No Encores

One of the strange things about Queen is - they never really gave an encore ! 

Maybe they have done so in their earliest days, but never once they went big. 

I do not consider those standard concert endings of returning twice with the WWRY/Champions finale a real encore. That was a planned part of the show and they always returned - even if the audience was rather silent. 

So - is there any known case of Queen returning on stage after "God save the Queen" ?  Or the four of them deciding spontaneously on stage to play an extra song - although the show was already over?

There are very few bands as big as Queen who spontaneously do an extra song. Maybe a band like Led Zeppelin who AFAIK had lots of jamming in the set did, but acts like Genesis, U2 and more very probably have a 99.9% fixed setlist for each night which will not be changed unless a bandmember has a heartattack on stage ;)

It's just the way it goes.

Genesis always closed with Los Endos, Zeppelin was Stairway, Chicago always encored with 25 or 6 to 4 and I'm A Man, Bon Jovi does Livin' On A Prayer and Wanted Dead Or Alive, and Queen always did Rock You and Champions.  When you're typecast with your hits, they have to come last.  Fans crucified Bon Jovi for doing Wanted in the middle of a show a few years back.

Bands like Rush are fortunate that they can get away without playing Tom Sawyer, YYZ, or The Spirit Of Radio.  They play them anyway, but they don't have to because their fans are happy to hear just about anything.  That's the plus side of being an album band.  But most popular bands don't have that freedom.

Metallica used to play until they dropped. They would do 3-4encores a night and that's on a slow night. Nowdays they do it like every other major band.
[/QUOTE]
[/QUOTE]In Queen's case it was really about tradition. The audience expects WWRY/WATCF/GSTQ at the end of a show. It gives them closure.[/QUOTE]
[/QUOTE]
[/QUOTE]V.[/QUOTE]
[/QUOTE]

[QUOTE]

[b]Soundfreak wrote: [/b]

One of the strange things about Queen is - they never really gave an encore ! 

Maybe they have done so in their earliest days, but never once they went big. 

I do not consider those standard concert endings of returning twice with the WWRY/Champions finale a real encore. That was a planned part of the show and they always returned - even if the audience was rather silent. 

So - is there any known case of Queen returning on stage after "God save the Queen" ?  Or the four of them deciding spontaneously on stage to play an extra song - although the show was already over?

   [/QUOTE]

They did, only once.
In 1976, they returned to the stage after God Save the Queen to play "Queen II" from beginning to end. On a bootleg you can here an audience member say to his pal: "What? They already did this song!" when White Queen starts.

^^ You are a very bad man ^^  [img=/images/smiley/msn/wink_smile.gif][/img]



Springsteen does spontaneous encores still.  He also still tours with a very basic stage and lightshow.  I think as the lights / videos / effects get more and more sequenced the opportunity to be spontaneous goes away.

U2 for example couldn't add a spontaneous song to their setlist if they wanted to because the whole concert is pre-programmed.  The band just provides the soundtrack.

[QUOTE]

[b]Rubbersuit wrote: [/b]

U2 for example couldn't add a spontaneous song to their setlist if they wanted to because the whole concert is pre-programmed.  The band just provides the soundtrack.

[/QUOTE]
Most big bands today have this issue. The setlist is decided well in advance (which is why there's so little variation in setlists on tours these days). Think of it this way--if encores were truly spontaneous anymore, would there really be synchronized light shows and pyrotechnics?

Modern music fans don't go to concerts just expecting the music anymore. They're also looking for the spectacle. This is a phenomenon that Queen did as much as anyone to create. If you're going by the classic definition of an "encore" as a spontaneous performance after the set had ended due to audience demand, then you'd be hard-pressed to find a band that truly does encores anymore.

As Sir GH said, there are certain songs that fans expect to hear at the end of the show. One of my acquaintances went to a KISS show earlier this year, and the band played "Rock and Roll All Nite" at the end of the set proper, before the encores. A couple members of his party were actually getting up to leave, and complaining that the band wasn't going to do an encore. That's how ingrained a song's place at the end of the setlist becomes with big, cult-following types of bands.

Queen fits into that group very well. If they were to play Rock You and Champions halfway through the set, what the heck else would they have closed with? If they skipped the two songs entirely, you'd still have fans there the next morning wondering when the guys were coming back out for the third encore.

I'm not so fussed about always closing with WWRY/WATC (after 1977 that is), but more annoyed about the fac that the setlist for most tours, no matter how good, was never varied as the tour rolled on.  Love them or hate them, bands such as Bon Jovi mostly chop and change the set each night, and with a repetoire as vast and varied as Queen's, there was no real excuse not to have done that.

A fairly young reviewer (a woman) who reviewed the QPR-show in Antwerp in 2008 was not aware of the fact that Queen always ended their show with ' We are the champions'. ... She wrote how the audience wasn't even screaming for an encore....:-)

Does anyone agree with me that you very seldom read good reviews? :-)

Sorry for my quite off topic post.

[QUOTE]













[b]cmsdrums wrote: [/b]







I'm not so fussed about always closing with WWRY/WATC (after 1977 that is), but more annoyed about the fac that the setlist for most tours, no matter how good, was never varied as the tour rolled on.





[/QUOTE]
I'd say it's about 50/50.  Plenty of Queen tours had much experimentation.  Minus the Jazz tour, 1977-1982 often didn't have the same setlist from night to night.

But shifting around a few songs was usually the extent of it, as they were never the type to do a rolling setlist and have 40 songs in their arsenal.  They just wanted to perfect their show for any given audience, assuming that most people only saw the band once.

[QUOTE]

[b]Thunderbolt wrote: [/b]

[QUOTE]

 



[b]Rubbersuit wrote: [/b]



U2 for example couldn't add a spontaneous song to their setlist if they wanted to because the whole concert is pre-programmed.  The band just provides the soundtrack.


[/QUOTE]
Most big bands today have this issue. The setlist is decided well in advance (which is why there's so little variation in setlists on tours these days). Think of it this way--if encores were truly spontaneous anymore, would there really be synchronized light shows and pyrotechnics?

Modern music fans don't go to concerts just expecting the music anymore. They're also looking for the spectacle. This is a phenomenon that Queen did as much as anyone to create. If you're going by the classic definition of an "encore" as a spontaneous performance after the set had ended due to audience demand, then you'd be hard-pressed to find a band that truly does encores anymore.

As Sir GH said, there are certain songs that fans expect to hear at the end of the show. One of my acquaintances went to a KISS show earlier this year, and the band played "Rock and Roll All Nite" at the end of the set proper, before the encores. A couple members of his party were actually getting up to leave, and complaining that the band wasn't going to do an encore. That's how ingrained a song's place at the end of the setlist becomes with big, cult-following types of bands.

Queen fits into that group very well. If they were to play Rock You and Champions halfway through the set, what the heck else would they have closed with? If they skipped the two songs entirely, you'd still have fans there the next morning wondering when the guys were coming back out for the third encore.





[/QUOTE]
   For a few shows on The Game tour of 1980, Queen finished with Tie Your Mother Down. As for other closing songs -   why not Bo Rhap?

cough...cough
[/QUOTE]did anybody notice the 'friends will be friends'-intermezzo back in '86 ? [/QUOTE]
[/QUOTE]
[/QUOTE]

[QUOTE]





[b]princetom wrote: [/b]



cough...cough
did anybody notice the 'friends will be friends'-intermezzo back in '86 ? 

[/QUOTE]
So that's what that awful noise was? I thought it was just Freddie getting creative with the first verse of Champions! Like a Mustapha deal, only longer.

No, actually, I liked the FWBF snippet played there. It worked well to throw the crowd a loop--kind of like closing the set proper with CLTCL did. Hell, if you live in Greg Brooks Land, they played Staying Power and Under Pressure in between Rock You and Champions once in '82.

Closing out the whole show with TYMD was done a couple of times on the Game tour, yes, but they closed the set proper with Rock You and Champions. They basically switched the encores, not really any experimentation there.

Closing the whole show with BoRap would've been odd. That song is, imo (and apparently in Queen's opinion too for most of their career), most effective as a showstopper before a high-energy number. The guys only closed the set proper with it twice that we know of, iirc. Once at the first show of the Jazz tour, and once during the Hot Space tour when they were tweaking the encores again.

Speaking of the Hot Space tour, that's the most experimental the band ever got with the setlist. Look at how many changes they went through in the first two months of that tour. They opened with popular encore numbers a couple of times, kicked TYMD around like a Canadian baby, and couldn't decide quite where Liar fit in the set before dropping it altogether. Those are my favorite Queen shows to listen to, because you can almost see the discussions the guys must have been having after virtually every show about which songs fit best and where.

[b]Thunderbolt wrote: [/b]

Speaking of the Hot Space tour, that's the most experimental the band ever got with the setlist. Look at how many changes they went through in the first two months of that tour. They opened with popular encore numbers a couple of times, kicked TYMD around like a Canadian baby, and couldn't decide quite where Liar fit in the set before dropping it altogether. Those are my favorite Queen shows to listen to, because you can almost see the discussions the guys must have been having after virtually every show about which songs fit best and where.







[/QUOTE]

This tour was a very dangereous point in their career. When it started, the new album has not been released and even  after the release many fans didn't like the new style. 
And the reactions to the new disco-flavoured tunes in concert were "ice-cold". So it's no surprise that they changed the set list very often to find the "best way" to get the audience warmed to the new songs.

I remember them slipping in an impromptu version of '39  (mostly sung by the audience) in Leiden in 1984. I guess the acoustic set offered a bit more room for improvisation.