Freddie Mercury: What He Left Behind by Peter Freestone & David Evans

Author:Peter Freestone & David Evans
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tusitala Press
Published: 2015-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven

There is so much that exists today because of Freddie and the others in the band. People have attempted and still are attempting to fill the void left by Freddie’s death. From a musical perspective, there are, first off, the many tribute bands and solo performers who have bloomed, emerging briefly to vie for the mantle. Included in this category are Germany’s BURGERQUEEN. These four manage to achieve a brilliantly funny take-off of Queen. I was laughing all the way through their performance at the German Queen Fan Club Convention at which I was a guest in Essen in 2002. A literal translation into German of BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY sung a capella by the lead singer was particularly memorable.

THE ROYAL FAMILY is a British band whom I have had the pleasure of seeing several times and have always been impressed. Jackie Smith was successful in getting them to perform at the British Fan Club Convention at Prestatyn. I love the way they change costumes to reflect the change in fashion and styles that the band adopted over their performing years.

The British comedian and actor Lee Evans includes an acrobatic and visual comic mime to the music of BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY which always stops his show. His physical reactions to the music playing behind him tell a whole other story that only he could have conceived.

MAGIC, whose five members perform Queen’s music without any attempt to be look-alikes and in the west country of Great Britain, there is a band called MERCURY who gave very creditable performances and I saw them several times when I was living in Torquay.

Many of you might know that I have recently taken to the stage myself and appear in a German musical entitled WE ARE THE CHAMPIONS. The band which is at the core of this production, I first saw performing in 2001 on the tenth anniversary of Freddie’s death at the Alte Schlacthaus in Dresden. The leader singer, Johnny Zatylny, a Canadian-born singer and actor performed as Freddie on an American Talent show in Los Angeles. There are times when he turns his head at certain angles and one sees Freddie. It is uncanny. The rest of the band were all born and raised in East Germany under the Communist regime. Such is the power of music. However, it’s good that they have an English-speaking Freddie to lead them or else there would be something of a credibility gap.

In Great Britain, it would seem that Johnny Zatylny would have done very well too because in the STARS IN THEIR EYES final on the 20th May 2001, the Freddie Mercury sound-alike act was the runaway winner.

This is going to turn out as a chapter of tit-bits, little tasters of the events which have filled the last twelve years. I visited Madame Tussauds in June 2003 and the much-heralded waxwork image of Freddie was nowhere to be found although I understand that Amsterdam is still proud enough of him to feature his image on the cover of their advertising brochure.

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