Queen Freddie Mercury Uncut Ultimate Music Guide Collectors Edition UK MAGAZINE 2018 NEW

Had the world changed in 1974, or had Queen changed? Never a critics’ band, Queen’s relationship with the press remained amusingly rebarbative in good times and in bad; those encounters are relayed for your enjoyment here in full, outrageous colour. If the rock press treated Queen with suspicion (occasionally with barely concealed homophobia), even in their early career Freddie Mercury had developed a persona to withstand it, and any of his own vulnerabilities. At one point an interviewer wonders if the singer is vain. “My dear, I’m the vainest creature going,” he replies with some élan, still some months from his commercial breakthrough. “But so are all pop stars…”

If it was designed to repel the press, this same persona, over the 17 years until Mercury’s death in 1991 (and beyond that event, via their million-selling compilations, live albums and the posthumous studio album Made In Heaven) helped Queen enjoy an enormously close relationship with its public. As the pieces here reveal, this was far from accidental. Into a rockist landscape, Queen injected a sense of fun, and willingness to please a crowd. Their operatic hit “Bo Rhap” (as “Bohemian Rhapsody” quickly became known) could not be played fully, authentically, live. Queen embraced the fact. They left the stage leaving backing tapes to deal with the song’s six-part harmonies, and returned in new costumes to rock out like a serious band at the close.

Note - the barcode has been removed from the magazine. Otherwise a new copy.