This year Queen is at the top of the Top 2000 of NPO Radio 2 for the nineteenth time with Bohemian Rhapsody. Danny Vera, still number 1 in 2020, can be found in second place with Roller Coaster, just like last year. The top three is completed by the Eagles with Hotel California. This was revealed this afternoon by Ruud de Wild in the Top 2000 Café in Sound & Vision in Hilversum. Coldplay has risen from eleventh to fifth place with Fix You. Procol Harum has completely disappeared from the top 10. The band rose from 153rd to third place last year with A whiter shade of pale. People had voted en masse for the favorite song of Peter R. de Vries, who was shot earlier that year. Golden Earring, last year in sixth place with Radar Love, is also no longer among the top ten numbers. Queen was not at the top of the Top 2000 five times. For Danny Vera, John Lennon (2015), the Eagles (2014 and 2010) and Boudewijn de Groot (2005) managed to score a first place. Listeners could vote for their favorite records until this afternoon. The full list will be revealed next Thursday. The broadcast of the Top 2000 starts on Christmas Day at midnight. The number 1 is played just before the turn of the year.
6 February 1977, Queen Live @ Nassau Coliseum in Uniondale, New York, USA 
Thin Lizzy opened
‘A Day At The Races Tour’
After the excitement of last night’s performance at MSG, the band hold back a bit tonight.
Freddie’s mic died on him at some point during this show, and it apparently took him a little while to get back into the swing of things.
Here’s a fabulous fan story about this show:
I saw Queen 2/6/77, Thin Lizzy opened and they were great. I believe they opened with Jail Break, with two revolving red police lights and a siren. After Queen began their set I left my seat and worked my way to the front stage and being a little guy I went pretty much unnoticed. I found a spot in the inside corner of the stage that jutted out, right side. Brian May was right in front of me, and Freddie was on my left. It was unreal. The stage was high so I would not have been able to touch them, which I would not do anyway. At some point in the concert Freddie took off the white silk scarf he had on and threw it in the air, which I caught. It was like catching a Babe Ruth home run baseball. From behind me some enormous girl reached over the fans standing right behind me and tore the scarf from my hands, never to be seen again. It happened so quickly I barely realized what happened. If my friends were with me I’m sure we would have gotten it back, but I was alone. After that, Freddie was throwing a bouquet of white carnations of which I caught a whole flower. The following day or so, I took that carnation and tucked it in the silver program and gave it to my then girlfriend, Kathy, she loved Queen as much as I. Two years later she broke up with me, never returning the program and breaking my heart. What I have left is one pedal from the flower, a ticket stub, and a concert memory from the greatest rock band in the world. They were Majestic. 
Written by Andy
48 years ago, 27 January 1974, Queen performed at The Sunbury Rock Festival – Held at a Private Farm in Sunbury, Australia. (The festival in 1974 ran from January 25th to 28th).
“Queen I Tour”
The Sunbury Pop Festival was staged during the long weekend celebrating Australia Day. It actually ran successfully for several years, 1972 to 1975, and was essentially Australia’s Woodstock. It attracted the best bands the continent could offer.
The large music festival was held on a 620-acre (2.5 km2) private farm between Sunbury and Diggers Rest, Victoria – Sunbury is a small town about 40 kilometres from Melbourne.
Queen were booked as the headliners, the first time a non-Australian band headed the show, which understandably drew some ire from inebriated fans, impatient journalists, and promoters.
The band were looked upon as snobs with the local roadies when they showed up to the event in a hired white limousines to transport them from their hotel to the concert, and when they arrived, they made a big entrance, which the Australian crew loathed, dismissing these ‘Pommies’ as just too clever.
The road crew even received a good drubbing: the local crew who had been hired to assemble the lights were pushed aside in favor of Queen’s own crew, and, understandably irate that they lost out on money and work, the Australian crew did everything they could to sabotage the band’s set.
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
February 1984
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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