It's just after midnight local time and my head is swimming from a great concert and lots of Latvian beer. Quick summary:
- Paul Rodgers was great
- Brian May was superb
- Latvian audiences don't sing along
- Latvian beer is excellent
- Arena hotdogs are awful
- The prime minister of Latvia plays drums pretty darned well!
It was a great show, very hard rocking. With a band like Queen it's hard to cover all the hits people would want to hear, but they did a good job selecting a broad range of songs that worked well with Paul Rodgers on vocals. So don't expect to hear "Killer Queen" but Rodgers was more than capable on classics like "We Will Rock You" and "Crazy Little Thing Called Love." Additionally the songs from Paul Rodgers' history with Free and Bad Company blended in great. I was curious how they would tackle something as defnitively Freddie Mercury as "Bohemian Rhapsody" and what they did was quite inventive: they had video footage of Freddie singing the introduction and then added the band and Paul Rodgers in later. It was a very fitting tribute.
Even though our seats were quite far back, the sound was incredibly loud. Luckily I had earplugs! I managed to shoot some video and photos using my smuggled in Canon G9, but we were pretty far back and so they are quite grainy. One weird highlight of the show: they brought out the Prime Minister of Latvia, Ivars Godmanis, to play drums on "Alright Now." He must have played professionally because he did a great job.
The setlist included:
- One Vision / Tie Your Mother Down *
- Fat Bottom Girls
- Another One Bites the Dust *
- I Want It All
- Break Free
- C-lebrity *
- Love of My Life (acoustic)
- '39
- Drum solo
- I'm In Love with my Car
- Say It's Not True
- Bad Company *
- War Boys
- Feel Like Making Love *
- Guitar solo / Bijou / Last Horizon *
- Crazy Little Thing Called Love *
- The Show Must Go On
- Radio Gaga
- Bohemian Rhapsody
- Cosmos Rocks *
- Alright Now (with prime minister Ivars Godmanis)
- We Will Rock You / Champions of the World *
* = Video posted on YouTube
Update: Note sure why it took so long for YouTube to process the videos, but I've finally posted all of them. Again, sorry for the low quality. I'm open to recommendations on a better compact camera.
- Photos & Video: PicasaWeb, YouTube
- Amazon: The Cosmos Rocks, Greatest Hits, Return of the Champions, DVD
- Queen: Official site, Paul Rodgers site, Tour Dates, News
I foud a video in good quality of Godmanis playing drums.
http://www.radioswh.lv/swh/video.php?id=492&tp=17&frid=17&action=tv
there is a list of videos . at the moment 2nd from top is the one.
Posted by: Drummer | September 22, 2008 at 01:19 AM
It's really a good posting. I like it. It's pretty much impressive to me. i think others will agree with me.
Good Luck. ;)
webroyalty
Posted by: Nick | January 06, 2010 at 11:09 AM