were developing. If their previous band Smile were a band for the late 1960s, then Queen’s sound and image was about the here and now and tomorrow. Their songs were already filled with huge riffs, choral harmonies and classical flourishes.

After John Deacon’s arrival, Queen secured a production, song publishing and management deal with Trident Audio Productions. Having heard the band’s demos, the company’s owners, brothers Norman and Barry Sheffield, agreed to fund the recording of Queen’s first album, which they would then shop to potential record companies.

The Sheffields also owned Trident Studios, a state-of-the-art facility in London’s Soho, which had been used by Elton John and The Beatles and was rarely available to young, unsigned bands. Trident’s popularity was such that the studio was usually fully booked during the day, meaning Queen could only record during what was known as ‘downtime’, those rare moments when the studio was empty, usually at night.

Queen began work on the album in May 1972 and spent the next four months living a fractured, nocturnal existance. Evenings would be spent waiting around Soho until the studio was ready. An exhausted Queen would emerge from Trident several hours later.

“We’d work through the night and usually until 7am when the cleaners came in,” recalls Brian. “It was us just grabbing little bits of time.”

Says Roger: “You know, we just came in there right after Bowie had done Hunky Dory and Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and he did both of those albums back to back, two great albums. So, we were very pleased to be there, but when we were there, we’d arrive at three in the morning and then go on, for all the hours that we could grab. It was just a grind. I wouldn't say it was soul destroying because we were quite confident. We had a sort of innate, gentle arrogance, you know, we thought we were good and quite different.”

Queen recorded the album with Trident’s in-house co-producers, John Anthony and Roy Thomas Baker. Both were staunch advocates of Queen and had been instrumental in the band signing with Trident. However, the group quickly ran up against the studio’s rules and regulations.

Says Brian: “Although we had great technology around us, we really didn’t have much freedom to use it. We were regarded as the new boys who didn’t know anything, and nobody really wanted to listen to the way we wanted to do things.”

While relatively inexperienced, Queen already had a clear musical vision. However, the huge guitar and drum sounds they heard in their heads proved difficult to recreate at two o’clock in the morning and on the studio’s in-house perspex drum kit rather than their own.

Says Roger: “They had this very dead drum sound, and it was never the sound we wanted. They had a drum booth, and it was a well known sound. It was kind of American. Very dry, quite fat, dead sound, which is not what I wanted. I wanted to hear the drums resonate, to hear the sound of the drum. I didn't even have my proper kit in there. It was a bit rough really. So the album never sounded as we wanted it to.”

“We wanted everything to sound like it was in-your face,” says Brian. “We had this incredible fight to get the drums out of the booth and into the middle of the studio and put the mics all around the room.”

But that wasn’t Trident’s way. “I remember saying to Roy Thomas Baker, 'This isn't really the sound we want,’” continues Brian.”And he said, 'Don't worry, we can fix it all in the mix.’ And I think we all knew it ain't going to happen." Now in 2024, it has been ‘fixed in the mix’.

Queen’s frustration was compounded by the fact that the songs themselves already displayed the breadth of Queen’s ideas and vaulting ambition. “Keep Yourself Alive”, was like a rallying cry, cueing up the likes of “Doing All Right”, “Great King Rat”, “Liar”, “Modern Times Rock’n’Roll” and “Son And Daughter”.

Meanwhile, Freddie’s imagination had free rein on the biblically-inspired “Jesus” and on “My Fairy King”, where the singer (who was soon to assume the stage name ‘Freddie Mercury’) sang about “horses born with eagles’ wings” and implored “Mother Mercury, look what they’ve done to me.”

“I never knew where some of those lyrics came from,” says Roger. “But Fred was like a magpie. He had a very sharp brain.”

Crucially, this new 2024 Mix version of Queen I now includes “Mad The Swine”, a song absent from the original LP after a difference of opinion between the band and one of its producers. It is now reinstated to its rightful place as the album’s fourth song, in between “Great King Rat” and “My Fairy King”, just as Queen wanted it to be in 1972.

Despite the restrictions imposed upon them at Trident, the band still managed to break the rules. Brian’s composition (and the box set’s first single), “The Night Comes Down”, blueprinted that layered acoustic and electric guitar sound that was soon to become part of Queen’s signature. But the band insisted on using a recording from De Lane Lea Studios rather than attempt a new version at Trident. They smuggled in their demo multi-track tape in a newly labelled ‘Trident’ box in order to mix the song for the album.

CD2: De Lane Lea Demos – 2024 Mix explores Queen I’s fascinating pre-history, with brand new 2024 mixes of the demos the band recorded preceding their album. In the summer 1969, Brian and Roger’s pre-Queen group, Smile, had recorded at De Lane Lea Studios in London’s Kingsway. Two years later, the company opened a new complex in Wembley and needed a band to help them test the mixing desks and the sound quality of the different rooms.

Brian and Roger volunteered Queen, and the band spent time at the studio between November 1971 and January 1972 – “a massive thrill,” Brian recalls. They were repaid with a five-song demo, overseen by De Lane Lea’s chief engineer Louie Austin, and containing “Keep Yourself Alive”, “The Night Comes Down”, “Jesus”, “Liar”, and “Great King Rat".

“The demos we made at De Lane Lea Studios were closer to what we dreamed of,” explains Brian. “Nice open drum sounds and ambiance on the guitar. That was much more the way we wanted it to go.”

“We were young and had total blind faith in what we were doing,” says Roger.

Although these demos were intended to be hawked around to procure a recording contract, the band says Brian, always felt the performances had more spontaneity and sparkle, as well as the benefit of more natural sounds compared with the final album versions. As, the only surviving copies of the mixes of the demos are on scratched acetates, here for the first time, these self-produced recordings have been restored and remixed from the original multitracks.

CD3: Queen I Sessions, and CD4: Queen I Backing Tracks, take the listener behind the scenes at both Trident and De Lane Lea studios.

CD3: Sessions collate completely different and 100% previously unreleased versions of the songs on the album. Newly created using out-takes from De Lane Lea and Trident. They feature some false starts, guide vocals, backing tracks and alternative takes, including spoken-word segments in which the members of Queen can be heard chatting and joking (“It was you Bulsara!”) and occasionally expressing their frustration. Many of the takes are built around acoustic guitar, the electric would have been added later, which gives a different feel to these versions.

CD4: Queen I Backing Tracks offers mixes of the songs from the original Queen album without lead vocals.

Queen pitched the De Lane Lea demos to several record companies but didn’t sign with any, hence their deal with Trident. The album was pretty much completed in 1972. But Queen and their producers were still arguing about the mix right up until the last day, so much so that the band chose a mix of “Keep Yourself Alive”, created with Trident’s assistant engineer Mike Stone, rather than one of the earlier versions. Mike would go on to engineer the next five Queen albums.

Trident pitched Queen’s debut to labels, and eventually signed the band to EMI in the UK and Elektra in the US. Elektra’s founder, Jac Holzman, attended Queen’s date at London’s Marquee club on April 9, 1973. The box set’s book includes an entry from Roger’s diary about the gig: “Went down a storm… Jac Holzman liked it!” Holzman circulated a memo to his staff declaring, “I have seen the future of pop music, and it’s a band called Queen.”

Queen’s debut wasn’t released until July 13, 1973 in the UK and September 4 in the US, increasing their frustration. Queen were “hugely ambitious and unashamedly so,” said Roger Taylor, and had progressed rapidly over the previous twelve months. The LP’s sleevenotes implied as much with the curt note: “Representing at least something of what Queen’s music has been over the last three years.”

EMI issued “Keep Yourself Alive” as a single a week before the album’s UK release, but radio play proved hard to come by. Someone was listening, though.

CD5: Queen I At The BBC, begins with “My Fairy King,” in a slightly different version recorded for DJ and early Queen champion John Peel’s BBC Radio 1 show Sounds Of The Seventies in February 1973, five months before the LP’s release. As no-one had heard their album yet, the band took in backing tracks and added new vocals and other overdubs for this first session. This was the first time Queen’s music had been broadcast anywhere in the world. Three further BBC sessions are preserved here, with new versions of all of Queen I’s songs broadcast by the BBC between February 1973 and April 1974.

What CD5 ‘Queen I At The BBC’ and CD6, ‘Queen I Live’, demonstrate is how these songs grew and developed away from Trident Studios.

CD6: Queen I Live distills the best performances of the first album’s songs from Queen’s triumphant March 1974 headline date at London’s Rainbow Theatre, plus several previously unreleased tracks added. These include the first official release of “Hangman”, a Free-inspired Mercury/May/Taylor/Deacon composition that was a mainstay of Queen’s early live shows, but was never recorded in the studio. This performance of “Hangman” comes from a show at the San Diego Sports Arena on the last night of the band’s US tour in March 1976.

The final songs on ‘Queen I Live’ revisit the historic moment Queen became Queen. Among the 108-page enclosed book’s many never-before-seen artifacts is Roger’s handwritten invitation to Queen’s first ever performance in London: “A private showing on Sunday August 23 [1970] at 7:30pm at Imperial College… lecture theatre A, level 5,” he writes.

Two songs from this historic show, “Jesus” and a cover of the Spencer Davis Group’s 1967 hit “I’m A Man”, have been retrieved from cassettes in the archive, and are the earliest Queen recordings in existence, even pre-dating John Deacon’s arrival in the band.

The final track on the original Queen album is the urgent-sounding one and a quarter-minute instrumental snippet of “Seven Seas Of Rhye”. The finished song wouldn’t appear until Queen II, and became a UK Top 10 hit. In a sense though, this abbreviated version’s frantic rhythms, hammering piano and orchestral-sounding guitar captures the spirit of Queen’s debut: it’s the sound of a restless, determined young band eager to take the next step.

As Freddie once said: “All of us were aiming for the top, and we weren’t going to be content or satisfied with anything less.”

Says Brian: “Freddie was so convinced that he would be successful, he never doubted it. We were all precocious boys but he was another level. But we all shared this passion. And the energy grew and coalesced into something very powerful.”

And a final thought from Roger Taylor: ”Essentially with the Queen I box set we've made the actual album sound the way we wanted it to sound using the techniques that we have now. We've made the drums sound like they should sound and, the overall sound of it is better, the mixes are better. So it's been a delight to improve it, to bring it up to where we wanted it to be.”

“I have found one thing though that has amazed me listening to this album again and again is how bloody religious some of the lyrics are, you know, it's really quite religious.”