September 11, 1976
Phil McNeill
New Musical Express
If punters queue when they’ve already got tickets…
…You’re witnessing A Phenomen. And such was the situation when Queen played the Edinburgh Festival - with supporters of The Young Pretender paying their man and his men the ultimate tribute… But what of the music? What of the future? Is our combination-clad Hero prancing up a blind alley?
It’s a freezing Edinburgh wind that whips up the bare slope by the Playhouse Theatre to torment the massed masochists who queue, strung out a full quarter of a mile, for Queen’s first British gig of 1976.
Masochists? Am I revealing my prejudice against the four wonderboys already? Actually, no: masochists because they’ve all got tickets already, and, while the pub the other side of the theatre stands almost empty, these kids are catching pneumonia for nothing in their impatience to reach their already allotted seats.
Baffled, photographer Chalkie Davies and I forsake the Scotch queue for the one inside the pub…
Later, in the Playhouse, Supercharge do their obscene thing to the delight of the packed audience. They’ve lost keyboardist Iain Bradshow, at least for tonight, and the consequent weakening in the band’s already clanky rhythmic mesh is disturbing. But that famed Scots audience does its nut.
Whether it’s the Bay City Rollers spot, the new punk rock leapabout or a completely serious, lopsided semi-funk song, the response is probably as strong as Superchange have ever had anywhere - and this is distinctly an off night!
The Liverpool layabouts troop off and the “We want Queen” chants strike up as scurrying roadies prepare a spartan stage: no clever backdrops and stuff, just Roger Taylor’s mounds of cymbals in front of that ever-present gong and Brian May’s mountain of AC30s.
Darkness...gaspo… a clashing gong… squeals of delight from the youth next to me...yer usual symphonic electronic atmospheric fanfare sort of thing… fading up into the Gilbert and Sullivan middle section of “Bohemian Rhapsody”...a welling up of dry ice...clamorous welcome from the audience..the youth next to me digs his elbows in my ribs and bounces on his seat in delirium…
And they’re on, racing straight out of the recorded “Bohemian Rhapsody” into a live rendition of the heavy riff section that follows. Lights flash madly, there’s smoke all over the place, the youth next to me is screaming with joy, as are 3,000 other lunatic Scotspeople. If explosions aren’t going off it feels like it, and I jot down what Freddie Mercury is wearing in an attempt to keep a grip on my reeling brain.
A white boiler suit, it says here. What professionalism. That’s like a war correspondent noting the time as the wall he’s leaning on gets demolished by a tank.
The relentless sensory bombardment continues as Queen bomb out of “BoRhap” - “just gotta get right outta here”, and how can I disagree? - into a harsh melange of heavy metal riffs plastered with flash harmonies, which in turn gives way to a fast intrumental.
Basically it’s rubbish, a theatrical synthesis of the grossest lumps of regimented noise the sometime power trio can contrive. As they thunder away Mercury emerges from the wings once more, looking like a frog in a balletic white skintight catsuit, and magisterially conjures up giant flashes that erupt deafeningly out of the stage.
The audience do likewise from their serried seats.
Queen have arrived, in more ways than one. Britain’s most successful group of the decade poutingly confront their loyal subjects.
The drift of the piece is obvious, maybe. The crowd loves ‘em and the critic hates them. Well, as it happens I quite like them, but generally that’s a fair picture of rock press attitudes to Queen: at the end of the gig, when the only possible view of the band involved standing on the shoulders of the person jumping up and down on the seat in front of you, I picked out two isolated, sour faces. Critics.
It wasn’t always like that: briefly, at the beginning of ‘75, Queen had a mass audience and critical respect. Dave Downing, whose newly published book, Future Rock, ranges incisively across the whole spectrum of heavyweight rock - Dylan, Reed, Bowie, Floyd, et al - reviewed “Sheer Heart Attack” alongside Sparks’ “Propaganda” in Let It Rock, January 1975:
“I find Ron Mael’s lyrics offensively lacking any conviction but pride in their own cleverness…. The arrangements conquer all in their streamlined assurance…. I have visions of a Gilbert O’Sullivan gone progressive….”
Change that to Gilbert and Sullivan and it could easily be directed at “A Night At The Opera”. However, Downing had this to say of “Sheer Heart Attack”:
“In stark contrast we have Queen’s third album….this is the best new band I’ve heard for a long, long time….Queen have convinced me that the division of rock into heavy soft has been largely a way of covering up the lack of energy in either. Whether rocking, ballading, whatever….they’ve got energy to spare. They have the old Beatles-style oomph.
“....Brian May’s guitar stalks Freddie Mercury’s vocals with as much power, and probably more ingenuity, than Ronno achieved in the heady days of ‘Panic In Detroit’....
“....Freddie Mercury’s voice is equally amazing, hampered only by the lack of lyrics to do it and the music justice. Some rock bands get hampered by depth-lyrics; I think Queen would just grow.
“But that’s a hope rather than a criticism. The superb gloss on this record covers the real gold, rather than, as I fear in Sparks’ case, just substitutes for it….”
Right, Queen at the time of “Sheer Heart Attack” were poised, ready to choose pretty much whichever direction and status they fancied. They had fought through the original drawbacks of being camp followers churning out rather grotesque Led Zeppelin rip-offs, to become a tough, stylish unit coasting on the back of a devastating single, “Killer Queen”.
Although they lacked Bowie’s way with words, the initial implications of the name still clung to them, and it seemed, listening to “Sheer Heart Attack”, that all they needed were some hot lyrics and a little discipline to instate them as not only the most popular Britrockers since Bowie, but also the best.
The first thing that hits you on that album, after a snatch of fairground FX is vibrant power as May leads the ensemble through the whirlwind of “Brighton Rock”. It explodes with a kind of seaside energy to match his mundane holiday romance lyrics, and stakes out May’s own preferred patch on the words map: storytelling.
That type of power is almost entirely absent from “Opera”, and even in “Brighton Rock” it gets horribly dissipated by a ridiculous guitar solo, May following himself up and down the scale in a meaningless exercise quite divorced from the rest of the number.
Another type of power also missing from “Opera”, is found in “Now I’m Here”, a Who-ish (“I Can See for Miles”) feel leading into brilliant beefy harmonies - very much in the mould of Roy Thomas Baker, Queen producer throughout their career, and now used to good use on Sunfighter’s “Drag Race Queen” - which wouldn’t get a look-in among all the breathy harmonies of “Opera”.
It’s great rock, strong and goodtime, apparently about Queen’s US tour with Mott the Hoople.
Elsewhere on “Sheer Heart Attack”, however, lay the seeds of Queen’s decline.
“Bring Back That Leroy Brown” was the first indication of their capabilities completely outside rock. As such it was immaculately performed, a camp minstrel pastiche, but unwelcome.
“Lap Of The Gods (Part One)” featured and unnecessarily ostentatious intro; “Flick Of The Wrist”, a murkily heavy song with a uplifting Baker buzz of a chorus, May’s guitar splattered all over the place in another facet of aggression that would soon disappear, was unfortunately a prototype for the appalling “Death On Two Legs”.
“Death”, the opening track of “ANATO”, is seemingly aimed at their previous manager to John Reid. Astounding dense musically, its lyrics are horribly strident and self-righteous, a blinkered, vindictive tirade that says more about the writer than his subject.
This sort of unflinching immaturity epitomises the Queen scene to some extent: infants on the loose with the weapon of technology, everything sublimated to technique.
“Flick Of The Wrist”, its predecessor, was similarly nasty - and apparently dealt with the same topic - but it succeeds where “Death” does not because the singing is sublimated to the music and, particularly, because the words are secondary to the melody.
In Edinburgh “Flick Of The Wrist” comes fourth, and it’s not as good as the record, possibly because they’re struggling somewhat on the faster songs.
They’ve already done “Sweet Lady” from ANATO”, Mercury singing well and the band thundering confidently. But suddenly Brian May’s guitar goes out of tune from all the crashing it’s received, and he drags the tempo. The final crescendo almost catches fire, but could do better.
Freddie toasts Edinburgh with champagne before he and May, moodily posed under blue spots, venture timorously into the medievally romantic “White Queen” from “Queen II”. Freddie goes to the piano for May’s curling, echoed solo, and we catch up with ourselves on “Flick”.
Here May’s problem is highlighted, he can’t get a decent uptempo solo together. The song is pounding along, but it’s like a cover-up, charging through seemingly pointless changes with throwaway solos, as if they’re attempting to dazzle you with workrate, a treasure trove of superficialities.
John Deacon plays a strong bass, holding up the song if necessary, and Roger Taylor, while seeming rather detached from proceedings up on his high riser, plays solid, varied drums. Mercury’s singing is superb, and on this might it’s mainly May whose playing isn’t quite up to scratch.
The medley comes next, and it brings a little warmth to the garish, posturing event. John Deacon’s “You’re My Best Friend” comprises the first part. Like “Misfire”, his semi-Caribbean pop-rocker on “Sheer Heart Attack”, it’s the friendliest track on “Opera”, and, while May and Mercury mess with every musical genre known to man, the only straight rock song apart from Taylor’s exhilarating “I’m In Love With My Car”.
Onstage, Mercury’s lead vocal floats beautifully on the band’s okay harmonies, and the audience clap along with the lazy rhythm. May’s guitar solo isn’t loud enough, and he hits a horrible chord at the end of it, but it’s a good break.
The two-note chime at the end of “You’re My Best Friend”, a similar device to the end of “Killer Queen”, leads into “Bohemian Rhapsody”.
On record, “Bo Rhap” epitomises the heavy-handed idiocy that bugs their last album. There are actually a few great touches in the rambling epic, notably the guitar break that follows the operatic bit, with its sudden halved phrases towards the end and the subtle way May’s fade out figure is continued by Mercury’s solo piano. But the rest is cumbersome and, where not plainly stupid, pompous and unimaginative.
For some reason Brian May seemed to have lost all feeling for rock on “Opera”, and the first guitar break on “Rhapsody” was the album’s sole unscrambled solo bar the period piece, “Lazing On A Sunday Afternoon”. And as for Beelzebub…
But the words of “Bohemian Rhapsody” are even worse than the music. The basic scenario would seem to be the romanticised alienation of a “poor boy” who indulges Mercury’s gun fetish by killing a man, leading to some kind of tug-of-war between, er, two forces. Life and death? Heaven and hell? Does Freddie know?
There’s that brief stab of “just gotta get out of here” defiance, but we finish on the fatalism of “anyway the wind blows…” A vague tale of idealised emotions that quite possibly means nothing at all.
Mercury’s songs do have a tendency to be vague to the point of meaninglessness - where they’re not utterly trivial anyway. Triviality I can take- “Lazing On A Sunday Afternoon”, for instance, where Queen’s technical skill turns a brief, twee ditty into a tour-de-force, with a great guitar break in what I think of as Brian May’s Mrs. Dale’s Diary style and one particularly wonderful harmony line on “there he goes again” - but the depths of pretension are plumbed on Mercury’s more “serious” songs.
These are actually fairly rare, but Mercury’s deepest opus outside of “Rhapsody” is probably “In The Lap Of The Gods” on “Sheer Heart Attack”, a portentous, monolithic singalong which I like a lot musically, but whose only discernible meaning is, like the conclusion of “Rhapsody”, that old vague predestination schtick.
The rest of Mercury’s oeuvre consists of live ballads (the melodically poignant, lyrically incomprehensible “Lily Of The Valley” from “Attack” and the more narcissistic, less focussed, meandering “Love Of My Life”, least memorable on “Opera”); bitchiness (that horrible duo, “Flick Of The Wrist” and “Death On Two Legs”); and weird period pieces (“Leroy Brown”, “Lazing”, and “Seaside Rendezvous” from “Opera”).
“Seaside Rendezvous” is pretty interesting stuff, illustrating the bizarre purism that prompts Queen to boast “No Synthesisers” on their album sleeves. A long, ‘20s-style piece, it’s fully orchestrated with instrumental passages by both brass and woodwind sections - performed entirely on vocals!
It’s astounding. Queen are perfectionists, as we all know; perfect confectionists. Even Mercury’s lead vocal is done, as on a lot of the album, line by line to get that bursting out of the speaker effect.
And therein lies their undoing, for they seem to have spent so long working on “A Night At The Opera” that they completely lost sight of the record they were making, coming out with shallow perfection without the least hint of the fire of “Sheer Heart Attack”.
However, returning to Freddie’s oeuvre: the next song in the Edinburgh medley, following on from “Bohemian Rhapsody” - and missing the operatics, thank god - is “Killer Queen”.
What a song. Although they take it slower than on record it still sounds slightly rushed, the ideas fall so thick and fast.
It has so many virtues that “Opera” lacks: interesting music (that got neglected on “ANATO” in favour of performance); brevity; flash (“Opera” is positively pedestrian compared to the swagger of this mid-tempo marvel); and it’s unpretentious in its triviality, something that none of the work - at - it - for - six - months - to - get - the - vocals - sounding - like - George - Formby’s ukelele trivia on “Opera” could claim.
Back live, it transforms into the noisy “March Of The Black Queen” from “Queen II” and thence to the end of “Rhapsody”. Kimono Taylor’s gong jerks us into a snazzy rendition of “Leroy Brown”, purely instrumental, and end medley.
“Brighton Rock” follows, red hot and awful tight, Taylor’s falsetto screaming over the top, until…
Oh no, it’s this guitar virtuoso bit, where the others go off and leave May to fiddle about with his patented delayed action devices. The man has little idea of stage craft standing awkwardly on Freddie’s promontory and dashing back to his amp every now and then to twiddle another knob. The performance is clever, but he’s hardly playing great music - enough’s quite enough.
At points during this intermediate solo May hits something good - a glassy, Japanesey section, a mellow, symphonic bit - but his individual slot is plagued by the fault that haunts Queen and devalues what good stuff they do play: they’ve got no taste. Don’t know good from bad.
They can perform, and they’re very bright boys (according to Larry Pryce’s unwonderfully written and uninformative Official Biography Of Queen, Brian may or may not have a PhD in Astronomy, Mercury a degree in graphics and illustration, Deacon an honours degree in electronics, and Taylor a degree in biology) but as for taste…
As if to emphasise that point, Taylor returns to do his dumb trick with lager on his tomtoms and they lumber into a bunch of monotonous, archetypal heavy metal riffs.
Next song, “‘39”, has the four down front - May on acoustic and Taylor on tambourine and bass drum.
My, they look well-coifed. Mercury demonstrates his fine voice again.
A newie, “You Take My Breath Away”, from the album currently known as “A Day At The Races” - half-finished - shows Freddie still pludding the fragile ballad vein, a hesitant, precious ditty accompanied by lone piano, old fashioned and unexceptional.
But then it’s Brian’s big moment, composition-wise: “The Prophet’s Song.” In Pryce’s book May explains that the plot came to him in a dream: “...a dream concerning revenge, only in the dream I wasn’t able to work out what it was revenge for.”
So out of the astronomer’s subconscious comes this Noah’s Ark parable seemingly set in the present, with a ship full of humans apparently heading off into space.
Musically it’s “Old English”, according to Roger Taylor, the rock equivalent of a Prussian military division marching to the Crusades, marred by the most fatuously self-indulgent acapella nonsense imaginable in the middle.
If Queen were chameleons to begin with (Zep meets Bowie), they’re even more that way inclined now, changing personality completely from one song to the next (George Formby meets Cecil B. DeMille meets…) It’s a treatment to which May’s songs lend themselves.
“Good Company” is a very English tale, another vague moral story, done Formby style, with an extraordinary guitar ensemble imitating a complete trad jazz band, another labour of months for a trivial piece of flash.
“‘39”, the acoustic song, seems to be another slice of science fiction, an obscure folk tale which disguises its meaning frustratingly well. Nice feel, though.
Onstage “The Prophet’s Song” is launched amid billows of dry ice and taped wind. As they muscle their way through the heavy chorus I keep expecting them to bump into one another in the confusion, but they manage not to. Anyway, the others clear off when Mercury goes into his ridiculous echoed vocals workout, a one-man Swingle Singers, appalling narcissism.
The audience, to their shame, seem entranced by the spectacle of the great poseur and his myriad voices. Nauseating.
At the end of the song to revolving globes descend and a tape of jangling piano speeds dizzyingly. The globes rise - UFOs taking off?
Anyway, it gives Fred a chance to change into a grotesque black outfit, and suddenly we’re back into the flashing lights/strobes.racing adrenalin scene again with “Stone Cold Crazy”, very fast and heavy, May playing a good scientific solo.
Freddie goes pianoing again for “Doing All Right” from “Queen”, slow and laconic with waterfalling guitar and lovely harmonies, but that gives way to a lousy solo over an unexpectedly Brazilian riff and more unnecessary changes. What are they trying to hide?
“Lazing On A Sunday Afternoon” is neat, and then the crowd get “Keep Yourself Alive”, which they’ve been baying for. It’s an okay song, but they do it terribly heavy and insult the listener with their soulless, declamatory attempts at communication.
Queen almost boogie on “Tie Your Momma Down”, also from the new LP, the most straightforward song so far with a slide break that veers towards a 12-bar. Freddie postures crassly under the rather inept lighting.
“Liar” from “Queen” comes in on a Bo Diddley beat, and as it gets into typical Queen HM jaggedness May slings out a real nasty phrase that sneers at the ineffectual stuff he’s played all evening.
As it dissolves into aimlessness it becomes obvious that Queen live are some great songs, an image and a lot of noise. Their heavy metal is no better than the likes of Nazareth, unfocussed, with no real dynamics outside of structural party tricks. A cover-up job for essentially lumpen music… yet they are capable of so much more.
“Lap Of The Gods” picks things up, its relentless chorus rising and falling on good chords - a rare commodity for Queen, as is its stable rhythm - and as the stage vanishes beneath dry ice they kiss goodbye.
Now this I don’t believe. Never in my life, outside of the likes of the Rollers, have I encountered such a hysterical response to a band. It’s like a riot, kids charging about in the smoky darkness, and if Queen don’t get back there soon this lot are going to knock the place down.
The encore is the great “Now I’m Here”, followed by their “Rock’n’roll” medley of “Big Spender” and “Jailhouse Rock.” They really shouldn’t do that. Mercury’s got no idea about getting down and having a good time, and his attempts to get audience participation are laughable. It’s scrappy stuff, and even their rock’n’roll is spoilt by too many changes!
As for where Queen go from here, the two songs they played from the next album were undistinguished, and can give no hint of what it will contain.
Nowever, it’s pretty obvious they’ve driven so far up their particular blind alley that there’s virtually no hope of them ever fulfilling the potential that was there in “Sheer Heart Attack.”
They could have been giants of real music, but it seems they are destined to remain the most perfect indulgence in rock. Masters of style, void of content.
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magical healing ramble
the first part of this is just a general “how psychic-style magical healing probably works” thing but the second part is a little more pokemon-specific due to some mention of aura mechanics
Psychic healing is basically really precise life-focused telekinesis. A psychic healer has to know what they’re doing, because they’re moving cells and so on around. Even if their magical senses are not normally that precise, while actively healing/scanning someone for injuries (a whisper of telekinesis, with no actual force applied), they can feel the cells etc. Medical knowledge is important for anything major. Skilled psychic healers can even heal things like amputation or nerve damage or whatever, but it might take a very long time. They must take the proteins etc from neighbouring tissues. It requires a lot of concentration, and a skilled healer could also very very easily kill you. Psychic-healing painkiller’s just paralysing the relevant pain-sensing nerves.
They could just as easily paralyze, say, the nerves to your heart.
They also can’t bring back dead cells. This is not so important when they can move around cells to even up things and compensate, but if you have eg a brain injury they can heal injured or dead cells but once you’ve lost a neuron it’s gone forever.
The most basic thing for a psychic healer is setting bones etc. Holding things in place, moving them back to the correct place. More advanced stuff is mainly ‘difficulty sorted’ by the criteria of “how complicated is it” and “how badly will you damage the patient if you mess this up”.
Knitting a broken bone back together is about the same level of control as sealing up a papercut or reinflating a punctured lung.
Dragging bacteria out of a wound or whatever is a thing these guys can do.
This can’t be made into a potion, by the way.
Life energy healers/aura users, on the other hand, work directly with life energy. The picture of the body they get from their powers is a bit less detailed than the psychic’s, but they get stuff like how much energy someone has in exactly the same way they’d check for a broken bone and can more easily check for injuries-in fact they don’t even have to be actively looking for injuries, necessarily, they just have to pay attention to the general life energy and notice that Hey That’s Injured Feeling Life Energy Over There.
For these guys, far less medical knowledge is required. The basics are generally fine. You don’t have to know how clotting works to add a bit of your life energy to a deep cut and drag it towards a healthier state.
Very basic healing works by the same principle as basic strength- or speed-boosting; add more life energy, superchange the tissue. The healing/speed/strength thing actually overlaps. An injured aura user may wind up moving faster and hitting harder as a result of this. They’re incredibly annoying to fight even when they have only the most basic command of their abilities because why won’t you tire out, why won’t you stay down?!
More directed life energy healing is more complicated. Also their way of dealing with infection etc is to supercharge the immune system, that’s really all they can do.
In pokemon, it’s been shown that aura can be used to make translucent or opaque usually-blue constructs. It has also been shown that an aura user that completely exhausted their aura in a short amount of time doesn’t leave a corpse behind, instead turning into translucent blue light without losing tangibility, then abruptly vanishing. This process includes apparently-painful blue lines sweeping up and down the body. If the aura use stops before the aura user is completely drained they quickly return to normal colour and can fully recover after a while.
This heavily implies three things. One, aura constructs can sub in for flesh and bone. Two, extreme aura use causes the body to flash-convert itself to aura-construct and lots of 'free’ aura, a process that eventually begins to spiral and kills the person even if they stop actively using aura. Three, this state of being partially disintegrated, apparently evenly from head to toe heals fully.
So: these guys can basically 'template’ even dead tissue, then flood it with life energy, creating a life-energy construct that can take on the appearance and functions of the replaced tissue, or just…sit there…possibly updating constantly…ready to sub in at any moment. Functionally this means that as long as things aren’t moved too far out of place they can revive dead tissue, including things like brain tissue, that is fresh enough to have kept its structure; and if they had the chance to template they can bring back squished tissue.
They can’t heal cancer or remove fluid from lungs or whatever. They can’t drag something back into place over more than like a millimeter-at best they can flash-convert some tissue. An aura adept can’t set a hinge break with their mind like a psychic healer.
They can bring you back from the dead, though, if they don’t mind both you and them being utterly drained for days.
This kind of healing can be put in a potion; not the really advanced stuff, sure, but downing a healing potion is basically taking a shot of concentrated life energy, able to seek out areas that Look Injured and drag them back to a healthier state.
Also very skilled aura users approach unkillable. Seriously these guys…won’t die…unless you, like, cut off of the head, or have really extended anoxia, or starve/dehydrate them, or impale them somewhere vital and leave it in long enough that they die and stay dead from not being able to mask/negate the injury due to Thing In The Way.
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