What Are You Listening To?

[Big Ears]

I've been listening to three Little Angels albums, Don't Prey for Me, Young Gods and Jam. At the time (late eighties/early nineties), they released a great Zeppelin inspired single, She's a little Angel, but the albums sounded average. Twenty years on, they seem the same. I was prompted to dig these out of mothballs after reading that their excellent lead singer Toby Jepson was working with yet another band (Gun I think).

Other albums I felt spurred into exhuming were various Queen remasters from 2011I, after watching the new year TV show with Adam Lambert. A friend lent me A Night at the Opera around the time it was released and, after Bohemian Rhapsody, I was massively disappointed, as it seemed to consist of the aforementioned epic with lots of sing-song filler. As with Little Angels, nothing has changed. Queen are one of the most inconsistent bands of the seventies; their heavy rock inclinations are great (Now I'm Here, Seven Seas of Rhye, Brighton Rock, Dragon Attack, Bohemian Rhapsody), but there is far too much meciocre material for my taste. One of these days, I'll make my own Queen compilation album.

On the subject of Adam Lambert, he was not the exact copy I expected and nor was he the showman to match Freddie Mercury. But in fairness to Lambert, I cannot think of anyone to match Mercury's stage presence, short of Jimi Hendrix. Brian May's guitar playing was distinctive, but surprisingly (to me at least) there was little chemistry between him and the rest of the 'band'. Nevertheless, Lambert did a reasonable job and it would certainly be intriguing if he joined May and Roger Taylor in recording an album of new material - as Queen.