24 January 1979, Queen performed @ Deutschlandhalle, Berlin, Germany “Live Killers” Tour

Freddie’s uses his voice to the best of its ability during this show and delivers great versions of ‘Somebody To Love,’ ‘Death On Two Legs,’ and ‘It’s Late.’ Their vocal harmonies are beautiful throughout the show.

Brian, before ‘Somebody To Love’: “Good evening, good folks of Berlin. Welcome to a night of Queen music. We hope you enjoy it.”

Freddie, before the medley: “We have a lot of music for you tonight from all our various albums, and the next song comes from an album called ‘A Night At The Opera.’ The song in question is dedicated to one of our managers. He was a real motherfucker. Do you know what that means?” Quite a few audience members indicate that they do. “Alright! You can call him anything you want. We call him ‘Death On Two Legs.’”

The front of house guy is asleep at the switch tonight, as the echo is not turned off in ‘Get Down Make Love’ on time. Roger’s whistle and his snare fill leading into the final chorus also echo twice before it’s finally turned off.

After Freddie does a few nice vocal adlibs in the intro to ‘Dreamers Ball’ (which Brian calls “self-amusement”), Roger does one an octave above his. Freddie jokingly calls him a “show off!”

18 January 1977, Queen performed @ Cobo Arena, Detroit, Michigan @ “News of The World” Tour

From this night onward, Queen were supported by Thin Lizzy. Lizzy’s manager, Chris O’Donnell, later recalled the experience:

“There were definitely times when Thin Lizzy played Queen off the stage. I felt that, as good as Queen were, they were now so stylised that the slightest thing going wrong threw the whole perfect balance right off, whereas Lizzy were so hungry and raw that they had an unpredictable energy on stage and it showed. The two bands were a great package, though.” He also recalled Freddie throwing a fit when any city on the tour couldn’t provide a limousine to travel to and from the gig in, often refusing to get in the car. But even Chris could tell that Freddie’s tantrums stemmed from other, deeper issues within him.

One of their guitarists, Scott Gorham, recalls: “A lot of bands get paranoid about not letting the support act upstage them, and to keep you down they won’t give you a soundcheck, etc. But we didn’t get any of that from Queen. They said right away, ‘Here’s the PA. Now you’ll need soundchecks and lights, and what else?’ Together we had the attitude that we would set out as a British attack to conquer America. Of course we were two very different bands. Lizzy was a sort of punk band with street cred, whereas Queen were very polished and sophisticated, so you see there was no competitiveness on that score.”

A recording from the Detroit show has been rumoured to exist, but nothing has ever come of it.

THE BIGGEST ROCK SHOW EVER HEADLINED BY THE MIGHTY QUEEN ROCK IN RIO !!

19 January 1985, Queen performed their second night at the massive ‘Rock in Rio’ Festival, the biggest music festival in history at a custom built arena nestling in the mountains at Barra Da Tijuca.

The place is 250,000 square metres in size and about the length of a small airport. It’s not your usual site with tacky old hamburger stands either. There’s a shopping centre with more than 30 shops, a fast food centre including the world’s largest McDonalds, a fully equipped hospital and flush toilets and showers.

You could land a jumbo jet on the stage, which is 21,000 sq feet in size with revolving sections to move equipment around. Twenty tons of lighting equipment with 160,000lbs of sound equipment belting out 500,000 watts of power have been flown in. The arena has its own electric sub station.

Rock in Rio should play to 3,000,000 people beating the Guinness Book of Records champion, Watkins Glenn festival in 1973, which could only manage 600,000.

Queen hit the stage once again at 2 AM as the closing act for the festival and playing to a staggering 250,000 to 350,000 (possibly in the upwards of over 400,000 according to sources) enthusiastic fans! Their largest paying audience!