Queen. The review, 34 years late.

Tonight, on BBC2, they showed the full "legendary" Queen 1975 Christmas Concert at the Hammersmith Odeon. I was there that night, and there I was, long hair, having it large in the mad crush at the front, my long lost friends beside me, yelling at the giant camera as it rolled along the orchestra pit. Streamers, balloons and confetti are cascading down on us, and a blow-up doll is bouncing across our heads.

I'm watching this youth in some kind of third person weirdness from my bed, thirty four years on, as what had been a memory for so long is blurted out into my mortgaged room I had no idea I'd ever own. A flickering light showing up one night, far down my dark time tunnel, with everything that happened inbetween telescoping into something the size of my head.

Queen were just realizing they were in their pomp, and Bohemian Rhapsody was number one in the charts following three cult selling albums. I'd seen them a couple of years before, blowing Mott the Hoople off the stage in Oxford, and rewriting rock theatre history. After Bowie, Queen were to be the last hurrah of showbiz excess before Punk let the masses flood onto the stages two years later.

That night in London wasn't really as legendary as they say. They'd done a far tighter job a few days before, again in the New Theatre in Oxford. But Hammersmith was the last night of their first world tour, and watching it again in hindsight, you could see they were worn out and going through the motions. Freddie didn't bother with nearly all the high notes that made the albums so fabulous, and at one point goes off stage during "Brighton Rock" to let Brian May masturbate thru over ten minutes of what now looks like really bad guitar noodling, but at the time we were gasping with the sheer out of the worldness of it all. Ordinary Life was extraordinarily bland back then.

The final encore was an appalling crash through "Jailhouse Rock" and something even less memorable, but we'd had our highlights, with "Liar", "Keep Yourself Alive" and "Black Queen " making virtually their last live appearances.

As the credits went up, I switched off the TV and left my hirsute self back in the days when talk of; tiny video cameras, mobile phones, i-this i-that, computers, emails, and blogs weren't even imagined in sci-fi books. No watching it on Youtube the next day for us.

No doubt we all fought over who got the blow-up doll, rolled up our programmes into our back pockets and shuffled though the party ribbons and paper that snowed the floor, out into the cold west London night air, to look for the Cortina we'd all arrived in. Memories sleep, until a word, a sight, a sound, awakens them.

Is this it.

Is this the winter then,
No sparkle from your voice
Across the phone.
No precious light to flicker
In your eye,
No shape or curve
Just solid nerve to get me by.

Is this the year end then,
Quiet from the hill
And shelved in labelled boxes.
No bright smile to brush
Away the pain.
Brilliant heart and words
Gone like birds ahead of rain.

Is this the future then,
Yes, the mute answerphone
is tight lipped.
No freestyle chatter
Off the walls,
No common sense
Or recompense, when evening falls.

29.11.95