Full Greg Brooks Interview Podcast & Transcript - 19/05/2021

What a knob. Way to drag the late John S Stuart's name through the mud by refuting the acetate's existence.
In other news, still waiting on 'The Miracle' boxset...
He's long overdue his P45 from Bri and Rog.

Thank you for the link. However, I would have loved to listen to this a few years ago and be hyped, but today? Sorry, I do not care anymore.



... quite literally.

I don’t have the ability to listen to it yet but what did the Gregster say about the Miracle box set?

well, the Hangman acetate discussion really had it's birth some time earlier. GB/QPL had previously asked for fans to send any rarities of Freddie-related stuff for the Freddie Boxset. John S Stuart, Karaoke Queen and (probably) others loaned Queen their priceless tapes etc - in John's case it was his original Ibex recording. QPL/GB (between them) managed to lose John S Stuart's Ibex tape and some other items loaned by other fans.
The Ibex tape turned up on ebay. John was never (to anyone's knowledge) compensated for this loss by QPL - surely, at the very least this should've been to the value of the ebay sale?

So, on to later discussions around whether a studio recording of Hangman actually existed - where John pointed out that it definitely did - and he had an acetate of the studio recording. GB got into his usual "no it doesn't" "put up or shut up" playground stuff - as did one or two QZoners. Consequently (and quite rightly, if the previous Ibex experience is anything to go by) the Hangman acetate never left John's possession - only a bona fide fool would take another such risk. Once, bitten twice shy eh?

For those who say "well there's no proof that a Hangman studio recording exists." Correct. There isn't.
But sadly, with John having passed away, we're now at a point where individual considerations need to go deeper than a need for physical proof. We need to rely on what we know about the characters on either side of this argument:

In my 16 years at QZone, i had many, many conversations with John S Stuart - not just through the chat boards, but via PM and email. I always found John to be good humoured, erudite and (above all) honest. We're talking about a Queen collector who had a vast and invaluable collection of Queen items - i'm sure most will remember his sharing of the remaining BBC sessions. From my own experiences with John, I have no reason to doubt his word. I'm 100% certain that almost everybody else who ever spoke/engaged with John will feel the same - the exception (naturally) being the gainsaying-reflex position of the "archivist" - who would challenge, counter and dispute John S Stuart frequently.

John's "archival nemesis", on the other hand: would frequently visit QZ - whenever he needed information for his "work" - ie the fans were frequently his unpaid workers. later (on one key occasion) he denied the existence of some archive live recordings that those very fans had provided him with proof of previously. i cannot recall a single "archivist" visit to QZ, where he actually contributed anything meaningful. it's my belief that he was the master of misdirection and obfuscation, to any reasonably intelligent person - the very antithesis of archivist.

i know who i choose to believe, so much so, that (should the impossible happen, and) at some later date were John somehow proven wrong (yeah right!), i'd still be happier to have believed John all along - rather than GB.

others may have very different views.

Indeed, I was only ever a lurker on QZ but JSS's decades of contributions to the forum were invaluable and his knowledge of the band was second to none.
A sad loss to the community, RIP.

I'm still astonished every time a post by Greg pops up on Facebook. "Anyone has a picture of XXXX, we missed it", "Anyone has a scan of XXXX, we missed it." This is for a book they've been working on for almost twenty years I think.

What an unethical villain! Brian seems have said a lot of good remarks about him. I assume the bank and the company must have a different idea towards the archives.

Does anyone know how the archivist's hiring came about?
I'm assuming the job was not externally advertised but rather given to him due to his previous connections with QPL.
What did he do to earn the job? From what we've seen over the past 26(?) years, he's extremely unqualified and incompetent.

As Freddie would have said about the likes of Greg: "Fuck and forget!"

If i remember correctly he wrote to Queen productions while researching a book and asked if they had anyone cataloguing and archiving material, they said no, he offered to.

At least that's his story, he also said he had permission from Jim beach to talk about the archive with fans and give a limited overview of what was there outtakes and such but he never actually did this.

Not gonna lie, I was hoping something similar would have come out of the first printing of my book, but that wasn’t my goal (not saying that was Brooksy’s goal either of course!). I’m just glad it didn’t happen – Greg is a twit and I like to think I’m not, so who knows what kind of twittage I might have gotten into…

A couple of people have answered already, but I'll add just a couple more details as Greg Brooks wrote about this in an article for the special Queen edition of Record Collector magazine earlier this year.

Greg writes that in 1997, he wrote a letter to Jim Beach after The Beatles released their Anthology series, offering to take on the task should Queen ever do something similar. That led to an interview and a job offer, but the actual call to start the job didn't come for a year and a half. It was initially a six-month contract to help move tapes from "their secret subterranean location to a new and even more secure base." 

The blokes an arse.

This is what gets me. None of us are getting any younger and, with my own health problems, i'm sad to think there could be some great stuff I'll never get to hear.