I spoke to other audience members at the interval and got two sets of responses. One was from younger people who had never seen Queen but liked the music. They all thought the show was pretty good, near enough was good enough for them. Perhaps someone like this should have been the reviewer. The other group were people like myself; a bit older (well, some pretty old at that!), people who loved Queen and knew the music and were not impressed with the show in any way.

 

The positives were that the lead guitarist was a brilliant musician, really very good indeed. But he was a terrible singer, loud and resoundingly flat and should not have been taxed with having to do back-up vocals as well. Just because Brian May is multi-talented does not mean every lead guitarist is the same! The costumes were good too, very authentic. One song was well done – “In the Lap of the Gods – I closed my eyes and could have been hearing the real thing. But it’s a very short song and half of it was omitted for some reason. “Somebody to Love” was fairly well done as well but again the words were wrong and lines were omitted – why?

 

I felt like a native Italian speaker listening to some Anglo diva mash the words to an operatic aria. The lead singer did not know  (or did not sing) all the words to any of the songs. And real fans know ALL the words and want to sing along. It’s very disconcerting when the singer doesn’t know the proper lyrics and, worse, when he inexplicably leaves entire lines out of songs time after time. It became a bit of a joke in the row I was sitting in. People were singing and then when “Freddie” skipped a line or got it wrong, people would look at each other and laugh out loud.

 

Laughter, and even thought, were drowned out by the sheer volume of noise produced. Finesse and subtlety, two of Queen’s hallmarks, were utterly lost to the overwhelming sound which only served to exaggerate the mistakes in tempo and the awful back-up singing which was nothing like Queen’s amazing choral harmonies.

 

If this band have been performing this show for 13 years as their press release states one would expect that they would be a lot better at it than Sunday night’s performance indicated.  It was disappointing for half the audience, but they were polite (which we expect in Newcastle) and perhaps it was too big an undertaking for success anyway.