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 1980's when Roger
Waters unsuccessfully sued the rest of the surviving Pink Floyd members
in an attempt to stop them using the band name, he made an interesting
observation. "They", because they had the Pink Floyd name, were selling
out 70,000 seat stadiums. In the meantime, he would be in the same
town, the same night, and was barely able to half-way fill a 2,000 seat
auditorium. The point here is that a band's name really does carry tons
of weight when generating attention and sales.
Just looking at this album cover, you can tell what some record
executive was up to. Let's make sure to put the name "Queen" in big
black letters on the middle of the cover, and make sure we give it a
catchy title that will be appropriate based on the band's illustrious
past. What the casual fan might not realize, is that there's only half
of the real Queen here, and whereas we shouldn't immediately dismiss a
band for trying to continue with new members, you have to really ask
yourself if they do the brand justice here by doing so. Had this lineup
called itself anything other than "Queen", well, it simply wouldn't have
sold as well, nor drawn the same amount of attention.
Then, some would argue, but this is a "live album - and it is mostly
Queen material here". O.K. fair enough. But then my counter argument
is, why anotherlive album?? Doesn't this band already have
plenty of collections out there that are basically exactly the same as
what is here? The only difference is that those collections
actually have the original band.
Then we come to the new guy - lead singer Paul Rodgers. Paul had been
in several hard rock bands, most notably Bad Company, and we have to
ask - why him? Nothing personal, the guy is great at what he does. But
Freddie Mercury was such an elaborate personality, such a unique
showman, you have to wonder why this choice. Listening to the songs
here, you can't help but cringe since they sound so incredibly
different. Not to mention it's littered with songs from his past
as well.
To be fair, this may really have been a great show to go to. Kind of a
"superstar combo" show, where different artists from different bands get
together for a sort of one-off. It just seems a bit unfair calling this
a Queen album. Well, I guess you really can't
really fault Brian May and Roger Taylor for wanting to still work.
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