The one band Brian May said could blow away “anybody in the world”
There isn’t a single ban on the planet that hasn’t been mortified when seeing Queen perform onstage.
Even though Freddie Mercury delivered some of the most jaw-dropping performances of all time, there are still more than a few people who have their jaws on the floor the first time they see Live Aid, knowing that they are never going to even touch that kind of performance. But even when Queen was at their peak, Brian May felt that the right band could have left them looking like a group playing their first-ever arena show.
Because while arenas can be very hit and miss depending on what band you’re seeing, Queen knew how to properly make the most of the space they were playing in. If they wanted to graduate to arenas, they were going to need to put on a show, and Mercury was more than comfortable every single time he brought theatre to the masses. But that also came from studying a lot of what had come before.
There was already a frenzy around Beatlemania when that started, but what Queen was doing was somewhere between The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, and some sort of rock and roll cabaret show. No one in the group wanted to take themselves too seriously, but compared to the massive festivals that they were playing, May knew that no one else could have possibly touched the kind of swagger that Jimi Hendrix had whenever he performed.
The world had already come to know Hendrix for being one of the most off-the-wall guitarists to walk the Earth, but aside from his playing, there was a fluidity to almost every single song he played. No one knew what was coming next, and when he started playing guitar with his teeth and behind his head, May was convinced that nothing that Queen ever did was going to measure up to that.
They could try their hand at making more ambitious rock and roll, but anyone who was stepping onstage after Hendrix was going to be competing for second place in his mind, saying, “When I saw him for the first time supporting the Who at the Savoy Theatre in London, he just completely blew me away. I thought, He’s it. The Who couldn’t follow him in those days and they were really hot, big news in England. Anybody in the world would find it hard to follow Hendrix.”
If they couldn’t match the raw tone that he was getting, though, they could at the very least try and make their own masterpieces. ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ could never be properly replicated in a live setting, but the fact that they regularly played pieces of the song throughout their career and managed to make it sound earth-shattering was clearly a nod to the kinds of thrills that Hendrix captured whenever he performed.
And despite being one of the best frontmen, Mercury was almost a bigger fan of what Hendrix was doing than his bandmates. He was fascinated by the fact that someone could make that much beauty with a single guitar, and whenever he sat behind the piano, he seemed to want to bring the same amount of passion to anything that he was playing, whether that was the purest love song or one of the campiest showtunes you’ve ever heard like ‘Lazing on a Sunday Afternoon’.
Because while Hendrix was a great starting point for Queen, none of them forgot about the fact that the whole gig was about entertaining the audience. The crowd wanted something they would remember when they walked out of the stadium, and while Mercury put a lot of hard work into being comfortable onstage, there’s no one else in rock and roll who seemed more natural playing guitar than Hendrix.
