Queen were misunderstood at the time… by me? By the UK? We thought they were either a lame glam band or a lamer metal band, actually they were an art metal band parody of a rock band with one foot firmly in the late 1950s and the other on Broadway.
Lead by a man who gave Liberace a run for his money when it came to flamboyance, he was embraced over here by the same wave of classic rock entitlement that brought us Elton John and David Bowie.
At the same, I considered Queen a below average joke band with one masterpiece and a bucktoothed irritant as a lead singer. What can I tell you? It was punk time and come on, they were nothing if not irritating.
Fast forward 30 odd years and Queen are in the pantheon of all time greats though unable to recover from Mercury’s early death . Paul Rodgers, while talented enough, couldn’t cut it and so they hung around waiting for Adam Lambert to emerge from the primal ooze of American Idol where he was one of their increasingly rare great finds. A leather booted rent boy with a taste for musical theatre and a voice built for hard rock, he has been playing with Queen, off and on, for the past couple of years. Lambert hasn’t proven himself on record, no, actually he has proven he sucks on record, but he should be an excellent Queen frontman.
Finally, as our own Helen Bach reported, Queen is embarking on an eagerly anticipated North American tour and I picked up a tix at MSG for the July 17 gig… should be a real mean scene.
