Queen – Now I’m Here (Live in Rio 1985)

Freddie crossed the stage in four bars without moving. There were two of him.

The stage goes black and fills with dry ice. Somewhere on the left, a single spotlight finds Freddie Mercury, who sings the line the song is named after and then vanishes back into the dark. Four bars later the light comes up on the right-hand side of the stage, and he is standing there instead, singing the answering line. He has not run. He has not moved at all. A stagehand dressed identically has been waiting in the dark on the far side for the whole song, and the audience’s eyes do the rest of the work.

Keep watching: Queen – Now I’m Here (Munich 1979) · Queen – Radio Ga Ga (Live Aid 1985)

Queen played Now I’m Here for the first time in Manchester on October 30, 1974, at the start of the Sheer Heart Attack tour, and the staging came straight out of the writing. Brian May had built the song around two positions — here, and then there — and a band with a frontman like theirs was never going to leave a structural gift like that alone. Most groups would have taken it as a lyric. Queen took it as a stage direction.

Written by the one member who wasn’t there

The song itself came out of an illness. May wrote it while recovering from hepatitis that had collapsed Queen’s first American tour, moving between a hospital bed and a small flat in West London, remembering the shows he had just been pulled out of. EMI released Sheer Heart Attack on November 1, 1974, and put the song out as a single on January 17, 1975, backed with Lily of the Valley, produced by Roy Thomas Baker with the band. It reached number eleven in Britain and charted across Europe. The lyric names Mott the Hoople directly, the band Queen had been supporting when May went down.

What happened afterwards is the part that matters here. Queen played it at virtually every concert they gave from late 1974 until they stopped touring in 1986 — not most nights, effectively all of them, through every lineup change of the set and every shift in what the band sounded like on record. Songs came and went. Whole albums fell out of the show. This one never did.

Rio, January 1985

By the time Queen headlined Rock in Rio in January 1985, the song had been in the set for a decade and was doing a different job. The theatrical trick belonged to a smaller room and an earlier version of the band. In front of a Brazilian crowd that ran to six figures, Mercury used the same song as a piece of equipment for handling an audience that size — the call-and-response section in the middle, where he sings a phrase and several hundred thousand people send it back, which by 1985 was the thing Queen did better than anyone alive.

Six months later they would do a version of exactly that at Live Aid and it would become the most-replayed twenty minutes in rock. Rio is the rehearsal nobody calls a rehearsal.

There is a neat symmetry in a song about being present becoming the one Queen used to prove they were. Brian May wrote it from a bed, convinced the band would replace him. Freddie Mercury turned it into a piece of theatre about being in two places at once. And eleven years later, in front of a field in Rio, it was the song that made a crowd too big to see the back of behave like one room.