Queen-The DVD Collection: Live at Wembley Stadium (1986)

This review is sponsored by

BUY IT

General		Extras
Category	Music	Booklet Menu Animation & Audio Featurette-Behind The Scenes-"Road To Wembley" featurettes (4) Featurette-"Unseen Wembley" featurettes (2) Gallery-Photo Multiple Angles-Concert footage extract with 4 selectable angles
Rating
Year Of Production	1986
Running Time	111:07 (Case: 300)
RSDL / Flipper	RSDL (54:06) Dual Disc Set	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Menu
Region Coding	1,2,3,4,5,6	Directed By	Gavin Taylor
Studio Distributor	EMI Music	Starring	Freddie Mercury Brian May Roger Taylor John Deacon
Case	Amaray-Transparent-Dual
RPI	$34.95	Music	Queen

    Whilst Queen had played Wembley Arena before in 1980 and 1984, their first appearance at Wembley Stadium was at 1985's Live Aid, where according to many sources including Bob Geldof, the band simply stole the show on the day, understanding perfectly Geldof's concept of 'the global jukebox' and delivering with a very tight 20-minute set of 'just play the hits'. This performance was beamed via satellite to 160 countries, reaching a combined audience of one and a half billion people - a third of the world's then population - on an estimated 80% of television sets on the planet. Gulp!  The event was described as "the perfect setting for Freddie Mercury" and it would prove to be a performance that revitalised Queen's career at that point. A year later, when organising the massive Magic Tour of Europe, Wembley Stadium was the obvious and only real choice for the London leg of the tour.

    Some stats and trivia on the Wembley gigs:

• dates: 11 and 12 July 1986. The concert featured on this DVD is the 12 July concert, in its entirety.
• attendance (both nights): 72,000, sold-out both nights. (Only The Rolling Stones and Bruce Springsteen had to that point had enough demand for two consecutive sell-outs of Wembley.) 
• support acts (both nights): Status Quo, The Alarm and INXS.
• the Wembley tickets sold out within a matter of hours of going on sale, forcing promoters to add an additional date at the end of the Magic Tour at the huge Knebworth Park in Stevenage. Demand is still strong enough that tickets for this added date also sell out in two hours.
• the concert featured on this DVD was watched by Mick Jagger and daughter Jade and Minder star Dennis Waterman.
• the concert was originally filmed for a TV/radio simulcast, to air as 'Real Magic' in October on UK Channel 4 to 3.5 million viewers. (The concert was also broadcast later that year on American TV as part of a 'Superstar Concert' series.)
• equipment used: 15 cameras, one helicopter, a stage size of 6,000 square feet, a lighting rig weighing 9.5 tons and driven by 6 computerised control desks, and a total of 5 electrical generators and 180 speakers, pumping out 500,000 watts of power for sound and lighting.
• of the four helium-inflated caricatures of the band members used in this concert, only two escaped the crowd and only one (Freddie) escaped the stadium and took greater flight. It landed in someone's garden several miles away in Essex, where it was held to ransom by the householder the next day.
• immediately after the concert featured on this DVD took place, Queen headed off to host a modest little get-together for 500 or so close friends to celebrate selling out Wembley two nights in a row. The party started at midnight and was held at a restaurant and club on the roof of the Marks and Spencer building in Kensington. Arriving guests were greeted in the lifts by girls wearing skin-tight uniforms (actually, on closer inspection, turning out to be nothing but body paint!) and the party itself featured dwarfs, drag artists, topless girls in the gents' lavatory and a man in a g-string in the ladies. During the party, Queen performed an impromptu set of songs for the crowd, playing under the very strange pseudonym of "Dicky Heart and the Pacemakers"! 
• the Magic Tour took in 9 countries, 26 dates, and played to a total of 979,600 people (official attendance). The largest gig of the tour was Stevenage (Knebworth Park), for which official ticket sales were 120,000, but for which authorities put the actual attendance estimate at anywhere between 160,000-200,000. This concert, on 9 August 1986, proved to be Queen's last ever live performance.

    The track listing for Queen Live At Wembley Stadium is as follows. Note that tracks marked with an asterisk indicate footage not commercially available before (i.e. these tracks were edited out of the previously available VHS release of the concert):

1. One Vision
2. Tie Your Mother Down
3. Medley: In The Lap Of The Gods (Revisited) / Seven Seas Of Rhye / Tear It Up*
4. A Kind Of Magic
5. Under Pressure
6. Another One Bites The Dust
7. Who Wants To Live Forever
8. I Want To Break Free
9. Improvisation*
10. Brighton Rock Guitar Solo*
11. Now I'm Here*
12. Love Of My Life*
13. Is This The World We Created?
14. Rock and Roll Medley: (You're So Square) Baby I Don't Care* / Hello Mary Lou (Goodbye Heart)* / Tutti Frutti / Gimme Some Lovin'*
15. Bohemian Rhapsody
16. Hammer To Fall
17. Crazy Little Thing Called Love
18. Encore 1: Big Spender* / Radio Ga Ga
19. Encore 2 : We Will Rock You
20. Friends Will Be Friends
21. We Are The Champions
22. Taped Exit: God Save The Queen

    The above set list remained relatively solid, more or less, throughout the whole Magic Tour, and the Wembley concert features the entire set list, so this DVD is indeed a good representation of Queen's live performance on their final tour. For the record, the only omissions of songs from this tour that we don't get to see here are a couple of songs that very occasionally made their way into the set list during odd nights on the tour, usually as part of the Rock and Roll Medley or Improvisation sections. These songs are a Piano Solo, Immigrant Song, Saturday Night's Alright For Fighting and snippets of Stupid Cupid and Shake Rattle & Roll.

Video

    I'd love to be able to tell you that this video transfer looks simply stunning in its restoration and new widescreen enhanced presentation for DVD. I'd love to be able to tell you that the noisy image I'm used to watching on the VHS release of the concert is a thing of the past now that the newly mastered widescreen DVD transfer has hit the streets. I'd love to, but I can't. I can't even report that's it's widescreen. But still, the video transfer is still eminently watchable.

    Disappointment #1: The DVD is presented in its original aspect ratio of 1.33:1 full frame. This was quite a surprise to me, as I was fully expecting the transfer to receive the same treatment as the previous two Queen DVD releases, whereby the original 1.33:1 image was cropped down marginally, re-framed and then enhanced in the ratio of 1.78:1. Personally speaking, I simply hate watching a 1.33:1 image with a full-on 5.1 concert audio mix, as I find the marriage of a small screen size with big surround audio soundstage completely incongruous. Of course, most widescreen TV's will give you the option of watching in 'cinema mode', enabling you to manually zoom in to the image to expand to a 1.78 aspect ratio, but this is quite suboptimal framing compared to the situation of a transfer deliberately scanned and constantly re-framed with the intention of creating the best 1.78:1 image (as in the previous two Queen DVDs). After I recovered from my initial dummy spit at the 1.33 framing, I soon realised why, in retrospect, the decision must have been arrived at not to provide a cropped 1.78:1 enhanced aspect ratio, and that is because of the lack of resolution of the source material at hand. Any zooming in to this source material at all immediately exacerbates image quality problems. So 1.33:1 it is. (Ed. Can't say I agree with this reasoning. If the original aspect ratio was 1.33:1, then in my opinion the disc should be (and indeed is)  presented at 1.33:1.)

    Disappointment #2:  The luminance portion of this transfer may appear OK at first glance, and indeed the transfer is eminently watchable as stated above, however on any closer inspection luminance scores poorly. The transfer is lacking in any detail, shadow detail is often poor and low level noise is a drama, all due to the analogue video tape source material and the technology of the valve video cameras of the day. This makes for much frustration at times watching the video transfer, but is no complaint of the DVD transfer process itself - all of the problems and artefacts I am about to catalogue below are simply something we have to live with as a by-product of the old camera technology of the day. Mind you, it's not all doom and gloom from go to whoa, and many shots do reveal appreciable detail in some scenes.

    Colouring is probably on balance best described as sufficient, however again owing to the analogue video source material, true solid colours are simply not achieved, and this is particularly evident with the low level noise in many blacks and with the chroma noise in some reds and blues. The old technology cameras also mean a propensity for significant chroma flaring and colour bleeding in many instances, such as in the bright yellows of Freddie's jacket during the first third of the concert, or the white outlines of many costumes or the flaring around band members as they approach or are highlighted by light sources. This flaring effect tends to lead to artificially enhanced colouring in some scenes. Still, if we put aside these annoying instances of flaring and bleed (and also some instances of streaking of colours, to be discussed under source artefacts below), the colouring in the transfer is generally sufficient to portray the impact of the many colours in Queen's impressive lighting rig. There are also many (mostly static) wide shots that reveal a healthy degree of colouring in the lights and costumes and overall environment.

    A bit of good news is that a great job has been done with the DVD transfer process itself, with absolutely no MPEG artefacts introduced and film-to-video artefacts (or 'transfer artefacts', in this context) also kept well and truly in check. The only transfer artefact I did note was a couple of trivial instances of aliasing, such as that appearing on the Vox amplifiers behind Brian during his guitar solo at 45:53.

    However now we come to major disappointment #3, film artefacts (or in this context 'source artefacts'). Where do we start? Probably the most annoying artefacts present here are colour bleed/chroma flaring/chroma noise, burning out and ghosting of the image, and microphony. I've noted some times for examples of these below, but you will see that these times are all mostly from the first half of the concert, as to be honest I gave up writing them down after a while - you can find several other instances. All of these artefacts are due solely to the old technology tube video cameras used to record this concert. This old technology certainly dates the concert and these problems would largely not be there at all if it was possible to go back and record the concert again today, using modern technology. What a pity.

    Bad colour bleed is evident on Brian May's white jacket (see 4:08) and striped black and white shirt (51:00), and on Freddie's bright yellow jacket (15:05). The bright yellow in this jacket cannot be handled effectively by this video camera technology, and consequently we have bad chroma flaring and even a complete loss of the detail in the jacket's white stripes and other finer details on occasion. Luminous bleeds are in fact a problem on the whites of costumes generally; see for example images of Freddie during Another One Bites The Dust, or the loss of detail on a flaring Freddie as he walks too close to the light at 37:25. Chroma noise is problematic with the video camera trying to capture reds and blues in particular, as in the images throughout Hey Big Spender. These old technology tube cameras also don't like bright lights being shined into them, and so next we catalogue instances of burning out and residual ghosting of the image on the camera. You can see this as an annoying and distracting streaking of the lights across the frame, whenever the camera tracks shots of moving performers in front of bright lights behind them. Once the image is burned into a particular camera, it then remains as a notable residual burn even for later static shots. See as some of the worst early examples of this annoying burn/streaking effect 9:46, 13:34 and 25:18, but there are others. Next, we have microphony as a result of the inability of the old valve technology cameras to handle vibrations from loud noise, marring the image at, for example, 9:30, 13:55 and 21:03.

    There's nothing really that can be done about all of these source artefacts. We just have to live with them. I do hasten to put all these issues in context though and state that it's not like the image is completely unwatchable or anything - in fact far from it. I have just honed in on the problems to note them. But there is indeed still some nice colour and adequate detail on display in many shots too. I also hasten to add that the above is in no way a criticism of the DVD transfer process. I doubt that these image streaking and flaring issues could have even been cleaned up digitally - or if they could it would have been simply too big a task  This does explain though why any thought of cropping and zooming in to the image to enhance it for widescreen TVs must have been quickly abandoned.

    No subtitle stream is provided on this disc - a lost opportunity to include a lyric sheet.

    The disc is RSDL-formatted, with the layer change occurring at 54:06. It is during a wide shot of the crowd, cheering between songs, and whilst still a bit jarring to the audio there is no less disruptive spot to place the layer change in a live concert DVD.

Video Ratings Summary

Sharpness
Shadow Detail
Colour
Grain/Pixelization
Film-To-Video Artefacts
Film Artefacts
Overall

Audio

    As with the previous Queen DVDs, this one comes with a default LPCM 2.0 mix (at 1536 kb/s) and a dts 5.1 mix (at 1536 kb/s). As before, there is no Dolby Digital 5.1 mix at all, and Queen is instead fully embracing the dts format, again offering a full bitrate track. It means however that if you don't have dts capabilities, then a surround mix is unavailable to you. My review below is of the dts track. Please note that if you just put this disc in and press play, it will start with the default stereo track, so you do need to go through the audio options menu first to manually select dts.

    The most immediate and pleasing aspect of this concert mix is in the mixing levels across the vocals and all instruments. Inappropriate mixing levels is one of my biggest gripes about concert DVDs generally (see review of the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert for my whinge about the previous Queen concert DVD mix). The mixing levels in the new dts mix on this disc have improved the concert sound immeasurably over the previous VHS and CD mixes of this concert. Vocal quality is strong and clear, (importantly) guitars are now loud enough to be satisfactorily distinct and biting and the drums are also much punchier and with good attack. The audio transfer on this disc also exhibits a healthy dynamic range, equally handling the quieter moments in songs like Is This The World We Created? through to the walls of sound in tracks like Now I'm Here, Tutti Frutti, Hammer To Fall and We Are The Champions. In terms of instrument separation, there is the odd track like Bohemian Rhapsody that still sounds a touch muddied in parts, but by and large there is very little bleeding of the instruments and nearly all songs sound just great. My picks of songs for the best examples of the quality and separation of the audio mix would be Under Pressure, Who Wants To Live Forever, I Want To Break Free (with a much more pronounced bite on the guitar here than before), the Hammer To Fall guitar solo, and We Are The Champions. I did not note any issues with clicks, pops or drop-outs, other than to note some audio hiss during the quieter tracks, as in Who Wants To Live Forever. I did not note any issues with audio sync at all.

    The surround presence in this audio track is constant and generally effective. Thankfully the surrounds are not used too aggressively this time for venue echo and reverb, as I found to be problematic in the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert audio track. This time, the surrounds are used in a more measured dose, still providing ample crowd noise and echo and giving appropriate front-to-back balance to the soundstage. A point to note with the surround use, however, is that there is very little, if any, utilisation of precise rear directional effects in the mix. With little separation between the rear channels, this restrains the mix in its front-to-back weighting and fails to elevate it to a 5.1 mix with distinct localisation. As an example, listen to the Brighton Rock Guitar Solo and note the use of the surrounds here. The two single repeat echoes on Brian's guitar are not directed precisely in this mix, as both echoes are simply directed to both rear speakers, rather than the first repeat to the left rear and the second repeat echo to right rear, as intended in the live environment. Still, I would much rather sacrifice some rear channel directionality in this mix than have a more localised mix that is ruined by an overly aggressive echo and reverb (to more accurately replicate the venue acoustics), as was the case with the Tribute Concert DVD mix. Effective but moderate is the best way I can summarise the surround use in this audio transfer.

    The subwoofer is called upon constantly and effectively to help fill out the bottom end in this concert mix. There is pronounced kick drum throughout the mix (another big improvement on the previously available mixes of this concert) and clean, deep bass. Check out Hammer To Fall and Tutti Frutti as two effective examples of subwoofer use.

Audio Ratings Summary

Dialogue
Audio Sync
Clicks/Pops/Dropouts
Surround Channel Use
Subwoofer
Overall

    Brian May and Roger Taylor themselves oversaw production of this DVD, and they are both acutely aware of what the fans want and the wait the fans have had to endure over the years for Queen's most popular concert to come out on DVD. It is therefore no surprise that all aspects of this DVD, from menu design to choice of extras, have been thoughtfully put together. The extras on this disc include several new ones including newly recorded retrospective interviews, a few previously unseen snippets of backstage footage immediately before and after the concert, previously unreleased rehearsal footage, unseen footage of the band's performance in the prior night's concert, plus previously unseen and unused coverage of the feature concert. To round it off, the extras package on this disc also includes excerpts from previously released Queen documentaries, providing other backstage and background material relevant to help put this concert and the Magic tour in context. This represents (to my knowledge) just about all of the extra/bonus material possibly available in respect of this particular concert, so fans could not possibly want for any more in this department.

Booklet

    A 20 page photo booklet gives some great pictures of this concert and other concerts from the Magic tour. Most of these pictures were previously available to Queen fans in one release or another, but the images will be fresh to many. In any event, it is great to see this collection of images presented together. There are also one or two new pictures that I have not seen released in any format before. This booklet also provides the DVD production credits.

Menus

    All menus are presented in the appropriate aspect ratio of 1.33:1, commensurate with the feature and extras. All menus are nicely themed, are animated and include audio underscore (sometimes overly loudly!) in Dolby Digital 2.0.

    All the extras to be discussed below - without exception - come in an aspect ratio of 1.33:1 and with Dolby Digital 2.0 audio.

"Road To Wembley" Featurettes (total 67:24)

     This menu screen gives access to four separate featurettes:

• "Brian and Roger" (27:26):  These are newly recorded 2003 retrospective interviews. The band members provide candid recollections of the event, covering such topics as their initial nervousness about playing at this venue and their approach to it, and the craft of 'building' the live show for such massive tour venues, including such considerations as the choice of songs for the set list, the translation of studio versions of select songs into a live context and the pacing of the concert.
• "Gavin and Gerry" (8:31):  Interview snippets with Gavin Taylor (video director) and Gerry Stickells (Queen's long-time tour manager). This provides an interesting insight into the more technical aspects of pulling this concert off, both the live show and the filming of it. Gavin Taylor talks about the number of cameras and camera placements he required to cover the event, whilst Gerry Stickells talks about some of the problems associated with constructing the huge stage and fitting it into Wembley Stadium.
• "A Beautiful Day" (28:21):  This mini-documentary features a lot of archival interview snippets of the band and crew from various sources, as well as other backstage/background footage, most of which was all previously available to Queen fans in the VHS release of the "Queen: The Magic Years" documentaries (1987). Most of the stuff in this featurette has been lifted and edited from volume 3 of this documentary series as is, or else with the footage re-dubbed with some more modern Queen songs over the top. Still, it's a great new edit by long-time Queen documentarians the DoRo twins, and it's great to have all the relevant backstage materials extracted and presented here on this disc, to give the concert a more complete context in one source. The quality of this featurette is only average though, with the original archival video material being quite grainy - very grainy in parts - and the colouring washed out.
• "Wembley Towers" (3:06):  An interesting inclusion as an extra, this short featurette shows time-lapse photography of the demolition/deconstruction of the old twin Wembley towers, and Brian and Roger's (very candid) views on it. Of course, the Wembley Stadium that Queen performed in in July 1986 is not there any more, and the inclusion of this extra provides a nice historical perspective to the concert and to a much-loved but now lost London venue.

"Unseen Wembley" Featurettes (total 47:15)

     This menu screen gives access to three separate featurettes:

• "Friday Concert" (27:59):  This is concert footage from the previous night's performance at Wembley Stadium. Parts of this concert were filmed by Gavin Taylor as a practice run, to fine-tune camera angles and ideas for the full shoot the following night. As a practice run, this footage is not quite as polished as the main feature, but nonetheless it provides the opportunity to see an alternative Queen performance of several tracks. It seems that this previous night's performance was much more informal, no doubt in no small part due to the fact that it persisted in being rainy and windy for most of the show, so the band seemed to be concentrating more on trying to have a good time with themselves and with the audience under the trying conditions. There is some classic Freddie fooling around here.
• "Rehearsals" (15:07):  This is a gem. The introductory text screen describes this extra as rare footage "found in the house of a private collector". It shows Queen rehearsing on a small-scale Wembley stage set up in some studio or warehouse, practising their run-throughs of several songs. There is no audience for the band to perform to, just the road crew who are constantly walking in front of, behind and through them, largely ignoring them and moving equipment and doing whatever it is that road crews do. The footage itself is very rough quality amateur analogue home video that looks like it is several generations old to boot!  It comes with very bad colour flaring, excessive noise, washed out colour, analogue tape tracking errors and mono audio. Certainly not an extra you would watch for the quality, but as an extremely rare piece of rehearsal footage it is fascinating and I'm glad it has been included on this DVD.
• "Gallery" (4:09):  Actually a slide show, not a gallery, this is a series of images set to a rare Queen studio version of A Kind Of Magic. This is an early formative version of the song, as featured over the closing credits of the film Highlander. It is considerably different to the final album version of the song that you know. It is a nice thought for the fans to use this particular song, as this track has never been released on any format with an accompanying video clip before - it has only ever been available over the closing credits of the film. Now we can listen to and appreciate this track as an alternative version of the song with an accompanying 'video clip'. The slideshow itself is well executed and contains some interesting pics.

"Queen Cam" Multiple Angle Featurette (19:34 x4)

     This menu screen allows you to select one of four specific camera angles used by the director for the concert footage (cameras covering Brian, Freddie, John and Roger respectively) as the songs One Vision, Under Pressure, Now I'm Here and We Are The Champions are performed. Note that as well as just being able to select one of these four camera angles from the menu screen and then staying with it for the duration of the featurette, you can of course keep swapping and changing back and forth between the camera angles whilst the songs are being played - simply use the angle button on your remote control.

    This is a great extra and the best use of a multiple camera angle extra that I have yet come across on DVD. This extra allows you to "be your own director" of a half hour of the concert footage. The more interesting use I found for this feature was to concentrate on the instrumentalists when they are not in the spotlight or soloing, so you can watch them playing and interacting with the crowd more naturally whilst the spotlight is on Freddie singing, for example. It also allows you to watch scenes you have seen played out in the main concert feature (Gavin Taylor's cut), but this time from different angles and perspectives - a bit like Back To The Future Part II, for want of any better way to describe it. This is a lot of fun and this type of extra should be adopted and used much more frequently for concert DVDs. I would love to see all my concert DVDs come with this as an extra.

    If you're a Queen fan then you've already got this DVD in your collection by now. For other rock music fans or just the curious, this is the perfect opportunity to see what all the fuss surrounding Queen's live performance is really all about.

    It is a pity that the video transfer on this DVD is marred by source issues, but still the transfer process itself has been well handled and the image remains eminently watchable. The audio transfer is a ripper, and the concert has never sounded better than in this new dts surround mix, effective in bringing out the power of Queen's live performance. A comprehensive DVD design and extras package rounds off the package.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall