Freddie Mercury on the Frankfurt concert and the European tour A Day At The Races (excerpts from an interview with KES Baars for the Dutch magazine OOR; Frankfurt, May 15, 1977):
Kes Baars: Last night [at a concert in Frankfurt] I noticed quite a lot of parents with children of different ages. Many parents just put their children on their shoulders.
Freddie Mercury: Great. Real proof of what we’ve always wanted: to reach as many people as possible with our music. By the way, I also noticed. First time on open air in Cardiff last summer. Then I everywhere I saw children on the shoulders of parents.
Kes Baars: it’s obvious that now you’ve managed to reach too large an audience, with the result that only a few people love all your songs.
Freddie Mercury: There is. But this is the only way: to play in a variety of musical styles, so that you as a group could not hang a label. It happened at first. Many journalists considered us a teenage or heavy band with a focus on vocals. In fact, we were neither. Of course, we had songs that could be attributed to a particular direction. Now, fortunately, not so.
Kes Baars: Why is there no warm-up on this European tour?
(Freddie is silent for a moment, pretending to think.)
Freddie Mercury: In any career there comes a stage when you can no longer do it. Our show was such a bright and spectacular event that it would be inappropriate to work with the opening. Besides, it takes too much time: our concert goes on for more than two hours, and since we have very young fans, the evening will end too late for them. Soon our show will go even longer due to even more effects.
At the moment we are working on the integration of the video in the show, and there are still a lot of ideas. Hopefully, when we play at Earl’s Court this summer, a new stage will be ready (approx. – will). We believe that these two London shows will be a kind of run-in for the American tour, which will start on October 11 and will again take three to four months.
After that, I hope I’ll be free for a while. I have a beautiful home, but I hardly ever go there. Everywhere in the world, especially in Japan, I buy antique furniture and paintings, and I don’t even know what they look like. But that’s life.
Live photos of Queen: Frankfurt, May 14, 1977 (taken by Peter Staecker):
