A half-century has passed since two very different concerts filled England over the same weekend. One belonged to the old guard, the other to the young upstarts. Each was viewed as a sign of a new era in rock, though the crowds they drew could not have been more different in size.
The Two Scenes, Side by Side
By late 1976, top names such as Peter Frampton, Yes, Fleetwood Mac, the Who, and the Rolling Stones had ticket sales that reached vast proportions. Their concerts filled football stadiums, outdoor fields, and racetracks. Around the same time, younger bands like the Ramones and the Clash came together in reaction to rock’s corporate direction, the swollen pride of its leading stars, and the excess of prog music, instead turning toward the plain, direct sound of punk.
During a memorable point in September 1976, the distance between these two separate realms became most evident. Queen performed a free concert in London’s Hyde Park for about 150,000 people, while just two days later the 100 Club Punk Special packed the 100 Club with 600 fans for performances by the Damned, the Buzzcocks, the Clash, the Sex Pistols, and a new group calling themselves Siouxsie and the Banshees.
Queen’s Big Free Show
Just five years before, Queen fans were filling venues as small as the 100 Club. Their fame swelled enormously thanks to “Seven Seas of Rhye,” “Killer Queen,” “Now I’m Here,” and “You’re My Best Friend,” along with “Bohemian Rhapsody,” which spent nine weeks at the top of the U.K. Singles Chart and pushed A Night at the Opera to platinum status worldwide.
The wait for a new record stretched to the close of 1976, yet the force behind “Bohemian Rhapsody” pushed them toward a far larger goal: the chance to hold the biggest free concert in Hyde Park since the Rolling Stones in 1969.
“I don’t think there’s ever been a show like we’re going to do in the park,” Queen guitarist Brian May told Melody Maker days before the concert. “We’re not going to hold back at all just because it’s a free concert. It’ll be the whole works. I hope it all fits together as a very nice and enjoyable afternoon. It’s a way of saying thank you. It’s an adventure, fighting our way through 15 million miles of red tape. It’s quite hilarious.”
The Bill Gets Shuffled
Closing the deal on the show’s cast proved to be its own adventure. Just days before the crowds started arriving at Hyde Park, John Miles and Be Bop Deluxe were removed from the lineup because of maneuvers by concert promoter and Virgin Records boss Richard Branson, who wanted Virgin acts Steve Hillage and Supercharge in their place.
“This move weakens the bill considerably and makes a mockery of free festivals,” a spokesperson for Miles told the Evening Standard. “Now it’s beginning to look like a free promotion stunt for Virgin Records.”
Kiki Dee stayed on the show, though she failed to get her “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” duet partner Elton John to show up, and instead sang with a cardboard cutout of him instead.
“Kiki Dee proved that she can exist quite happily without Elton John,” wrote Melody Maker, “although she has obviously adopted the same attitude towards stage performances as the esteemed EJ, which is to use as many musicians as is needed to reproduce recorded sound on stage, regardless of financial disaster.”
The Show Itself
Before Queen settled on a full lineup including a keyboardist, they faced the hard job of bringing all the elaborate sounds of A Night at the Opera to life on stage. The spectacle worked anyway, driven by fireworks, fog, Brian May’s virtuosity, Freddie Mercury’s charm, and his constant wardrobe shifts.
“The music veered from the wild excitement of ‘Ogre Battle’ and ‘Brighton Rock’ to soothing pieces in the mould of the moving ‘You Take My Breath Away’ without ever losing pace,” wrote Doherty. “Two weeks ago, I queried Queen’s ability to produce the goods at a gig of this magnitude, and it fills me with great pleasure that I state they have the rare ability to create as much atmosphere in open fields as in homely theaters. They are, how you say, a great little band.”
That “great little band” closed out their set with “In the Lap of the Gods… Revisited,” but they planned on coming back for an encore of “Now I’m Here,” “Big Spender,” “Jailhouse Rock,” and “God Save the Queen.” The authorities had another idea.
“The powers that be wouldn’t let us go on and do the encore, about which we were very upset, having worked up for months and prepared for all that,” May told Capitol Radio in 1977. “They got very frightened because there were 150,000 people in Hyde Park in the dark, and they thought they were going to get out of hand. But in fact, there was no possible danger happening at all. Everyone was peaceful and having a good time.”
The Crowd Outside the 100 Club
The day before that, the gathering outside the 100 Club was just as hungry for something fresh. A queue ran across two blocks outside London’s 100 Club in Oxford Street, with people waiting for the Punk Rock Festival to begin.
“Two 18-year-olds from Salisbury were at the head of the queue. ‘I’ve been waiting for something to identify with,’ says Gareth, hopping up and down. ‘There’s been nothing for years. I just want to be involved,'” Caroline Coon wrote.
There was no denying that a new decade in rock was about to begin, and the proof came from a line that carried 600 people.
What It All Meant
Both events appeared to herald a long-awaited new era of rock during a particularly bleak moment for the U.K. music press, a period when “I Only Want to Be With You” by the Bay City Rollers was one of the top songs in England.
“At last, the Seventies have arrived,” gushed Melody Maker’s Harry Doherty in his review of the Queen concert. “The reverberations of it will be felt for the rest of this decade, hopefully ridding us once and for all of the apathy that generally emerges from those who experienced the sixties and are unwilling to accept anything new from this generation.”
“The reverberations of it will be felt for the rest of this decade, hopefully ridding us once and for all of the apathy that generally emerges from those who experienced the sixties and are unwilling to accept anything new from this generation.”
The two shows could not have been more different. Queen delivered a grand spectacle, but it came across as a product of the very excesses that punk was rebelling against. The Sex Pistols and their peers played cramped, loud, and angry sets, and they drew a crowd that had been waiting for something to identify with.
A triumph of corporate spectacle and a declaration of war against it both came to be regarded as harbingers of a new era in rock. The music press of the time saw them as signs of a long-awaited new era, even as they drew crowds that could not have been more different in scale.
Half a century on, those two concerts still stand as an odd and lovely image of a time when rock music was breaking apart into separate camps.
See the video the story is built around at Rolling Stone.
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