Long live Queen

Sorry about the crappy photo it was taken with my phone

Music has always coloured every era and every experience for me. From my earliest memories there is a soundtrack strumming in the background of everything I have seen, done, felt. Those who grow up with music can never be cured of the addiction. We need to be surrounded by sound in all that we do.

When I was a mini there was music everywhere - we listened to that radio on the way to school in the mornings, and alternated between Rod Stewart and Neil Diamond in the evenings, so that I travelled home with Maggie May and sweet Caroline. Weekend mornings the house was filled with Abba and The Beatles, Crowded House, The Rolling Stones and Led Zepplin. My dad told me tales of Elvis and Pavarotti, my auntie indocrintated me for hours with Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty, and my cousin made a shrine for Guns and Roses. I chose Kylie Minogue and Jason Donovan for myself in the early years, and later Alanis Morissette, The Cranberries and Nirvana.

But growing up the main source of music, and what it meant, was at parties. My mum had a riot of ridiculous and wonderful friends whose thirties were their glory days. On the weekends the gardens and bedrooms of suburban homes would be crawling with children hiding and seeking, chasing and catching, playing and squabbling, while downstairs the 'adults' cranked the tunes and let the good times roll.

Parties would start with Roxette, Bryan Adams, Bon Jovi, and then roll on to Dire Straits, were air guitar was obligatory. Fleetwood Mac and The Beach Boys would jostle for air time with Roy Orbison and Chuck Berry, and mixed CDs of greats would have you taken from Eric Clapton to Bob Marley in minutes.

And just when everyone should have been going to bed, the night would kick up a gear as a theatrical thrill poured out of the speakrs and made its way through the house - someone had found the Queen catalogue.

Freddie Mecury's voice has a hypnotic quality - all in its thrall are immediately turned into pouncing, posing, mincing, majestic rock stars. It's (a kinda) magic - there is no stopping it. Suddenly you are all platform heels and glitter, feather boas and operatic delivery, you are Brian May's 'fro and his electric guitar. Confidence flies through you harder than any line of cocaine and you are strutting and pouting through every song. This is the power of Queen.

They are part of a select group of bands whose songs I knew every word to before I could possibly be expected to understand what they were singing about. I heard them through walls when I was supposed to be sleeping, I crept down stairs to listen to them when parties had exploded. Watching the peculiar and fantastic dancing it inspired I longed to be part of the rock 'n roll tribe my parents and their friends had all been initiated into. There is no party Freddie can't fix, no mood he can't soften.

And so with this emotional attachment to Queen, this belief that they are mine, that they were a birth rite, I went to see Stormtroopers in Stilettos. The exhibition was set up in a warehouse just off Brick Lane and was an installation piece with a space dedicated to each of Queens first 4 albums.

It was wonderfully executed, a multi media indulgence in the extreme, with video, audio, photographs, letters, costumes, quotes from Queen members and other musicians. It was immersive - as though you had slipped back into their sequinned, irreverant, ridiculous world for a little while. In the beginning you read tales of Freddie just hanging around this fringes of the hipster/glam rock scene, watching Hendrix night after night all over London, sewing all his own costumes and singing at student parties. Imagining that life made me want to trade everything in for a flat in Shoreditch and a pocketful of rhinestones.

As you move through the space you are aware of their music developing, they draw more and more on the theatre that would become their trademark, experiment with every type of rock, and you listen as Freddie gains the confidence and depth in his voice that Rock hasn't seen since.
The exhibition it beautfully and lovingly put together, by people who obviously new and loved Queen and their music. There is so much to read, to watch to absorb I wish I had gone more than once and taken more time. Its a sensory treat for anyone, but for a real fan its a feast of information and a window into a band (and a time) gone. I left feeling full and overwhelmed by their magnitude, but also very sad that I could never see them in all their live glory. Long live Queen!