Queen Rock Montreal
By Kit Macdonald
You may have caught a slightly different version of Queen Rock Montreal under the title We Will Rock You sometime in the past, but whatever the title for this concert film of the band playing at the Montreal Forum in November 1981, it captures Freddie Mercury, Brian May, Roger Taylor and John Deacon at a moment of peak creativity, peak confidence and peak popularity.
Director Saul Swimmer had a task on his hands to convince the band to make the film near the end of an exhausting tour. Swimmer said the deciding moment came when he took Freddie to the Smithsonian in Washington, DC, showed him the three-storey Imax screen there and told him to imagine himself five storeys tall. Freddie and the band at last agreed, and the result stands along with the iconic appearance at Live Aid at Wembley Stadium in 1985 as the two most powerful recorded examples of the band's extraordinary peak-era live shows. Any real devotee of live music should be sure to catch both at least once.