Another extract from the Drum Solos, Bottles and Bands book which I self-published back in 2012. I was browsing through some Wiki pages on Queen's tours back in the 80s, in particular the Hot Space tour I saw them on. I remember towards the end of the show Freddie introducing someone who came on at the side of the stage but due to the appalling sound quality of the venue I had no idea who this guy was. Turns out they had a 5th touring member of the band playing keyboards off-stage. I had read previously that this was Spike Edney but I've now discovered Spike didn't start playing with Queen until 1984. So the guy who appeared from behind that curtain at the Royal Highland Showground was former Mott The Hoople member Morgan Fisher.
In June 1982 Queen played two nights at Ingliston on the outskirts of Edinburgh. By now I'd passed my driving test so was able to borrow my mum's car for the night and my mate Phil Caton came up from Lancashire for the gig. After browsing the merchandise stand we eagerly awaited the start of the music. First on was the American band Heart. I knew the name but that was about all. I don't remember much about them. They probably made a good enough noise but for me they were just a warm-up for the main act.
By now I owned a few Queen albums including the new, if rather patchy, Hot Space so I reckoned I would know pretty much everything they were likely to play. And this was indeed the case but with some songs it took me a while to figure out what it was they were playing. This was because the venue at Ingliston was the Royal Highland Agricultural Exhibition Hall which was designed to display farm machinery rather than stage rock concerts. So the acoustic were, in a word, awful. Part of the way through Queen's set I realised that the sound was bouncing off the back wall which didn't help. It was certainly loud enough. Queen were never shy at turning the amps up but in the circumstances it might have been better to have turned them down a bit. I imagine it was something of a nightmare for their sound crew.
But it wasn't all gloom and doom. This being one of the first rock concerts I'd ever been to I was determined to enjoy it, poor sound quality or not. Perhaps because of the synth-heavy nature of some of the songs on Hot Space they only played three numbers from that album including the brilliant 'Under Pressure'. The set started with two numbers from the Flash Gordon soundtrack, the second song 'The Hero' was the one song I wouldn't have recognised as I didn't have a copy of that album. It's always a bit disconcerting when you think you will know all the songs and you hear something unfamiliar and, of course, the terrible acoustics wouldn't have helped. One hiccup on stage happened during 'Crazy Little Thing Called Love'. Brian May joined Freddie Mercury on acoustic guitar for the first part of the song and then swapped back to his electric guitar. He walked up to the front of the stage, started playing, but nothing came out. Presumably the problem was with the guitar as he hurriedly swapped to another one and all was well. It just shows it can happen to the best of them. One other song that has stuck in my mind was 'Get Down Make Love'. Phil was going through a religious phase and disapproved of such lyrics. He didn't recognise the song when it started and asked me what they were playing. When I told him, he sat down on the floor until it was over.
That was my one and only Queen concert. A few years later some friends tried to persuade me to go down to London to see Queen at Wembley but I declined, hoping that they would come back north of the border. Alas, it was not to be and those dates at Ingliston were the last concerts (with Freddie) Queen played in Scotland. With Freddie's declining health and subsequent death from an AIDS-related illness we lost one of rock music's great front men, a fine songwriter and he was no slouch on the piano either. The day he died, 24 November 1991, I was in Edinburgh seeing The Cult at The Playhouse and I read the news in The Scotsman newspaper the following morning. It's fair to say I was very upset by this terrible news and I struggled to get through the rest of the day. On the Friday evening I was alone in the house I rented with a friend in St Andrews and after a whisky or two I shed some tears while listening to A Night At The Opera. Farewell Freddie and thanks for the music.
