Queen

All this current royal chat must have prompted me [subliminally] to put on a Queen Hits CD in my car on my way to the recent Talisman railwayana auction, near Newark. The sound quality is excellent. Brian May is surely one of the best lead guitarists of his generation and he certainly provides a most distinctive trademark sound.

Freddie must have had one of the clearest voices of any rock singer, yet I realised that I couldn’t quite make out a line in The Show Must Go On, so I looked it up when I got home. What I had absent-mindedly sung along to for decades as, “Another hero, another miner’s strike,” has actually been, “Another hero, another mindless crime” for all of that time. Wash yer ears out, Priestley.

We saw them at the Liverpool Empire in the mid-1970s, when they were still very much on the way up. They performed songs from their early albums, highlighting Killer Queen. The event left a strong impression, but we were never to see Freddie again.

Another Queen, Princess Royal Class No. 46211 Queen Maud, awaits scrapping at Crewe works in 1962, photograph with thanks to John Dyer. Scrapping royalty? Isn't that treason?