Music review: Queen + Paul Rodgers

Published on Monday 13 October 2008 20:18

* SECC, GLASGOW

HOARY old ex-Free singer Paul Rodgers cannot, suffice to say, hold a tealight to the late great Freddie Mercury as a frontman or vocalist. Brian May and Roger Taylor's pockets are surely so bulging that the pair of them need never lift a finger ever again. So what, exactly, was the point in this?

It can have enhanced no-one's memories of Queen – one of rock'n'roll's greatest ever live bands – to see them as they exist now: half-hearted, half-there (original bassist John Deacon refuses to partake), past-it and prone to indulging themselves in fashions that lurched from the naff (May dedicating a song to "all our mums"), to the vain (May's ten-minute guitar solo; Taylor's ten-minute drum solo) to the plain rubbish (a botched attempt to synch Bohemian Rhapsody with footage of Mercury performing the song) to the frankly weird (Taylor knocking out the Jaws theme on an electric upright bass with drumsticks).

Worse still, not only did they manage to reduce Queen's oeuvre to the level of a very loud covers band performing for pints down the local, but they played some brand new pub rock numbers too, from their recent studio abhorrence The Cosmos Rocks. Of these C-Lebrity – Rodgers's soft-brained dissing of reality TV stars who "just want to be / a face on TV", which he growled while his own fizzog was beamed on to a 50-foot screen – was the most laughable. There should be laws against this kind of thing.