time promoting and gigging the album, including a huge free gig
at Hyde Park in front of over 150,000 people. Brian May would
talk about the concert’s importance to the band a few years later:
‘I think that Hyde Park was one of the most significant gigs in our
career. There was a great affection because we’d kind of made it in
a lot of countries by that time, but England was still, you know,
we weren’t really sure if we were really acceptable here. So it was
a wonderful feeling to come back and see that crowd and get that
response.’
A commercial and critical smash hit, the album went three
times platinum in the United States, and this success, as well as
playing sold out venues all over the world, proved that Queen had
finally made it big on the popular music scene. ‘A Night at the
Opera’’s successor, ‘A Day at the Races’, was essentially the second
half of what could be deemed a split double album. With both
albums taking their names from famed Marx brother’s movies,
and featuring similar album covers, ‘A Day at the Races’ was
unable to eclipse its predecessor, yet still proved a huge success
in musical exploration. Staying true to their guitar-driven style,
and continuing in the vein of complex multi tracking, Queen’s
fifth studio album featured a number of chart hits that helped
the album break into the UK Top Ten Album Charts. The band’s
1977 American tour of the album saw Thin Lizzy as their support
act, with May announcing the importance of having a challenging
support act: ‘Thin Lizzy as a support band is a real challenge.
They’ll want to blow us off stage, and that can be a very healthy
thing. You feed off the energy of others and I know that if they
go down a real storm then we’re gonna go on feeling that much
higher. It makes for good concerts. We’ve had it the other way
around. I think that we gave Mott the Hoople a hard time on our
first tours of Britain and America.’
Queen would also go on to play two nights at Earls Court this
time around for Queen Elizabeth’s Jubilee celebrations. Unveiling
chris devlin
(Chris Devlin)
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