City: Rotterdam, Netherlands
Venue: Ahoy Rotterdam
Date: April 19, 1978

Setlist:
We Will Rock You (slow/fast), Brighton Rock, Somebody To Love, Death On Two Legs, Killer Queen, Good Old Fashioned Lover Boy, I'm In Love With My Car, Get Down Make Love, The Millionaire Waltz, You're My Best Friend, Spread Your Wings, It's Late, Now I'm Here, Love Of My Life, '39, My Melancholy Blues, White Man, The Prophet's Song, guitar solo, The Prophet's Song (reprise), Stone Cold Crazy, Bohemian Rhapsody, Keep Yourself Alive, Tie Your Mother Down, We Will Rock You, We Are The Champions, Sheer Heart Attack, Jailhouse Rock, God Save The Queen


 


         
                             
         

         

This is the first of two nights at the Ahoy in Rotterdam. Here's a newspaper article (in Dutch) in anticipation for the show.

After Freddie offers a stellar version of Somebody To Love, he asks the audience for requests. "Killer Queen? Do you think we'll do Killer Queen, girls? We'll do that. Listen, what we have right now is a sort of a medley. We have about six or seven songs all rolled into one, and to start off this medley this is a song called Death On Two Legs."

Freddie's piano intro of The Millionaire Waltz is now much more drawn out. During a brief pause, tonight he says, "I think we'd better do it," and the song begins as normal.

Freddie, after the medley: "We'd like to do a John Deacon composition. This is our latest release as a single. Deacy, over here. Ok, this is a song called Spread Your Wings."

Before Love Of My Life, Brian says: "Ok, you may have noticed we're doing a few different things this year, and we're doing a longer show which gives us a chance to do a few more things." After he says everyone will have to be very quiet for the next song, plenty of people keep shouting, to which he responds, "In other words, we can't play it unless it's... reasonably quiet. You'll have your chance to make noise later."

Freddie, after '39: "We'd like to do one more acoustic song, and then we'll do some more real rock and roll, huh? This is a song that we like to do every night. It's just the three of us. This is while Brian takes a rest. This is a song called My Melancholy Blues." Some people in the audience even sing along with this song, which reveals how strong the band's fanbase in the Netherlands was.

After the song, Freddie asks the audience, "Did you like that one? We really enjoy doing that. Ok, what do we have for you right now? He goes off on a slight tangent. "This is like a real nice party, isn't it? Oh yes." He then asks people in a couple different areas of the arena if they're going to be here tomorrow. Plenty of them cheer in affirmation. "We'll have to do a slightly different set." They certainly would. "Ok, we'd like to feature Brian May on the guitar right now. This is a song called White Man."

While he and Brian do their solo spot with all the various sound and visual effects, they stop their improvisation for a moment as there is some kind of unrest in the audience. Freddie pleads, "Please, come on. Listen!" With the phase, delay, and harmonizer effects still on his voice, he asks someone near the front, "Do you want to sing?" He then says, "You're not like Brussels," suggesting that the audiences were much less rowdy at those two shows earlier in the week. He and Brian then continue their improv, and Freddie even incorporates a bit of Keep Yourself Alive into it.

A couple minutes later Freddie insists, "It's your turn now, you sing!" and holds out the mic for an audience member. "Louder!" he demands. Some audience members are clearly restless by this point, as his vocal improv has gone on for seven minutes now. Self-indulgence of the 70s at its best (or worst) - the entire White Man / The Prophet's Song segment of the show totals 23 minutes.

Here's a review of the show (in Dutch), submitted by Raf Foubert.

The first two pictures are from a book called "Voor Queen En Vaderland" by Edger Hamer (see more details here). Pics 23 and 24 were taken by Lex van Rossen and submitted by David van Dijk, pics 25 and 26 are by Lizette de Jong (submitted by Tim de Scally, who also took pics 30-35), and pic 29 was taken by C van Berkel (who also submitted the ticket stub and the ads).


Recording length: 115 minutes (2 CD, incomplete)
Quality: B-
Source: Audience
Lineage: AUD > ? > CDR (x)
Track listing:
We Will Rock You (fast), Brighton Rock, Somebody To Love, Death On Two Legs, Killer Queen, Good Old Fashioned Lover Boy, I'm In Love With My Car, Get Down Make Love, The Millionaire Waltz, You're My Best Friend, Spread Your Wings, It's Late, Now I'm Here, Love Of My Life, '39 [cut], My Melancholy Blues, White Man, The Prophet's Song, guitar solo, The Prophet's Song (reprise), Stone Cold Crazy, Bohemian Rhapsody, Keep Yourself Alive, Tie Your Mother Down, We Will Rock You, We Are The Champions, Sheer Heart Attack, Jailhouse Rock [cut]


This audience source is missing bits of the beginning and end of the show. This is a very high gen copy.


Recording length: 74 minutes (1 CDR, incomplete)
Quality: B
Source: Audience
Lineage: AUD > ? > CDR (x)
Track listing:
We Will Rock You (fast), Somebody To Love, Death On Two Legs, Killer Queen, Good Old Fashioned Lover Boy, The Millionaire Waltz, You're My Best Friend, Spread Your Wings, It's Late, My Melancholy Blues, White Man, The Prophet's Song, guitar solo, The Prophet's Song (reprise), We Will Rock You, We Are The Champions


This home-made CDR from the 90s (given the title "It's Late But Not Too Late") is a lower generation copy of the above audience source. It's the best-sounding recording of Queen's five shows in Holland in the 70s.

Some versions of the disc have a clean edit in We Are The Champions for some reason, removing the first chorus and second verse (bringing the disc length down to 73 minutes). All known copies of the CDR have varying amounts of digital noise in this last track, simply due to age (possibly disc rot).

The recording runs a bit slow.


Recording length: 122 minutes (2 CD, incomplete)
Quality: B-
Source: Audience
Lineage: AUD > ? > CDR (x)
Track listing:
We Will Rock You (slow/fast), Brighton Rock, Somebody To Love, Death On Two Legs, Killer Queen, Good Old Fashioned Lover Boy, I'm In Love With My Car, Get Down Make Love, The Millionaire Waltz, You're My Best Friend, Spread Your Wings, It's Late, Now I'm Here, Love Of My Life, '39 [cut], My Melancholy Blues, White Man, The Prophet's Song, guitar solo, The Prophet's Song (reprise), Stone Cold Crazy, Bohemian Rhapsody, Keep Yourself Alive, Tie Your Mother Down, We Will Rock You, We Are The Champions, Sheer Heart Attack, Jailhouse Rock, God Save The Queen


This is a merge of two audience sources to best complete the show. It is primarily a second source, using an average-sounding copy of source 1 to fill in some gaps.


Recording length: 7 minutes, incomplete
Video/Audio quality: B+ / B
Source: Audience
Lineage: Super 8 master

       
Track listing:
We Will Rock You (slow) [cut], Tie Your Mother Down [cut], We Will Rock You [cut], We Are The Champions [cut], Sheer Heart Attack [cut]


A super 8 film exists from this show.




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