For me this is the perfect example, that tapes like this one do not tell the whole story. In fact they can turn a "difficult" concert into a "performance with good overall feel".
I was there at that show. It was the third time I saw "Queen". And I still remember leaving the show thinking, that this could have been the beginning of the end. Usually most bands had 3 "fat" years, Queen so far had already 8 years.....
Freddie's aura that night was quite like he's having a very bad mood. He often called us "MF"s. Especially when the reaction to the 2 new songs was "lukewarm". I was sitting in the grandstand, from where I could see the whole stage and also the complete huge round hall. The recording of that concert has a lot of audience reaction from where the taper stood.
But compared to the other times I saw Queen in that place, this night the audience was very "reserved".
In the early part of the evening there was a moment, when Freddie interrupted the show, because some people at the front had started to fight. Freddie not only shouted at them, he also threw one of his drinking cups on them. I'm not sure, whether he hit the right people, but it looked extremely aggressive. This was not the "Live Aid-Freddie"....
Musically the keyboardman did not really sound good that night, he seemed to have problems becoming a unit with the band. So it didn't surprise me, when he was soon exchanged.
What the tape also doesn't show are several huge gaps of silence. Maybe it was because of programming the lights or whatever (it was `'82 and computers were far from what they are today), but there were several long moments of darkness and silence in between some songs.
Finally when the band left the stage before the encore, the audience as a whole was amazingly silent, nowhere near the enthusiasm seen on the Live Killers-tour and the later Works-tour in the same building. It was a feeling of "We do not need to clap too much, they come back anyway - and also the new songs are horrible". So far the career went forward with new songs always being welcome and leading into the future.
Suddenly it was all turning backwards relying on the "classics". And with only two new songs in the set it seemed, that the band also was full of doubt.
I was happy to see them return with the Works tour "heading forward" again.
