Sir GH wrote:
Yara wrote:
Besides Freddie, none of the guys were really great singers - and one can easily notice that the lush vocal harmonies are the part of their music which suffers the most live.
Certainly, in the later years. But in the early years their vocal harmonies were very often bang on. Roger Taylor had one hell of a voice in his prime.
This is my week of correcting injustices! Roger Taylor is a good singer. Not a great singer, but a very good one, good enough to sing on his own or harmonize other people's singing. My message gives the impression that I think he's talentless as a singer, which is not the case. And singing back from the drum kit is harder than just singing. There's this band thing: if Roger wasn't performing very well, it seemed Freddie was not that good as a singer - Freddie's weaknesses got all too appearant in such cases because he sang only for himself and the other guys had to adjust their playing and singing to him; but Freddie couldn't do the opposite: it's quite rare to find him adjusting his performance to help the other guys out. Sometimes he'd let Roger, and Brian with that very thin voice!, singing the harmony on their own when he was supposed to step in - and when he stepped in out of tempo it was quite annoying. He'd harmonize the vocals in the wrong key creating some unpleasant dissonances; on the other hand, it's harder to find Roger harmonizing the vocals out of key - he made clever choices, but sometimes his voice just didn't sound right coupled with Freddie's: their timber got too distinct and dissonant when Freddie dropped the pitch too much. So you have some very unpleasant endings to "Let Me Entertain You" sometimes - Roger is right on doing his "tonight" but Freddie was many times either out of key or singing ridiculously below the mid-tenor register - sometimes a whole note or a note and a half! And one can see that it's just him being lazy sometimes, while at others he's really fumbling the line. Same goes for the higher sections of "If You Can't Beat Them...", "Put Out The Fire", "Action This Day" - in Leeds, Freddie and Roger sound almost as a strong block in the higher parts of "Action This Day": "Sunshine ray in the crack...". Sometimes Freddie would harmonize beautifully, just like at Milton Keynes; and there were many times he sounded really out of place in the song.
So a band is a band. :op Listening to Queen barely being able to hear the bass is too annoying. And it happened so often in the 80's. When the mix was right or someone was recording from or next to the soundboard, just like that amazing Japan gig in 1981, one can listen to John's bass quite prominently and the whole sound of the band gets so much better - more layered, thick, strong and smooth.
I'm in the "correcting injustices" frenzy! It ends this week.
Freddie was such a towering showman that it's all too easy to forget about the wonderful band making the music - and his singing! - possible sometimes.
