(FM broadcast FLAC)
Band : Queen
Venue : Hammersmith Odeon Theatre, London, UK
Date : 24. December 1975
Title : Christmas Times Rock'n'Roll (fan-created multi-source compilation)
01. Area Code 615 - Stone Fox Chase (taped intro)
02. Bob Harris (?) - concert introduction
03. Queen - Now I'm Here
04. Queen - Ogre Battle
05. Queen - White Queen (As It Began)
06. Queen - Bohemian Rhapsody (intro)
07. Queen - Killer Queen
08. Queen - The March Of The Black Queen (rock part)
09. Queen - Bohemian Rhapsody (reprise)
10. Queen - Bring Back That Leroy Brown
11. Queen - Brighton Rock
12. Queen - Son And Daughter
13. Queen - Keep Yourself Alive
14. Queen - Liar
15. Queen - In The Lap Of The Gods ...revisited
16. Audience - waiting for encore
17. Queen - Big Spender
18. Queen - Jailhouse Rock
19. Queen - Stupid Cupid
20. Queen - Be Bop A Lula
21. Queen - Jailhouse Rock (reprise)
22. Audience - waiting for second encore
23. Queen - Seven Seas Of Rhye
24. Queen - See What A Fool I've Been
25. Queen - God Save The Queen (taped outro)
This is definitely Queen's most bootlegged concert. It has been broadcast countless times on the radio worldwide and shown many times on TV, and so for decades it has kept the bootleggers busy! Originally, it aired live simultaneously on TV (Old Grey Whistle Test) and the radio (Radio One).
For this reason, there are moments when the band sound nervous. Brian's vocal harmonies are iffy at times, especially in Now I'm Here. Freddie hits couple of bad notes on the piano in White Queen when he first enters, and then hits a couple wrong chords at the end of BoRhap. Roger's snare seems to have problems tonight. It may seem as if he forgot to turn it on when White Queen's guitar solo starts, but it seems to actually turn itself off towards the end of the song! The snare is off again at the beginning of the first chorus of Liar. Later in the song, Roger misses his big flam to queue everyone into the coda. They recover well, although Freddie, clearly startled to some extent by Roger's mistake, sings "Everything you do is sin" for the first and second lines, instead of starting with "They never ever let you win" as usual. Still,all these things aside, it's a great performance, not even considering the
fact that both Freddie and Brian were feeling ill that day!
Listen carefully in Gods Revisited, as the sound engineer puts Brian into stereo immediately after Freddie leaves the piano. Glorious! Despite his illness, Brian has a superb night on his guitar, turning in fantastic renditions of White Queen and Brighton Rock, particularly.
While listening to such a high quality recording, one realizes that Freddie's live voice has not quite developed itself yet. In Seven Seas Of Rhye, for example, he doesn't hit most of the high A's with clarity or precision. Compare See What A Fool I've Been to the Champions shoot concert on 10-6-77, where two years later he's much more confident and uses his voice to greater lengths.
As revealed by the original live video broadcast on the Old Grey Whistle Test, most of the speeches between songs mentioning the fact that it was Christmas were later edited out of every (known) rebroadcast of the show, audio and video. Before Ogre Battle, Freddie says: "Right now Queen would like to drink a special Christmas toast to everybody here, all the viewers. So cheers!" Before Liar, he says, "And now a special Christmas edition of a little number called Liar." Roger, before he jumps into Big Spender, says, "Alright, Merry Christmas. Thanks for a fab year. We're gonna do some rock and roll." However, Freddie saying "Thank you, Merry Christmas everybody" at the end of Gods Revisited is fully audible on the video rebroadcasts, although it was muted on the recordings for later radio broadcasts.
This video is the best document of Freddie's strip act during Big Spender. The kimono, worth about $500 (which doesn't last long, of course), was given to him by a Japanese fan earlier in the year.
This is a multi-source compilation made with the intenson to finally have a complete audio version of this excellent concert. During the years this concert was re-broadcasted by both TV and radio in many countries. Therefore many audio sources have appeared, but none was complete. Many parts, like the spoken concert introduction or Freddie's christmas speeches appear only on the original TV broadcast, I will call this source the "video mix". This video mix covers the concert from the opening by the Nashville country band Area Code 615 - a taped song called Stone Fox Chase, which was used as the Old Grey Whistle Test theme song, to the end of Queen's rock'n'roll medley. After this medley finished, the BBC crew packed their equipment, the TV broadcast ended, which is the reason why the rest of the concert does not exist on video. It is also one of the reasons why this source can't be 100% used for this compilation, the second reason is the sound quality, which is much worse then the soundboard recordings. Since this concert was also broadcasted on BBC radio, this concert was recorded on soundboard. These multi-track master-tapes were later used to create 2 different soundboard mixes. The first soundboard mix, the "common mix" has great sound on the backing vocals, but the drum sound is not very good. This was the only mix used for all radio re-broadcasts, until the Swedish radio rebroadcast from 2005. This broadcast used a completely new mix, the "swedish radio mix", which has absolutely perfect drum sound, but on the other side, the backing vocals sound very weird. Also this new mix has unfortunatelly some radio-added jingles during some songs.
This compilation uses elements from both soundboard mixes with gaps filled with the video mix. Songs 1, 2, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22 and some other small pieces come from the video source shared on Queenzone.
Its lineage should be something like : TV broadcast > VHS tape (unknown generation) > FLAC
Songs 4-9 come from the common soundboard mix. The recording comes from a pre-FM CD, intended for broadcast on April 12/13, 2002 on the Westwood One radio network. It is missing Bring Back That Leroy Brown, and everything after Gods Revisited. The quality is outstanding, and surely better than any radio broadcast (of this particular mix, the common mix).
Songs 3, 10-15 and 23-25 come from a bootleg CD called "There Ain't No Sanity Clause", which uses the swedish radio mix. All songs from it except the last 2 tracks have the lineage : Swedish FM radio 'P3 Live' 4-29-05 > CDR (0). The last 2 songs (See What A Fool I've Been & God Save The Queen) have the
lineage : BBC FM rebroadcast > Cassette (0)
This compilation was created in summer 2007 by pittrek using Cool Edit Pro. I have always used crossfades instead of cuts always when the sources change.
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