A NIGHT AT THE ODEON

Originally broadcast live on BBC radio and television at Christmas 1975, Queen releases their performance at London's legendary Hammersmith Odeon forty years later, in 2015, "A Night at the Odeon", a clear allusion to the release of the iconic "A Night at the Opera" available on the market just a few weeks earlier (November 1975). A new and unexpected present for the band's fans after the release in 2014, also forty years late, of the double album "Live at the Rainbow '74".

"A Night at the Odeon" captures one of the most prolific and creative periods of the English band, about to take off in the world thanks to the immortal "Bohemian Rhapsody", which curiously in the setlist of the concert is part of a medley shared, without its complex operatic section, with the vaudevillian "Killer Queen" and one of the most progressive and best achieved pieces of the band, the intricate "The March of the Black Queen". The album also includes powerful pieces taken from their first four albums, such as the hard rockers "Now I'm Here", "Ogre Battle" (very close to heavy metal), "Keep Yourself Alive" and "Liar", the infallible and complex solo guitar display by Brian May after the also rocking "Brighton Rock", the intense and emotional pause proposed by the beautiful "White Queen (As It Began)", the restless and very brief "Bring Back That Leroy Brown" with almost no vocal work, and the lilting "In the Lap of the Gods. .. Revisited" which for some reason failed to become a stadium anthem despite its very chantable chorus.

The approximately five thousand people who packed the theatre also watched as Freddie Mercury's band paid tribute to 50s rock and roll with a medley that included fragments of "Jailhouse Rock", "Stupid Cupic", "Be-Bop-A- Lula" and "Shake, Rattle And Roll", before the final encore with the only single from "Queen II", "Seven Seas of Rhye" and its B-side, the bluesy "See What a Fool I've Been", and finally the tape version of the English hymn "God Save the Queen", the closing song that the band kept as an unalterable tradition in their live shows.

"A Night at the Odeon", with a very good sound production work, is another great opportunity to appreciate many of the songs that stopped being part of Queen's setlists in later tours, displaced by the mega hits that began to follow one after the other after "Bohemian Rhapsody".

4/4.5 stars

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