This is just amazing - Brian May joined Andrea Bocelli on his tour for this incredible performance of Who Wants to Live Forever… the only good thing to come out of the Highlander movie. I have not given Brian May enough credit for his vocals before!

I am, obviously, a huge Queen fan, but when it comes to full albums, it can be a bit hit and miss whether I like them or not. This one was a big hit. There’s the tracks that you know but they’re surrounded by excellent pop rock songs and veering towards rock opera, in fact the genres are quite varied. Freddie’s vocals lead the way, with Roger popping up occasionally, and you can hear the four of them pulling their weight and working together to create this epic album. A winner for me.

Stumbled across this during a late night YouTube music trawl and love, love, love it. I’m not sure what it’s for or why it’s happening but I’ll take more collaborations like this please!

This is an interesting album, the way it’s set up - two halves with the first being penned by Brian May and the second by Freddie Mercury. You can absolutely tell the difference! The first half feels like more standalone songs, more upbeat and poppy. The second half is definitely darker, more elaborate, more Freddy. And yet somehow they do work together, finishing off with the iconic Seven Seas of Rhye.

Anyway, this is their debut album and what an amazing body of work to kick off your career with! There aren’t really hte amazing stand out songs that feature later in their career but it’s some really good rock to get you going. I was confused why Seven Seas of Rhye is on there and also on the second album, but this was a shorter instrumental version that obviously went down quite well because it came a fully fledged song by the next album. Mm, what a great journey.

After watching the Bohemian Rhapsody movie, it was only a matter of time before I delved into the Queen archive again. This was a great album, with a handful of famous songs interspersed with more greatness. I liked it better than Night at the Opera, but only because the songs had a similar feel to them throughout, rather than a mish-mash of genres. Could be a new favourite.

Rami Malek is incredible in this, embracing the spirit and the passion and the teeth of Freddie Mercury with style, grace, and a touching humanity. The actor playing Brian May was also really good, I thought. The scenes were well made with incredible attention to detail, particularly in the remakes of Top of the Pops and of course, Live Aid. It told whatever story it was trying to tell well, and swept you along to the end, by which time I was in floods of tears.

James Corden continues to do fab and fun things for his late night US talk show, but his latest exploits with Queen grabbed my attention like no other. A faux battle between him and current front man Adam Lambert saw the pair having something of a riff off with Brian and Roger backing them on guitar and drums. I’m so jealous of the things James gets to do and this tops the lot. Singing with actual Queen must be the biggest dream of all.

Beautifully eclectic mix of grungy rock & roll alongside the more poppy pieces, some country influences and more. Crazy but brilliant.

I was sad to hear that We Will Rock You will be closing, after 12 years as a mainstay of the West End theatre scene in London. Long time readers will know I was completely obsessed with this musical when it first came out, seeing it no less than five times in just a couple of years. I’m not a huge fan of the so-called “jukebox” musicals, but this one worked for me right from the start.

A great video of the lovely Paul Rudd is doing the rounds today, as the actor faces off against talk show host Jimmy Kimmel in a lip sync battle. I love this for three reasons. First: Paul Rudd. Second: Queen. Third: Lip sync battle sounds like a fab game! And while I’m indulging in a bit of Paul Rudd, I saw this other video a while back, in which Rudd essentially Rickrolls Conan O’Brien with clips from his movie. The film contained within looks scary and a bit weird, but I love the concept and that Conan just keeps on falling for it.

It’s been Mr C’s turn to come up with something for us to do on a day out for a while now. With a sunny bank holiday approaching, he said he finally had something in mind, so we hopped in the car. I’m not good with surprises, but he wouldn’t tell me where we were going. After navigating us this way and that, he admitted that I shouldn’t really get my hopes up as we were going to a field in the middle of the countryside. Having grown up in the countryside, I’ve seen my fair share of nature so this didn’t exactly thrill me. I assumed there would be a bit more to it.

This evening, I finished watching the second part of a two-part Queen documentary called: Queen - Days of Our Lives. I’m slightly late to this, as I missed it first time round. I captured it to watch, as something of a Queen fan, but Mr C and I started to view it and realised it would require a lot more of our attention than we had to give it.

Eight Songs The song choices are by far the hardest part. My mother left her choices on the previous post, and told me that it took her the best part of an hour to narrow it down to eight. I’m not sure how long I’ve spent thinking about this as I chose them over a period of several days, by writing one, then going away to ponder and picking it up again later. Here goes:

I have seen this once, a long while ago, and I remember very little about it. I feel like I should like it because it has Queen songs and involves transcending time which is on a par with time travel. Perhaps I don’t like this film as much as I thought I did. The Queen music is awesome, obviously. But the sword fights are laboured, the accents are annoying, and it doesn’t really make sense. The gathering, the quickening, the prize, it’s all nonsense! Still, Queen!

Have you seen that sketch in Catherine Tate where the woman gets her colleague to guess something, and then gets really annoyed if she gets it straight away? I was reading somewhere about MiG Ayesa finishing in the top three to be the new lead singer of InXs. There was a programme or something, I think. I was quite upset about this because last I heard, MiG was still in We Will Rock You, trying to replace Tony Vincent and failing. This means that I am now officially out of date with news of the musical, and I can’t seem to find any new cast lists anywhere. (Not on any website does it tell me who’s in it at the moment. Even Google can’t help me. Although, it doesn’t help that the main website is about six months out of date as well.)

Electric 6 have covered Radio Ga Ga. It’s awful. Enough said.

We so should have called our film festival DVD Day. Anyway, we watched The Day After Tomorrow and Troy. During the week, Mr C purchased Dave Gorman’s Googlewhack Adventure and Live Aid 4 Disc Special Edition. He’d previously seen Dave Gorman live on stage, and laughed so much that DG actually stopped and looked at him, so my expectations were pretty high. I only managed to watch half of it in one go, but it was funny. I remembered parts of it from the book, which helped, as he talks really fast. It was good though, I’m going to watch the second half soon.

Although not a day to be curled up inside, I felt like watching some films. I thought instead of wasting the weather, I could manoeuvre the television and sit in the sunlight. Now, you should all know that I’m quite a big Queen fan, if not you obviously haven’t been reading this journal for very long. I was recommended to watch Highlander, the film which ‘Who Wants To Live Forever’, my favourite song ever, is famous for. When I was in the video shop last, I could only think of Braveheart, which I was informed at a rather loud volume later, was completely different. So, today, I picked up Highlander (the guy from Holby City’s in it!!) and also Timeline.

I think I knew before we went, that the replacement wouldn’t live up to the outstanding performances of my favourite Tony Vincent. But I like to think that I was willing to go in there with an open mind and give him a fair shot. And he pretty much blew it. I just think his voice wasn’t clear enough to pull off the songs and I didn’t notice but Mr C said his dancing skills weren’t exactly on top form.

Okay, so here’s the lowdown on what’s been going on recently… My love of Queen is still going on unabated, I listen to them a lot and have recently started singing loudly to Bohemian Rhapsody and falling in love with it all over again. I got a workout DVD, which is mostly dancing which is great because you’re so busy concentrating on getting the moves right, you barely notice you’ve been exercising for an hour. I really, really wanted to be learning something new so I had a peruse through some courses. Psychology, Economics, that kind of thing. To help me see if it was for me, I picked up a copy of The Economist and I loved it! It’s weekly, though, and that’s not fair because it’s taking me to get through it. Mr C says I should just read as much as I can and then get the new one each time because soon I’ll be understanding it more and more and finding it easier to read, so when I finally manage to finish it before the new one comes out, it’ll be a momentous day. I went to the cinema on my own and saw the third Matrix film. I thought it was really good. I’ve heard people saying they thought it didn’t end properly and didn’t explain all the things it opened up in the second film. Now, I’m completely positive they should have just left it at the one film because that one was a classic and changed the way films are made today. The second one left a lot to be desired, but I thought the third made up for that totally. It answered all the questions I have and it seemed to end properly to me, the action was great (especially when Agent Smith’s face goes all slow-mo and wobbly) and there were only a few corny bits which I was thankful for. Basically, my opinion is that if they had to make it a trilogy, then they ended it well, even if it lacks that extra something in the middle.

I just booked for us to go and see We Will Rock You again!

Things that are getting on my nerves: I can’t stop listening to Queen. And if it’s not Queen, it’s We Will Rock You. I’m currently playing Tomb Raider 2 in an attempt to kill time before the new one arrives. I got stuck in Venice (level 2). All those waterways! Once I’d got through that, I breezed through the next four levels and now I’m stuck again… grr… We headed to Borders, to their Paperchase section, for wedding present wrapping paper, but we ended up browsing through all the books and DVD’s and the computer magazines. I wouldn’t let Mr C buy anything until he convinced me that if we both bought something, that would be fair. I couldn’t find anything I wanted though!

We Will Rock You rules!!! That is all.

Okay, first things first? I can’t get any of the Queen songs out of my head and I can’t stop listening to them! Oh no! I really should be glad though, because they’ve stopped me going down the destructive path I was headed on - the liking of U2! So thank you Queen and Ben Elton!

At about this time 24 hours ago, I was about to go and see the brilliant We Will Rock You. It was really, really good and I would recommend it to every single person that even half likes a Queen song. Tony Vincent was pretty tasty as Galileo as well! I had an interesting tour of London, I saw China Town and Hamley’s, oh and I got taught about an ‘underground bridge’ (don’t ask). Of course, we didn’t get back until two in the morning, and having had a late night the night before as well, I am thankful to be home at last.