Here’s a wonderful fan story:

“In the summer of 1986 my friend Martin and I decided to do an Inter Rail Tour i.e. you buy a railway ticket which allows you to travel unlimited miles all over Europe for a whole month. We started the tour in Villach/Austria on July 1st 3:15. 18 hours later we reached the Italian-French border at Savona. As early as the next day we went on to Cannes and the first thing we did in Cannes was to go to a ticket shop and to buy tickets for the Queen show that was to take place on July 30th in Nice. The vacation was already a huge success having these tickets and our anticipation was huge.

We kept on travelling the whole European continent. On July 11th we decided to visit the Queen Fan Club. Unfortunately, the office was closed but we noticed hectic activities near the building of Queen Productions without knowing the reason for it. Only much later we realised why the fan club had been closed: it was the day of the first Wembley concert and we two blockheads had no idea!

One or two days before the concert I was lying sunbathing on the beach of St.Raphael when I noticed a small aeroplane towing an advert banner. The banner read that the Queen concert had been rescheduled to take place in Frejus instead of Nice. Thank heavens I saw that banner, if I had not seen it by sheer coincidence we would have stood before closed gates on the night of the concert.

Finally the long awaited day arrived: July 30th 1986 – Queen live in Frejus.

Around 5:00 pm, the gates opened. We had good “starting positions” and ended up in the 5th row in front of the gate. We had a perfect view of the stage. The theatre is rather small and very intimate. No matter where you were, you could see the stage well. The stage was also pretty small and packed with equipment.

After more waiting the show finally took off. The support band Craaft was rather boring and was hardly appreciated by the crowd.

Queen enter the stage. The start of the show is the part I remember most vividly. The lighting rig hung deep down, only about 2 metres above the stage floor. As soon as the “One Vision” intro began, the apparatus began to move and bright light came out of it. During the intro the whole lighting construction unfolded to its full size, a modest size of course, because the stage was really rather small.

I don’t need to tell you about the show and the set list. I remember Freddie’s greeting “Welcome in this little bedroom”. My friend had smuggled his mini cassette recorder into the stadium. In the beginning he held up the recorder – unfortunately, because the music was so loud that the small microphone could not handle the sound volume. Later we put the recorder on the step behind us and so we got a reasonable bootleg. After such a long time I don’t remember more details but I will never forget the magical atmosphere on stage and in the audience. Wait, I remember this: both Brian and Freddie played a wrong chord: Brian made a terrible mistake towards the end of Bohemian Rhapsody and Freddie hit the wrong key in “We Are The Champions” on the piano right before the part “but it’s been no bed of roses”. It was so bad that the show stopped for a second. It is remarkable that in a perfect show like this one small mistakes do happen and it made me happy to see that Queen are human, after all.

The last thing I remember of this concert is our walk from the stadium to the station. We walked along the rails, did not speak a word, were half deaf and totally blissful. This night was definitely the highlight in my life as a Queen fan.

Written by a fan named Winnie

Courtesy of Queen Concerts

We were met at the Negresco Hotel in Nice, one of the best hotels in the world. And we followed them up into the hills, an hour outside Nice where the studio was, in Berre-les-Alpes. By that time most of the backing tracks had already been done so it was vocals, guitar overdubs that kind of thing. I just remember it being the same as most other recordings: it gets a bit dull when you’re not involved. Just sitting there, making a cup of tea or changing guitar strings or whatever. I know the producer got ‘creative’ and didn’t like the studio room. We’d got all the equipment in, but we couldn’t get the tractor-trailer up the hills. It was one of those tiny Provence roads, so we had to ship it into a little Citroen van and move it up in stages.

And then they’re all these steps in the studio, and we finally got it there, and got it in on it set up and the producer said, “I don’t like floor”. So we had to take everything out again get the carpet rolled up, taken outside and we moved all the equipment outside and then there was one of these torrential rain storms that you have in the south of France, and that was one of the days that we weren’t too happy……

There was a big swimming pool, which was great and we ate in, and as you can imagine, had quite reasonable food – being in France. I think John was living in the studio place, Fred had a villa down the road. We were sort of dotted around. It was a tiny village so… But like all recording you start at strange hours and work strange hours and yeah basically it was just like another recording session, it just happened to be in the South of France. It was just a little nicer when you came up for air than being in some of the rough places in London where we were, so yeah, it was nice.”

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