“Good evening everybody. Welcome to our picnic by the Serpentine. You all look very beautiful, I must say.”
Resplendent in a chest-baring white leotard, Queen frontman Freddie Mercury surveyed the crowd gathered before him in central London’s largest Royal Park. Five years earlier, in the summer of 1971, Mercury had personally hand-designed 120 invitations, dispersed among family and friends, for a ‘private showing’ (aka a free gig) from his band at Lecture Theatre A on level five of the ‘New Block’ at London’s Imperial College, and around 80 people had showed up. Five years on, as the final notes of Ogre Battle melted into the darkening sky above Hyde Park, the delightful singer could see that a considerably larger audience, conservatively estimated at between 200,000 and 350,000 Queen fans, had turned up for Queen’s latest homecoming.
“It was odd,” guitarist Brian May later recalled to Classic Rock, “because we’d been around the world and we weren’t sure whether people had forgotten us back home. We were quite shocked… It seemed like there were a million people there.”
Here, if proof was needed, was confirmation of Queen’s elevation to the gilded ranks of British rock royalty.
Ten days earlier, Mercury, May and bandmates John Deacon and Roger Taylor had gathered at a reception at the Les Ambassadeurs Club in London thrown by their record label, EMI. The event was organised in order to present the quartet with silver, gold, and platinum discs commemorating sales of their fourth album, A Night At the Opera, their first UK number one album, and Bohemian Rhapsody, their first UK number one single. But if the band were in a celebratory mood, knocking back glasses of champagne for invited media, they also appeared at pains not to come across as triumphalist or smug.
“I don’t really think of it as a very commercial album,” Brian May admitted to Melody Maker. “But it was the one which broke all the records. It’s not nearly as easy-listening an album as Sheer Heart Attack. There’s a lot of very uncomfortable things about it. We were deciding to branch out again. It was a conscious decision. Thinking that Sheer Heart Attack had been successful but safe, if you know what I mean, with A Night At The Opera we wanted to be adventurous again.”
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Days ahead of their Hyde Park show, May seemed concerned that the free concert would be interpreted as a “we’re a big band now” flex.
“I really hope it’s not taken in that way,” May told Melody Maker’s Harry Doherty. “I really hope that it’s taken in the spirit that we’re thinking of – just a nice thing to do. It’s a dream to be able to do a free gig in Hyde Park, like the old days. It’s as romantic as that.
“I don’t think there’s ever been a show like we’re going to do in the Park. We’re not going to hold back at all just because it’s a free concert. It’ll be the whole works. I hope it all fits together as a very nice and peaceful and enjoyable afternoon. It’s a way of saying thank you.”
Somewhat inevitably, as with so many other musical events on this scale during the era, Queen’s free show was not entirely problem-free. As recorded on the band’s own website, it was estimated that up to 90% of the crowd couldn’t see the stage, which naturally caused some frustration, expressed via the medium of cans and bottles being hurled towards those enjoying more advantageous sight lines.
“I have been requested by the constabulary for you not to throw little things around, tin cans or whatever,” Freddie Mercury told the crowd at one point. “So, make this a peaceful event, OK? Sit on your arses and listen.”
Later, with the show over-running, Queen were forced to drop a number of songs from their proposed set-list. And when they were still playing In the Lap of the Gods… Revisited 20 minutes after curfew, they were told by the police to vacate the stage immediately or face being arrested.
“The police got very iffy because they thought there would be some kind of riot,” May recalled, “and they wouldn’t let us back on stage for an encore.
“We were very upset, having worked up for months and prepared for all that.”
Such irritations aside, the concert was judged to be a landmark evening for Queen.
“At last,” raved Melody Maker‘s Harry Doherty in his review, “the Seventies have arrived.”
“I think that Hyde Park was one of the most significant gigs in our career,” Brian May later reflected. “It was a wonderful feeling to come back and see that crowd and get that response.”
Queen would never look back.