Breathtaking Beauty (Wardour-078)
Boston Garden, Boston, MA – February 9, 1977
(79:56): A Day At The Races overture, Tie Your Mother Down, Ogre Battle, White Queen, Somebody To Love, Killer Queen, The Millionaire Waltz, You’re My Best Friend, Bring Back That Leroy Brown, Sweet Lady, Brighton Rock, ’39, You Take My Breath Away, White Man, The Prophet’s Song, Bohemian Rhapsody, Stone Cold Crazy, Keep Yourself Alive, Liar
The fragment for Queen’s February 9th, 1977 Boston show surfaced recently and Wardour chose to press it on this new release Breathtaking Beauty. It runs from the beginning of the show through two and a half minutes of “Liar” before cutting out, omitting “In The Lap Of The Gods…Revisited,” “Now I’m Here,” “Big Spender,” “Jailhouse Rock” and “God Save The Queen.”
Taped from the front row, the sound quality is excellent although it wavers a bit in the upper frequencies. Wardour’s decision to press this tape on silver is a bit strange. They usually focus on complete shows for this label, and having a fragment of a show isn’t very collectible.
To add insult to injury, the same people who run Wardour have produced some excellent looking Queen sets, such as Medieval Queen (Uxbridge 215) with the May 23rd, 1977 Bristol show and Rocks New York (Trial-220) with the December 1st and 2nd, 1977 Madison Square Garden shows, on CDR rather than pressed silver. It is decisions like this which call into question the label’s commitment to producing quality Queen titles.
This could have been an essential release if it were complete. A review of the show titled “A night at the Garden: Queen in Concert” written by Claudia Perry focuses upon the visual presentation, gushes about Brian May and calls Freddie “camp.” In short, Breathtaking Beauty is for the absolute Queen silver completeist but is, in all honesty, an insult to collectors and can safely be ignored.
