Queen were the champions

My first queen cassette was the compilation produced by (again) Aquarius. Wearing Flash T shirt Mercury jumped so high that I thought some kind of camera trick was applied. See below

May and Deacon must be more than 165 cm or so - hence Mercury would be more than 2 meter above the floor. Fantastic. The first song of the cassette was 'Love of My Life'. I tried to learn the chords but was stuck toward end, normally I just jumped to the end part:   

Love of my life

Love of my life

Ooh, ooh

When this cassette was released a pirated VHS tape titled "Rock Convert" was circulated. It had videos of Queen performing live. I remember when Mercury sang 'we will rock you' he was piggy backed by a guy wearing superman costume. Apparently it was shot in 1979-1980 during 'The Game' tour. Hence the queen crazed started.

My next Queen cassette was 'The Game'. My band mate wanted us to play 'Need Your Loving Tonight'. The other song that I would not miss was of course 'Crazy Thing Called Love'. I quickly found what the chords are and later I played the song with my Uni mates (1985-1990). 

I hunted all the old albums produced by Aquarius and Monalisa. I love all albums expect for the earlier albums (Queen I and Queen II). Later Aquarius issued the second best compilation of Queen. It contained 'Under Pressure' performed by Queen and David Bowie.

The other song that I remember in this cassette is 'You Take My Breath Away'. I learned the chords. It was easier to play the song on piano rather than guitar. In fact I am sure I didn't learn the chords using a guitar, even though I did not have a piano/keyboard until much later.

I watched Flash Gordon mostly because the sound track was produced by Queen. The movie was pretty cheesy but I still loved the sound tracks. Songs that I loved from the album are: Football fight, Battle Theme, The Wedding March and Flash's Theme Reprise (Victory Celebrations). 

I stopped listening to new Queen materials after listening to 'Hot Space'. It has two songs that were parts of Aquarius The Best 2 above: Under Pressure and 'Life is Real (Song for Lennon)' but the rest are -to me- did not sound like Queen that I knew (choir, rocking riff, etc). To quote Wikipedia ' a notable shoft in direction from their earlier work, the employed many elements of disco, funk, rhythm and blues, dance and pop music on the album'

I thought the only new Queen song that I loved was Radio Ga Ga. Nothing so Queen about it, but the song is catchy. 

When Queen (+ Adam Lambert) played live in Perth (August 2014) I watched them along with a bunch of friends. One of my friends brought Queen T shirts in Jakarta and we wore those to the show. Of course no one around us wore those. Buying T shirt sold during concert was costly - obviously much more to the ones my friend bought in Jakarta.  Of course Lambert is no Mercury and he didn't pretend to be one. But I was pretty satisfied watching (older) May and Taylor on stage

I watched Bohemian Rhapsody with a mixed emotions. Having read one bio book about Queen I did not think the movie was faithful enough to the real history of Queen but of course as entertainment the movie was pretty OK. 

Mercury was dead, Deacon is no longer public but long live Queen, they were one of the loves of my life.