Talk:The Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert

Viewers
"televised live worldwide to an estimated audience of one billion viewers" Really? 1 in every 6 people turned on their televisions to watch this concert? I somehow find this hard to believe...218.186.12.218 (talk) 12:40, 24 November 2008 (UTC)

Criticisms and Controversies
A current discussion is taking place about the extent to which Brian May may have used The Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert in part in order to promote both his own songwriting as well as his upcoming solo album.

NOTE: This article has been repeatedly vandalised!! My suggestion is that, rather than simply erasing large sections of material, discussions be addressed at this site.

Paragraph of Nonsense
Please stop adding this paragraph of nonsense back. All of this is POV, conjecture and speculation from a certain point of view. Let's keep it to facts. Very little controversy came from the concert, nothing was mentioned by other sources. Clearly, this is someone with an agenda and an ax to grind, portraying Brian May as an egomaniac attempting to cash in on Mercury's death-almost NONE of the media coverage that resulted implied such a thing. The paragraph also states that Mercury was the "main songwriter," whereas Queen had no "main songwriter" with many times Brian May writing just as much as Freddie did (and just as many hits). Also, this poster is obviously not of great intelligence--note misspellings like "sceptics" and "prominantly" as well as punctuation lacking, missing spaces and no capitals at the beginning of sentences. The paragraph in question is here:
 * "Similar to other stadium-sized events such as Live Aid, the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert has been considered by some to be a self-promotion gimmick by the remaining band members (especially guitarist Brian May). It has been suggested that it wasn't a genuine tribute to Freddie, since more of May's songs were performed. This is peculiar considering that Mercury was the main songwriter in the band. Also, it has been noted that only a handful of the artists (e.g. Elton John, Robert Plant, George Michael, David Bowie, Liza Minelli, Ian Hunter, Annie Lennox) were friends or influences to Freddie. Some sceptics believe that others (Iommi, Rose, Hetfield, Seal, Daltrey, Elliot) were brought in simply because of Brian May's musical preferences or in order to increase the audience. The great popularity and prominence of Guns N' Roses and Metallica at the time can be seen to support this argument. on the other hand, both bands (before and after the event)have publicly sighted Queen as an influence. Moreover, Metallica had recently recorded a Grammy Award winning cover of 'Stone Cold Crazy', while members of Guns N' Roses, especially Rose, have spoken prominantly with huge admiration for Mercury and the band". CinnamonCinder December 5 2005
 * To CinnamonCinder, Because so many people are involved in writing the articles on Wikipedia, the appearance of various spelling errors and/or omissions of words is inevitable. Furthermore, since the writing can always be improved, this alone does not represent a valid excuse for erasing an entire paragraph. However, I re-wrote the section in order to make it read better and I do admit that it previously pretty hard to follow.
 * On the other hand, a recent discussion on www.queenzone.com revealed that many fans agree with the overall suggestion that The Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert was not a genuine tribute to Freddie Mercury, for various reasons. You have to admit that it is strange that Brian May's songs dominated the concert when the purpose of the event itself was supposedly to honor Freddie Mercury! He further used the event in order to perform a song called "Too Much Love Will Kill You", which was a single on his upcoming solo album! For all of these reasons, I do believe that some of the overall points points should remain. On the other hand, I agree that some of the points that were being added were so dramatic that it was becoming funny! Perhapds a compromise of some sort should be made. User:67.161.159.218 December 5 2005
 * By the way, here are various clips of what different Queen fans had to say:
 * " I also found it appalling that Brian May would use the event in order to promote the single for his upcoming album. More amusingly, he actually goes so far as to declare that this particular self-promoting act represented the best thing that he could do to honor Freddie!"
 * "The reason why there weren't so many Freddie tracks at the FM tribute concert and on the Q+PR tour is quite simply because it's incredibly difficult to sing many songs like Freddie did! Songs were picked so that others could lend their own style to them."
 * "I must admit, I share a lot of the same feelings as the topic starter. The tribute concert, completely."
 * "The only problem with Brian is that he takes himself a way too serious. Maybe his sense of humour is low when it comes to him."
 * User:67.161.159.218 December 5 2005

The Paragraph
The paragraph reads much better now, so thank you, and I left that. However, I deleted the second, smaller paragraph--it is possible to connect every artist with Freddie in one way or another--all of them either influenced Freddie, were friends with Freddie, or drew considerable influence from Freddie and the overall work of Queen. Also, expect further editing of the paragraph--though the concert may have had more May songs than others, one need only take a look at the Magic Tour setlist to see that the band often had many May songs in their setlist, because many of his songs worked very well live. CinnamonCinder 05:17, 5 December 2005 (UTC)
 * To Cinnamon cinder, yes, the paragraph does read a lot better than it did. Good points were also added, so I have no real problem with it. To me, it seems like a pretty good compromise, since it mentions both points of view. User:67.161.159.218. December 5 2005

Trivia Section
For one, statements like this one:

"This concert marked the last public appearance by bassist John Deacon as a member of Queen. Following the concert, any official appearance by members of the band, from the dedication of Queen's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, to awards presentations, to the full-scale "Queen + Paul Rodgers" tour have all occurred without Deacon's participation."

are incorrect. John Deacon and Roger Taylor were billed as "Queen" at a festival that took place after the FM Tribute Concert, and all three band members joined Elton John (they were billed as Queen) for a ballet performance in 1997.

Beyond that, trivia sections are frowned upon. I'm going to try to integrate the (accurate) information into other parts of the article so we can delete it entirely. Phoneclear 02:50, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

Ticket sales
The tickets took more than 2 hours to sell out. The remaining members of Queen appeared on TV at the 1992 Brit Awards to receive a posthumous award for Freddie Mercury at somewhere between 2000 and 2100 BST, the show was on before the main BBC news and that was transmitted at 2100. As they left the stage they announced (I think it was Roger Taylor) that 'we'll see you at Wembley in April'. At that point I grabbed the phone. I can't prove it (I no longer have the credit card statement) but I am sure that it took more than 2 hours to get through to the wembley box office on the phone - this was before on-line booking of course! My recollection is of 6 hours of dialling - and I DO mean dialling, my student digs lacked a phone with a keypad!

Def Leppard during "All The Young Dudes"
During the song, you can see Joe Elliot and Phil Collen walk into the stage mid-song and start singing the chorus; Brian May and David Bowie look at them laughing from ear to ear. I read this on a message board:

Joe Elliot: "I stood at the side of the stage with Phil Collen. I turned around to Phil and said, 'Come on out,' and he went, 'Nah!'. I said, 'Phil - think about this for a minute. If you don't, you'll regret it for the rest of your life.' So we both went out and did the backing vocals... we even did the 'oh-oh-ooohs'. We were just grinning from ear to ear for weeks afterwards. It was like 'Wow! - we've just been on stage with Bowie, Hunter, Ronson and Queen.

Can anyone source this, and if it's true? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 201.251.7.15 (talk) 11:18, 5 October 2008 (UTC)