Return of the Champions (2005) 


 

Disc One
 1. Reaching Out
 2. Tie Your Mother Down
 3. I Want To Break Free
 4. Fat Bottomed Girls
 5. Wishing Well
 6. Another One Bites the Dust
 7. Crazy Little Thing Called Love
 8. Say It's Not True
 9. '39
 10.Love of My Life
 11.Hammer to Fall
 12.Feel Like Makin' Love
 13.Let There Be Drums
 14.I'm in Love with my Car
 15.Guitar Solo
 16.Last Horizon
 
Disc Two
 1. These Are the Days of Our Lives
 2. Radio Ga Ga
 3. Can't Get Enough
 4. A Kind of Magic
 5. I Want it All
 6. Bohemian Rhapsody
 7. The Show Must Go On
 8. All Right Now
 9. We Will Rock You
 10.We Are the Champions
 11.God Save the Queen

 

Back in the late 1980s, when Roger Waters sued his former Pink Floyd bandmates in an effort to stop them from using the Pink Floyd name, he made a telling observation. He noted that while “they” were filling 70,000-seat stadiums under the Pink Floyd banner, he was struggling to fill a modest theater down the road. His point? Sometimes the name on the marquee is just as important — if not more so — than the music itself.

One glance at this album cover and you can sense the marketing machine at work. Big, bold letters: Queen. A title meant to evoke nostalgia and legacy. But let’s call this what it really is — Queen in name only. Yes, Brian May and Roger Taylor are present and accounted for, and yes, they were a vital part of the band’s classic sound. But Queen, as most remember and adore, is only half here. And while you certainly can’t blame the surviving members for wanting to keep playing, the question is — does it still deserve the name?

Enter Paul Rodgers. A perfectly capable vocalist with a solid rock pedigree (think Bad Company, Free, etc.), but stylistically, a strange match for the music at hand. Rodgers is a bluesy, gritty frontman. Freddie Mercury was... well, Freddie Mercury. A one-of-a-kind performer who could sing opera one moment and belt hard rock the next — all while commanding an audience with theatrical precision. So yes, Paul Rodgers is talented, but no, he doesn’t quite fit. His interpretations of the classic Queen material here range from serviceable to jarringly out of place.

And that brings us to another point — this is yet another live album. Queen has more than a few of these already, many with Mercury himself, and all with more cohesion than what’s presented here. Apart from a couple of Rodgers’ own hits (which, frankly, feel a bit like padding), this is a setlist that most fans already own — and in better, more authentic form.

That’s not to say the performance itself is bad. It’s not. There’s real energy here, and if you squint hard enough, you can almost trick yourself into seeing it as a kind of “classic rock fantasy camp” — a what-if combo show of legends sharing the stage. On that level, sure, it’s enjoyable. But if you’re approaching this as a proper Queen album? It’s hard not to feel a bit let down.

In the end, you can’t really fault May and Taylor for continuing on — musicians play, it’s what they do. But maybe a different name would’ve been the more honest route. One that paid respect to what Queen was, without trying to repackage it as something it no longer is.

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