Queen had been successfully oversold before I got a chance to catch up with them. Flamboyant success, Freddie Mercury’s endless egomanic conversations printed in full in the press, records that surely bore more the hallmarks of solid calculation than inherent honest rock and roll...you could admire the manipulation but you didn’t have to like the results. By the time I became curious enough to find out what all the fuss was about I’d already made my assessment— they might impress with their live work in terms of effect, but I wasn’t going to like what they stood for.

Nearly two years ago in Birmingham, watching them from the side of the stage, I made a peculiar discovery. I didn’t like or understand them any better but what startled was the surprising innocuousness of it all. They were so polite, so clean and nice. Roger Taylor says now they can be very rude to people; he quotes Freddie Mercury’s recent run-in (resulting in a verbal triumph, at least, for Mercury) with Sex Pistols Rotten and Vicious. Even so, my immediate expectations of Queen being violently outrageous were quashed. Brian May, grimly concentrating, could be heard actually counting into his guitar solo; was heard apologizing to Mercury when they accidently bumped together during a particularly zealous Mercury twirl. And Mercury himself, this supposed doyenne of sexual stage acrobatics; his ballet-dancer muscles bulging through his all-in-one unzipped cat-suit, reverted to nothing more threatening than a holiday camp leader once the music stopped. He extolled the audience to enjoy themselves, he wanted everybody to be happy, he even said things like “jolly good” in a frightfully British way. Despite the pouting and bum wiggling, Mercury appeared oddly asexual.