The 1981 Queen project Brian May couldn’t stand: “A thorn in our side”
No artist can claim to have a perfect track record when they enter the studio. While some records may be more pleasant to make than others, there are often a handful of tracks that never fully come together, leading to large chunks of material that feel more like filler than emotionally genuine.
Though Queen was known for putting everything they could into every album they made, Brian May thought one of the band’s sonic detours shouldn’t have been celebrated.
Then again, it’s not like Queen weren’t looking to shake it up whenever they entered the studio. Whether it was going along with the trends of the time or flexing their muscles with different genres, nearly every album the band featured different styles across its runtime, starting with the various show tunes Freddie Mercury would incorporate into the band’s repertoire like ‘Lazing on a Sunday Afternoon’.
As the band started to turn the studio into their playground, though, they started to get in touch with different technological advancements. While the first half of the band’s career had messages in its liner notes about May making synth-like sounds on his guitar, they would begin to incorporate different electronic enhancements going into the 1980s.
They always left their mark onstage for all of the great music they made in the studio. At nearly every show, Queen held the audience in their hands, tearing through every song they could think of, and Mercury staked his claim as one of the greatest frontmen ever to grace the stage.
Even though the band may have dominated any crowd that would have them, their gig in Montreal would go down as legendary. Filmed a few years before the band made rock and roll history at Live Aid, they are already in fine form in the live broadcast, featuring some of the fiercest guitar breaks that May has ever laid down and Mercury teaching a clinic in how to control an audience.
While the shows may have gone down like gangbusters, May said he was never satisfied with how the video version panned out. Instead of the spectacle everyone was used to onstage, May thought that the footage never did justice to what they performed that night.
Alongside the shoddy production work, May thought that everyone’s instrument got swallowed up in the video’s original mix, saying, “For most of our career, this was a thorn in our side. It was something that was never right. It was badly mixed; horrible dry sound which sounded terrible. It was badly edited and badly put together. It was really something we were embarrassed about. It took months and months of work [to get right]”.
Part of May’s frustration stemmed from how important the Montreal performances were in documenting Queen at their absolute peak as a live act. By the early 1980s, the band had evolved into one of the most commanding touring groups in the world, capable of balancing theatrical spectacle with airtight musicianship.
To May, the original concert film failed to capture that electricity, flattening the dynamic interplay between the band members and stripping away the overwhelming atmosphere audiences experienced inside the venue itself.
The eventual restoration, therefore, became more than a technical upgrade; it was an attempt to preserve Queen’s legacy properly. Once the footage and audio were remastered, fans were finally able to appreciate the precision of Roger Taylor’s drumming, John Deacon’s understated groove, May’s layered guitar work and Mercury’s magnetic charisma in far greater detail.
The renewed version transformed the concert from a source of embarrassment into one of the definitive visual documents of Queen’s live power, reinforcing why the band remains such a towering force in rock history.
After the band began working on different remastered versions of the concept, May would say that they sounded revitalised, capturing the sound of the band at their best as if the viewer were in the centre of the crowd during the concert. Even though May had some reservations about putting a mediocre show out to their fans, it’s a testament to the band’s creativity that they sound this good even on an off day.
