Queen: Live at the Rainbow '74 (1974)
There is something genuinely strange about watching a band perform in a mid-sized London theatre, knowing what they would become. Queen: Live at the Rainbow '74 captures the group on the 19th and 20th of March 1974, at the Rainbow Theatre in Finsbury Park, a venue that hosted some of the most celebrated rock performances of that decade, from Jimi Hendrix to David Bowie. Queen at this point had released two albums, Queen (1973) and Queen II (early 1974), and were touring in support of the latter, still some way from the colossal commercial success that records like A Night at the Opera would bring. The footage sat largely out of reach for decades before Queen Films oversaw its restoration and theatrical release in 2014, giving a new generation the chance to see the band in a setting that feels almost domestic by their later standards. That gap between the scale of the venue and the scale of what Freddie Mercury, Brian May, Roger Taylor and John Deacon were clearly capable of is part of what makes the film so quietly remarkable to look at.
The film was directed by Bruce Gowers, who would go on to direct the promotional video for "Bohemian Rhapsody" the following year, a clip often credited as one of the most influential music videos ever made. His background was in television production, and that practical, close-to-the-action sensibility is visible in the Rainbow footage: the camera work is attentive to the band as performers rather than as icons, catching the details of movement and expression that a purely reverential treatment might have smoothed over. The cinematography is uncredited, and what you see is less a polished visual essay on the band and more a document, shot with the kind of steady, purposeful framing that keeps the performance itself front and centre. The sound, shaped by the band's own characteristic layering of guitars and harmonies, is presented without ornamental score or narration: what you hear is what was in the room on those two nights.
For a sense of how this kind of archival concert film sits alongside other music documentaries released in recent years, I also reviewed EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert and Depeche Mode: M, both of which raise similar questions about who these films are really made for and how they handle the relationship between live performance and documentary framing. The Rainbow film makes a different set of choices to either of those, opting for almost no framing at all. The four band members, Freddie Mercury, John Deacon, Roger Taylor and Brian May, are presented in the costumes of the period: theatrical, outré, and worn with the kind of total commitment that either reads as magnificent or faintly ridiculous depending on your temperament. Mercury himself, still in his mid-twenties, performs with an ease and command that sits at odds with how early in the band's career this actually is. He speaks to the audience between songs with a loose, almost cheeky informality that was characteristic of live Queen at the time, a quality the more polished, arena-era footage tends not to preserve in quite the same way.
Queen are, for my money, one of the great bands, and this film catches them at an electric early moment. This is Queen in 1974, playing the Rainbow in London, and the period alone is a large part of the appeal: before the stadium-conquering behemoth they would become, when they were younger, hungrier and gloriously theatrical. The whole thing crackles with that early energy.
It leans, pleasingly, on a lot of their lesser-known material rather than just the greatest hits, played in one of the most storied venues of the seventies. And it is presented as pretty much pure, unedited concert footage, which is both its strength and the thing that will divide people: there is no documentary wrapping, no talking heads, just the band, the stage and the songs, start to finish.
That makes it, inevitably, a film for the faithful. If Queen do nothing for you, I doubt this will win you over; it simply asks you to sit and bask in a full gig, nothing more. I had rather the opposite experience to the one I had with Depeche Mode: M not long ago, where I was the indifferent outsider. Here I am squarely the target audience, and I lapped it up. Your mileage will depend almost entirely on which side of that line you fall.
And on the strength of the performance alone, it is hard to argue with. The playing is tight, the costumes are wonderfully absurd in the best early-Queen fashion, and above it all is Freddie Mercury, who remains, without a shadow of a doubt, one of the finest frontmen who ever lived. Even this young, he owns the room completely. Three and a half stars, not much use to the uninitiated, but a joy for anyone who already loves the band.
Queen: Live at the Rainbow '74 occupies a particular, slightly unusual place in the concert film catalogue: not a biographical documentary, not a fan retrospective with archive interviews, just eighty minutes of a band playing, preserved and released on the strength of the performance alone. For those interested in British rock of the early seventies more broadly, it sits alongside other films of that period, Get Carter and The Wicker Man among them, as a cultural document of a country and an industry at a particular, unrepeatable moment. Whether it works as a film, rather than simply as a record of something that happened, is the question at its centre, and the answer depends rather a lot on what you bring to it. Fifty years on, it remains a document of a band still finding out how large they could become, which is, depending on your point of view, either a limitation or the whole point.
Rating: ★★★½ | Year: 1974 | Watched: 2026-10-19
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for Queen: Live at the Rainbow '74 (1974) on YouTube
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