Freddie Factor in Herning: The Rock kings Queen in sublime rock party.
The show Must Go On. Though Queen didn’t play it tonight…
Almost exactly the same time as Denmark sat down to watch the last episode of Arvingerne (The heirs), a completely different heir entered the scene in Jyske Bank Boxen in Herning.
The colorful American singer and actor Adam Lambert (mostly known from the American Idol) has agreed to the in principle impossible task to play Freddie Mercury of Queen.
Of course rock music's biggest and most flamboyant vocalist ever neither can or should be replaced.
Let it be said; Jyske Bank Boxen soon present stage to the final of 'The X Factor' – Queen’s Adam Lambert has Freddie Factor. Neither more nor less.
It took 20 to 25 min before he really got into the game in the heavy and compact sound on stage - but with Adam in Killer Queen sitting in a purple rococo sofa with gold frame on the big screen, and Brian Mays constant imaginative and singing guitar in counteraction, we were transfixed. And then there’s the evening's first tribute speech to Freddie Mercury.
Lambert's magnificent voice is great, but he wisely refrains from copying. In Save Me he put just enough drama and fervor into the song, in the best 50 Shade-y way it’s both demanding and pleading for. The sublime six-string, in the hands of Brian May, became the second voice in the duet with Adam. One of the evening's highlights. And now we are on the subject of highlights Who Wants To Live Forever, where Lambert and May both sang with their own 'instrument’ was perhaps the moment Lambert came closest to reaching the corners of Freddie greatness.
(I took the liberty to not translate the next two parts since they’re irrelevant to the critique. This journalist writing style is messy to say the least LOL)
… Brian May's guitar was forefront of the soundstage in Herning. With a handful of their hardest concrete rock songs in the beginning, One Vision and Stone Cold Crazy – it was glam rock multiplied by the 20.
Even the funky Sugar Hill Gang 'Rapper's Delight' rip off Another One Bites The Dust with furious raw edge. The same with the strangely futuristic disco-march song 'Radio Gaga', which on the album flirt as much with fascism as it does with Queen’s contemporary British electronic counterparts. Roger Taylor had his son Rufus with him on stage. Two drummers are a lot, but a good choice - the son lifts his father’s somewhat heavy sound.
With Fat Bottomed Girls a song with the very sympathetic message 'fat bottomed ladies, you make the rock'n'roll go round' we’re back to getting it hard and to the point.
Early in the set, we got the supreme and melodic Someone To Love, and like all other songs in the evening, it was without the choir and picturesque harmonies we know from the albums, originally by Mercury and drummer Roger Taylor.

Unless of course you count the 12,000 in Jyske Bank Boxen as a chorus. The audience also did of singalong of Love Of My Life with Brian May, who was solo on guitar with a little electronics in the background - and le Freddie himself on the big screen. Touching - pure and simple.

People with greater technical, and for that matter also spiritual sense of the guitar, are welcome to sneer here. But it has always amazed me that Brian May is always found at the top of the lists of the world's best guitarists.

Not that you can’t hear his qualities on the albums, but it’s always been in a very economical and straightforward rationed way.

After tonight I know why. One thing is man's game in itself, but almost more importantly almost all songs played live is arranged around May’s guitar playing on a bed of simple, minimalist heavy rock'n'roll, boogie, glam and heavy.

For example in Crazy Little Thing Called Love, which is a frenetically rock'a'billy walkthrough, we felt invited into spaces that are normally populated by the likes of Tony Iommy.
Maybe May takes up so much space because the former natural center is long ago in Heaven! – Now replaced by Lambert as a facilitator, first and foremost.

And because of that I’ll go with the nearly ten min long solo after 'Last Horizon'.

Unlike the Queen musical 'We Will Rock You', which is far more a self-parody than ironic, Queen in the year 2015 is a worthy rock'n'roll squad that celebrates and brings new life to one of the weightiest English rock treasure chests.

On a happy high note, here where the encore fades away, a tip for the Roskilde Festival: if the iconic 'castle' on Saturday night at the Orange Stage is still available – then get us Queen. That is if the agenda again this year is rock history with weight, quality, common-singalong-ness and sassy appeal.

Source: http://www.bt.dk/musik/freddie-factor-i-herning-rockkongerne-queen-i-sublim-rockfest

#Adamlambert #Queen #QAL

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