Why did Freddie give up the piano?

In the early Queen years his piano playing was amazing and he put in in a lot of songs but as time went on he phased it out. Even during live shows he seemed like he had no use for it anymore. His playing became very choppy it was as if he wanted nothing to do with the instrument anymore. It's a shame because when I watch live performance of songs like "White Queen" from 1975 it is really amazing how well Freddie's piano and Brian's guitar go together.

Somebody may have further information, but my recollection is that he eventually felt it tied him too much to one spot on the stage and inhibited some of the performance and audience engagement aspects he wanted to develop. I thought the mid career/pre Spike balance was perfect.

repatoire was firmly sealed
and now perfoming in big stadiums required Freddie to work the stage
and synthisiers and background keyboards with pinano sounds did the job when needed
plus all the older songs that had a lot of pinano on were not played even hardly ever on later tours
and as for music in general
stlyes change and long pinano riffs like long guitar riffs wenty out of queens fashion

plenty on pinano on the works album
and even other later
infact always most always a bit of pinano
Freddie wrote nearly everything on pinano anyway
if i am not wrong

[QUOTE] [b]jones904 wrote:[/b]

repatoire was firmly sealed

[/QUOTE]

This is an anagram for 'A Arterialised Fey Sperm Owl', which can only be Fred's hearty blessing of the recent Baron Cohen interview as well as an official announcement that the casting is so awesome the movie will be 3D. Welcome aboard!

pinano? It's spelt pie-nano! Also, see geetar, derums, quayboreds and bash.

It seems like jones/MEDUSA/whatever sometimes has something useful to add to the conversation but doesn't seem to be able to speak English at all, intentionally or otherwise.

Another reason was the smoke was bad for his lungs

i think this is where queen (freddie) put emphasis on putting on a show rather than more substance.

they could have thrown in more piano songs like lily of the valley or you take my breath away to balance the shows. as an artist i would imagine it would have been nice to do those songs in a massive stadium.

personally i'd prefer them than listening to hello mary lou etc...

Most people who listened to the radio in the 80s hadn't heard the 70s Queen albums. They knew a dozen big hits.

So they chose to play 50s covers - because people knew them.

50's covers weren't a new thing in '86 anyway, they just chose to do a bunch of them in a different format at that point. I would personally have preferred if those slots were filled by original material instead. I do quite enjoy their version of Big Spender though.

[QUOTE]they could have thrown in more piano songs like lily of the valley or you take my breath away to balance the shows. as an artist i would imagine it would have been nice to do those songs in a massive stadium.[/QUOTE]

I don't know if those songs would have worked that well in a giant stadium. They would have been great in smaller venues, but not in the bigger ones, I think.

But I too wish Freddie had played more piano in the later years. I think he is an underrated pianist. And in concerts, I know he liked to move around and put on an energetic show, but I would have preferred less of that and more musical substance. That's why I have always loved Queen as a studio band and not cared for them as much as a live band. But, with just the four of them, or even five, they couldn't have reproduced the complex things live that they did in the studio anyway, so perhaps it's just as well they took a totally different approach live.

damned if you do, damned if you don't

frontman or singer/pianist?

fact is, he still did it - when it was needed/called for

one of my own highlights of milton keynes (as someone who was there) was the intro to Somebody To Love - he did the piano thing to get the audience involved in the intro
but then morphed quickly into the frontman. it was the perfect blend of BOTH...

Good shout brEnski.

When the band were restricted to purely studio work the piano didn't really feature, which is a shame but that was the direction they took I suppose.

For what it's worth, March of the Black Queen features my favourite piano playing.

Whatever the reason, from an artistic and musical perspective Queen's live show suffered as a result of less piano playing. I'd much rather see Fred on the piano for STL than faffing around the stage as he had to do in an attempt to make ANOBTD interesting.

In the iPad version of 40 Years of Queen I'm currently going through there is a passage in the section on the first album where Brian is quoted as saying "I'd also mention 'My Fairy King' because that was a portent of things to come. That was an experimental thing: the beginning, really, of Fred playing the piano. He used to play for his own amusement but he was very against putting a piano in the stage act."

It was interesting to me that Fred's ambivalence about the instrument then wasn't truly an evolution but something that was perhaps always present to greater and lesser degrees.