Queen Photographs from The Crazy & Game Tours Freddie Mercury Brian May Roger Taylor John Deacon

Queen Photographs from The Crazy & Game Tours Freddie Mercury Brian May Roger Taylor John Deacon

Crazy Tour was a short tour during November and December 1979. After the release of the single "Crazy Little Thing Called Love", the band decided to change the concert dynamic they used to do the last years. In this tour Queen would revisit smaller venues, many which held fewer than two thousand seats. Nonetheless, it was the highly awaited UK leg of the successful Jazz Tour. The last concert of this tour at the Hammersmith Odeon was also the first concert of the Concerts for the People of Kampuchea. A bootleg recording of this concert exists as the 2-CD set Crazy Tour of London.

The Crazy Tour is praised by fans as one of Queen's best tours.[citation needed] Freddie Mercury's vocals have recovered from the wear of the previous tour and are possibly the greatest they have ever been on stage. Because Mercury is in great form during this run of concerts, he is very experimental and isn't afraid to try daring high notes, some of which he had never tried in a live setting before, such as the C5's in "Somebody To Love," "Bohemian Rhapsody," or "We Are The Champions."

Five concerts from the Crazy Tour have available audio from circulating audience tapes: December 1 (Glasgow), December 3 (Newcastle), December 4 (Newcastle), December 6 (Liverpool), and December 26 (London, Hammersmith Odeon). November 26 (Manchester) is said to have an audience recording which is not in circulation. A couple of short 8mm film clips from December 22 (London, Alexandra's Palace) were shown in the documentary, "The Great Pretender," although each is only about 2 seconds long.

The Game Tour was a concert tour to support their successful 1980 album The Game. This tour featured the first performances in South America by the group. In Buenos Aires, Queen drew a crowd of 300,000—the largest single concert crowd in Argentine history as of 1982.[1] In São Paulo, Brazil, the attendance was 131,000 and 120,000 on two consecutive nights. This was the only tour that Queen played in Venezuela where they were due to play 5 shows in its capital city Caracas. However, after their third performance on 27 September, the Venezuelan government declared an 8-day period of National Mourning due to the passing of Venezuelan former president Romulo Betancourt. The remaining two concerts were cancelled and all tickets were refunded to more than 50,000 disappointed fans.

Guitar by James Rundle

Deacon