The new incarnation of “Queen A Night At The Odeon – Hammersmith 1975” “premiered at an 8 October screening at Olympic Studios, Barnes (now a cinema) in West London. Brian May attended and witnessed his younger self play this milestone concert in Queen’s career.
Following the screening he told Rolling Stone: “It was very weird. It seems like watching another person, that young boy. I look so thin! I look very serious and the body language is so different now – I was quite shy in those days. There was a lot of noise and energy in the playing, but my body is different from the way I am now. These days I feel a channel in the body towards the noise that’s coming out, but in those days it looks like it just comes from nowhere.
“It felt great at the time. There was a lot of adrenalin, a lot of joy because all our fans who’d followed us on the tour had all scrambled to get in there. Roger [Taylor] was really sick – he looks pretty good but he was feeling really bad. I think he threw up afterwards but you wouldn’t know.
“We’ve never played ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ in full, because the middle bit is a little work of art, it’s something that’s painted on a canvas and you can’t really reproduce that – or, at least, we prefer not to try the operatic bits. It’s a choice we made early on; we thought, ‘We don’t want to be standing there trying to reproduce 140 voices in the studio.’ You can’t really pretend you’re doing that on stage.
They [the audience] sing along on some things but not a lot. In those days, people went to a rock show to listen – and to jump about and scream and shout, but not to sing every word like they do now. And there’s nobody with mobile phones in the audience, nobody doing selfies – how weird is that?