Roger Taylor about Queen Forever.

[QUOTE] [b]cmsdrums wrote:[/b]


Whilst I'm sure there was nothing 'illegal' in the contract, I'm sure signing a deal for massive numbers (reputed to be 'telephone number' big) when they knew the state of play was morally suspect.

With regard to the hits packages, they left off some tracks that actually made higher chart positions in most territories than some that were included on GHII & GHIII. [/QUOTE]

Yeah I agree re GHII and III, but I don't think they had the Same criteria that GHI followed..

I think at the time of the Hollywood records deal they weren't selling very much in America and I'm sure the deal was geared towards having control of their back catalogue. The amount has never officially been published, I don't think, but if it was for a huge amount I really don't believe they were expecting huge sales of anything new.

Peter Paterno was the president of Hollywood Records, when Queen signed for them. He met Freddie, as he told me.
He is also the lawyer of Metallica. He had a marketing idea, to reedit the records, and also published Classic Queen including Bohemian Rhapsody with some 80's hits to the american audience Queen lost in the 80's heard that songs.

About the greatest hits, GH1, GHII make sense for the decades (71-81, 81-91) and the first, as Vocal Harmony said, were to be the singles in the top 20.
The rest? No comment...a person who doesn't know Queen well, will buy the hits, not Deep Cuts . Only the collectors buy that kind of things....I bought it, but I knew it was only to complete the discography, only that, not with more illusions.
I wish some day they will publish box of rareties, like the FM box set.
The Cosmos Rocks is a ok record, with some great songs, but not a "Queen" record. Is more near to Paul Rodgers solo stuff than Queen, is obvious.

[QUOTE] [b]Russian Headlong wrote:[/b]

So RT was pissed off with EMI not promoting the Cosmos Rocks. Queen ripped Hollywood records off signing with them in 1990 when they knew Freddie had Aids. Most Queen compilations are rubbish except gh1, gh 2 and Rocks. Even gh 1 lacks tymd and some other classics. gh 3, Absolute, deep cuts and forever are crap.

[/QUOTE]


I wonder if Hollywood Records knew that Freddie wasnt in good health when they signed Queen..........certainly a possibility! I don't think they would consider themselves ripped off, they got to reissue the entire back catalog, and put out 2 compilations and a live album, all in the first few years......

The original UK Greatest Hits was all of their UK Top 30 singles....that was why no TYMD!

Personally, I think the worst Queen compilation is Classic Queen.....the edit of Miracle that I dont like, and what in the heck was One Of Your Love doing on it? lol

GH3 is a joke it has non queen tracks on it ffs. I think gh1 was weaker without tymd and liar on it. gh3 had 'hits on it that were solo or not even hits'.

personally, im not interested in seeing the band with lambert but would like to see them work with pr again. I suspect there was a falling out between pr and bm which is a pity. no established singer is going to want to join the band fulltime and lambert as I said earlier is just using the band to get himself known in Europe. I can't believe the didn't think the pr collaboration didn't work cos the tours were sell outs. sonisphere with lambert was called off due to piss porr sales and they did a smaller gig at hammersmith instead.

GH3 is a joke it has non queen tracks on it ffs. I think gh1 was weaker without tymd and liar on it. gh3 had 'hits on it that were solo or not even hits'.

personally, im not interested in seeing the band with lambert but would like to see them work with pr again. I suspect there was a falling out between pr and bm which is a pity. no established singer is going to want to join the band fulltime and lambert as I said earlier is just using the band to get himself known in Europe. I can't believe the didn't think the pr collaboration didn't work cos the tours were sell outs. sonisphere with lambert was called off due to piss porr sales and they did a smaller gig at hammersmith instead.

^^^ BM and RT don't want a permanent singer as such, that why this tour isn't billed as Queen. It's Queen + or didn't you notice?

BM and RT quite clearly have no wish to work with Rodgers, if they did they would have. He's not the easiest person to work with. With Lambert they seem to work better as Queen. Rodgers they were aways a bit more like Bad co as someone else has already said. Your comment that no established singer wants to join the band seems a little odd.

Sonisphere didn't sell well in 2012, but Queen can't be held up as the sole reason for that. It's a festival, it includes many other bands and another headliner. Remember that Download and Reading/Leeds that year had very strong lineups and had sold massively, so Sonisphere probably lost sales through that. Remember Queen sold over 20,000 tickets for the four Hammersmith shows and almost 400 thousand in total on the other dates.

Now they are selling Arenas on this tour at the same level as they used to with Freddie.

For me, the worst queen compilation is the bizarre compilations of hollywood release in 2000´s, A-Z, stone cold classics, fucking shit!!

[QUOTE] [b]Russian Headlong wrote:[/b]

Queen ripped Hollywood records off signing with them in 1990 when they knew Freddie had Aids.[/QUOTE]

Umm, let's not forget that Hollywood made a ton of money off record sales after Freddie's death.

Whenever an artist dies, ka-ching ka-ching.

[QUOTE] [b]The King Of Rhye wrote:[/b]

Personally, I think the worst Queen compilation is Classic Queen.....the edit of Miracle that I dont like, and what in the heck was One Of Your Love doing on it? lol
[/QUOTE]

But on the plus side, it has the best sounding version of Under Pressure on it. It dwarfs every version before and since.

I grew up on that compilation. I wore out the cassette.

[QUOTE] [b] Brian May said :[/b]

And we spent a huge amount of time making that album with Paul Rodgers, going through quite a lot of pain, and I don’t think it made the slightest dent on public consciousness. So I would be cautious about being in a recording group called Queen without Freddie.[/QUOTE]

Glad to see the doc finally open up about this.

Had they called it something like Good Company there would've been a ton of interest in the supergroup idea, and it would've sold 10x more copies too.

But hindsight is 20/20. Some of us called it from day one, but they had to learn the hard way.

Re Hollywood Records, it might be another case of "misdirection": To fail to sign might signal something they didn't want to. To sign might scotch the rumours about Freddie's health. And might also be part of the internal pretence that things might be alright.

At the point Hollywood records signed Queen, it was blatantly obvious to everyone that Freddie was seriously ill, and although it was not stated, people had a pretty good idea what it was. The idea that nobody at Hollywood Records had noticed this is absolutely ridiculous.

"I wonder if Hollywood Records knew that Freddie wasnt in good health when they signed Queen"

Its not relevant. Ultimately Queen would have signed a deal and that deal would have included future releases including compilations and re issues. If they had signed a deal promising 5 new albums knowing fine well they couldn't deliver then that would be fraud and they would have been taken to the cleaners.

To be honest I think in 1990, or 89, Freddie was still able to record - and he was still being treated. I think somewhere inside he probably thought it would be OK, you know, denial. I think the rest of the band probably went into denial too, and I also think that they thought they'd have more stuff to work with after Freddie's death than they did (I mean, at the time of recording, not after he died). I think that even as late as October 1991, Brian was still in a state of shock and denial about what was happening, and I can only assume that the John and Roger were too. Although, it's fairly obvious that they all knew that Freddie was going to die.

Peter Freestone claims that Freddie's doctor had told him (had told Peter, not Freddie) that he wouldn't make it to Christmas of THAT year. The band were probably told this, too. When Freddie pulled through and had a second wind , perhaps they thought that he'd pull through a second and maybe even third time. If he had managed that he might even still be here today - but there's no point in going down that road since it didn't happen that way. You know when someone is dying - we've pretty much all been through it with friends or family with various illnesses - there is sometimes, towards the end, an absolute burst of life when they can sort things out and perhaps realise some of their ambitions before the final deterioration happens. In every case that this burt of energy happens, all the friends and family think or hope that somehow they will be OK in the long run.

So, without trying to turn this into yet another Freddie's illness thread, I think the signing of the contract with Hollywood in 1990 was done with good intentions. I'll bet that when the fan club wrote in their magazine in the last magazine before Freddie died that there'd be another Queen album in 1992, that the four of them believed it at least at the time of writing, or if they didn't believe it, they were trying their best to block out what was actually happening. Fair enough. Who wouldn't. Young man, who is the centre of your brand and a close friend, catches terrible illness and dies. Natural thing is for friends to say 'no, this is not happening' and get on with life, at least for a while.

regarding Roger's comments on Queen Forever - I think he was probably quite uncomfortable with the idea from the start. Brian probably likes it. There'll be a combination of record company pressure and Brian and Roger wanting something in the charts to coincide with the Queen tour. Personally I think a single or an E.P would have been better, something packaged nicely on a 7-inch or 12-inch to hark back to the 1984 days (after all, it's from their 12-inch extended remix period...... did anyone actually ever like these remixes? I thought they were crass). Perhaps even a boxed set with the 7-inch or 12-inch, or CD, with a little booklet with some unseen pictures, a little story about MJ and FM, perhaps some out-takes. If the MJ estate had allowed them to release all the MJ and Queen tracks we'd probably be having a different conversation, and if they'd been mixed with a little more care, too.

Along with many others I'm quite confused by Queen sometimes. How many times have they released the albums? There was the original release of each LP/Tape/and CD in the case of the Works/Magic/Miracle/Innuendo/Wembley/Heaven, then there was the CD re-issue campaign in the late 1980s with the albums that weren't previously available on CD given the digital treatment, but they made some mistakes with these ones. Then there was the Digital Master Series in 1993/1994 which many people didn't like but they at least had a small touch of class in the packaging. There were still some odd things with the mastering and I can only think that they were released fairly quickly as the demand for Queen product rose in anticipation of Made In Heaven.

Then there was the Mini LP CD series, which I think happened in Europe and Japan in about 1998, then there was the CD-booklet series, then there was the Vinyl series in 2009, but apparently they were the same masters as the Digital Master Series, then there was the 2011 remaster series with two sets of CDs made available (why didn't they just release the two-disc sets only?), and then I believe we are being treated to another set of vinyls next year (read it on this forum, not anywhere else).

Not to mention the Hollywood records 1991 reissues, and of course the Complete Works in 1985, and the CD cabinet in 1995, and lets not forget that even in the UK there were some special versions of the albums released at the time of release, and a couple of EMI 100 re-issues in 1997, two versions of Made In Heaven on vinyl in the UK....

The fan who has to have everything will end up having at least 10 copies of every album. In most cases there was nothing, sonically at least, to be gained from buying a reissue.

The comments about PR not being that easy to work with - yes, perhaps, but we're talking a bunch of rock megastars here, are any of them that easy to work with? I'll bet every member of Queen could be very difficult. Somebody once told me that Tori Amos used to phone up her personal assistant at 4 in the morning demanding a hamburger, and if no where was open then she'd demand that the assistant come round and makes one from scratch. The stories we hear.....

^^^^ yeah I agree about rock mega stars etc. However with Rodgers there was a definite Me and them feeling in everything he did, whether live, recorded or in interviews. With Lambert there is more of a real band feeling and presentation.

I think the story about Tori Amos may have originated from her friendship with Maynard James Keenan, she used to call him late late at night and they'd sing song ideas to each other, and sometimes meet up and cook breakfast in the early hours.