Queen II Collector’s Edition
There were gaps of, respectively, five and two years between Queen’s first three studio-album collector’s editions – News of the World (2017), The Miracle (2022) and the renamed Queen I (2024). Now their fourth – Queen II – lands after just a seventeen-month hiatus….
Queen I Review
“Queen I is the debut album we always dreamed of bringing to you.” Brian May and Roger Taylor, 2024 The Queen I box set, which was released in October 2024, is the third Queen studio album to get the Collector’s Edition treatment following on…
Genesis Bootleg History Overview
This overview brings together all the blogs I have written in my Genesis Bootleg History series. It is the story of Genesis, told via a selection of bootlegs.
London 1992: Genesis Bootlegs
Our bootleg history of Genesis live concludes with the We Can’t Dance tour, specifically Knebworth in August 1992 and Earls Court in October 1992.
Reflections on Led Zeppelin Part 2
In Through the Out Door is Led Zeppelin’s eighth and final studio album, assuming we are not counting Coda, the compilation of previously unreleased tracks that was issued two years after the band had officially disbanded following drummer John Bonham’s death. It came out…
Reflections on Led Zeppelin Part 1
Friday Morning at the Funhouse with Pete Pardo and Martin Popoff on the Sea of Tranquility [sic] YouTube channel is a great watch/listen for any rock music enthusiast. Pete is the channel’s main man, and Martin is a prolific writer, critic and podcaster in…
Best Queen Singles
Another bank holiday, another ‘best Queen song’ poll – well, best Queen song since the last poll of best Queen songs. I am exaggerating, but not gratuitously so. This time it’s BBC Radio 2’s Your Ultimate Queen Song.
Genesis Autobiographies
Thoughts on autobiographies by members of Genesis: Not Dead Yet by Phil Collins; A Genesis in My Bed by Steve Hackett; The Living Years by Mike Rutherford.
Queen – The Miracle: Collector’s Edition
Was it all worth it?
My favourite song from The Miracle and also a question I have been asking myself since The Miracle: Collector’s Edition landed with a veritable thud on the doorstep a couple of months ago.
Morrissey Live in 2002
This is a write-up of a Morrissey gig from twenty years ago. I unearthed it during a tidy-up of old newspaper cuttings and other music-related ephemera. I remember posting it on a fan website, presumably a day or two after the show itself. I…
Queen + Adam Lambert Live Review
“They always deliver” – the words of concert promoter Harvey Goldsmith about Queen, at or around the time of the famous Wembley shows in 1986. For anyone casually landing on this review of the Queen + Adam Lambert Rhapsody tour, let’s take that as a given. Queen deliver the goods – every time.
Books, TV and Films, December 2021
My Inspector Rebus reading journey has arrived at The Hanging Garden, originally published in 1998. The main plot line concerns an ugly turf war between rival gangsters. Hello again, ‘Big Ger’. One of the great things about following the Rebus trail is the cast of recurring characters. Big Ger is still doing time and his ascendancy is threatened by the not-at-all-pleasant Tommy Telford. Rankin takes us to even uglier places than usual (and not in a sightseeing sense) and the book doesn’t pull its punches in its portrayal of graphic violence, including the torture of Rebus himself. There is also a nice Brian de Palma, Untouchables-esque set piece involving a planned armed raid on a top-secret pharmaceutical factory.
Books, TV and Films, November 2021
Steve Hackett played guitar in the ‘classic’ Genesis line-up of the Seventies, of course. These days I count myself as a huge fan of his solo work too. I bought his (excellent) third album, Spectral Mornings, way back when it was first released in 1979, having been enchanted by the song Every Day. But I have only really got to know his solo stuff in the last few years, taking a chance on a 2017 album, The Night Siren, after which I picked up a cheap collection of five of his mid-career releases. His recent output — in terms of both quantity and quality — is phenomenal. In fact, unlike most late-in-their-career artists, he is currently producing the best music of his life.
Books About Freddie Mercury and Queen
Reviewing a biography of Queen by Laura Jackson on Amazon back in 2002, I bemoaned “the frustrations of the literate Queen fan”. It was a (very) clumsy — not to mention pompous — way of saying that here was yet another 300 or so…
Books, TV and Films, October 2020
1 October The Romantics and Us is the latest TV series from Simon Schama, who is perhaps best known to non-historians for his A History of Britain TV series at the turn of the millennium. Watching this is part of ongoing efforts to broaden…
Radio Blah Blah: Records and Record Buying in 1977
Giving away my record collection about ten years ago — all bar a couple of rarities — was an easy decision to make. Vinyl might once again (in 2020) be the cool way to listen to music, but not a decade ago, a time…
London 1980: Genesis Bootlegs
Genesis, 1980 — and this time it’s personal. By the time I was discovering rock music as a young lad in the late-‘70s, the ‘classic’ era was already over and its surviving big beasts were fast mutating into something altogether cuddlier and more house-trained….
Dijon 1978: Genesis Bootlegs
Follow You Follow Me, released in February 1978, was the lead-off single for the And Then There Were Three album. The song was essentially a quick and spontaneous studio creation. There are no references to mallet-wielding schoolboys and rampaging hogweed or to ‘Slippermen’ and…
Dallas 1977: Genesis Bootlegs
Our Genesis history continues. Join us in Dallas 1977 on the Wind and Wuthering tour. This is Genesis at their absolute peak. A wonderful bootleg of a wonderful show.
Montreal 1974: Genesis Bootlegs
It is 1974. In Britain and parts of Europe, notably Italy — though not yet North America — Genesis have broken through to the big time: top-ten albums, decent-sized venues such as the London Rainbow, front-cover status in Melody Maker. This bootleg — an…
Calling All Stations: Not the Worst Genesis Album
Setting to one side From Genesis to Revelation, essentially a pre-Genesis album written and recorded by schoolboys — literally so: they were still pupils at Charterhouse when the first demos were put down — Calling All Stations is almost certainly most fans’ least favourite…
Queen On Fire — Live at the Bowl: Reviewing the Review
I was interested to see what, if anything, had changed — my Queen knowledge, my thoughts and opinions, other contextual information — in the fifteen years since I wrote my review of the Queen On Fire – Live at the Bowl DVD. At the…
Seconds Out — The Greatest Live Album?
Reflections on Seconds Out and Genesis live on the 1977 Wind and Wuthering tour I probably bought Seconds Out in 1979 aged twelve or thirteen, having discovered the band via And Then There Were Three. As luck would have it, my local library stocked…
Queen Songs Ranked Overview
Intrigued and inspired by a blog I came across on Twitter in late-October 2018 — annoyingly, I can’t find the link, but there are plenty like it — I began drawing up a complete list of Queen songs, ranked from ‘worst’ to ‘best’. Obviously…
Queen Songs Ranked 20–01
At last — cue the opening drum roll from Innuendo — we arrive at what this fan considers to be the twenty greatest Queen songs. The best of the best. It is surprisingly difficult to write anything about these twenty gems — especially the…
Queen Songs Ranked 40–21
Another selection of twenty incredible Queen songs, almost the best of the best and drawn fairly evenly from the ’70s and later. This collection features the three best tracks from The Miracle and no less than four tracks from their debut album, as well…
Queen Songs Ranked 60–41
Queen’s finest non-album release features in this magnificent selection (at number 50), as do tracks from most of their albums. Innuendo and News of the World both feature three times. No album released in Freddie’s lifetime has yet made its last appearance. Of the…
Favourite Queen Album
Inspired by a blog I came across recently (unfortunately I can’t find the link but there are loads of such blogs around), I have spent the last few days compiling my personal ranking of Queen songs, and I am just in the process of…
Queen Songs Ranked 80–61
It was the last album to make an appearance (at 82), and here three more classics from the consistently high-quality A Day at the Races appear in this magnificent selection of Queen songs. There is still one non-album track yet to feature, as well…
Queen Songs Ranked 100–81
This is why Queen are the best band in the world: we’re just into the top 100 and there are some seriously great songs here. The first song from their fifth album, A Day at the Races, finally makes an appearance (at 82). Three…
Queen Songs Ranked 120–101
Twenty great songs, which nevertheless just miss out on a Top 100 placing due to the exceptional quality of the Queen canon. Some incredibly tough choices here, including the appearance of a bona fide Queen classic. Amazingly, any track from A Day at the…
Queen Songs Ranked 140–121
This is starting to get hard now. Although we are still some way off the top 100 — or even the halfway point — there are no ‘fillers’ here: this collection is made up of twenty good, solid Queen songs. Some of them are…
Queen Songs Ranked 160–141
Plenty of material here that is good but just rather ordinary by Queen’s exceptional standards. Another couple of singles feature, as do some of the better non-album b-side tracks. With numbers 185 to 141 now complete, only tracks from the first album and A…
Queen Songs Ranked 185–161
This initial selection — from 185 to the dizzy heights of 161 — contains mainly b-sides, plus incidental and dialogue-heavy pieces from the Flash Gordon soundtrack. There are also a number of songs from the Miracle sessions. Two singles (both minor hits) also feature…
Bohemian Rhapsody Film Review
I wrote this blog in the week that the Bohemian Rhapsody film was released. I was not expecting it to be the box-office phenomenon it became and, as is clear from the second paragraph, I certainly did not think it was going to be…
Queen Live Killers: Forty-ish Years On
Essential listening in its day … Live Killers is flawed but brilliant nonetheless … Queen’s catalogue of restored and remastered live recordings currently contains a gaping pizza oven-shaped hole … The quality of the Rainbow ’74 box set, recorded five years earlier than Live…
Rush: A Fan’s Appreciation
Note — 11 January 2020 I heard the awful news late last evening that Neil had died earlier in the week of — of all things — brain cancer. What a cruel roll of the bones for such a cerebral and erudite human being….
Teenage Tales of Queen via Ten Objects
Memories, my memoriesHow long can you stayTo haunt my days All Dead, All Dead (Brian May, 1977) These reminiscences are neither comprehensive nor authoritative; still less do they amount to any kind of a history of Queen, ‘personal’ or otherwise. Rather, like the scrapbooks…
‘Queen in 3–D’ Review
The viewer can almost feel the heat generated by the ‘pizza oven’ lighting rig (page 135) or reach out to touch the various drums and cymbals that surround Roger on stage (page 151, for example). Diogenes Queen in 3–D by Brian May Brian May…