Live Performances
The newly-formed Queen quickly added "Keep Yourself Alive" to their live set. Mercury commented that the song "was a very good way of telling people what Queen was about in those days" (RAM, 21 May 1976, p 17). Indeed, the number included a drum solo by Roger Taylor and one line sung/spoken by him.
"Keep Yourself Alive" was part of the band's live set until the early 1980s. On the 1980 and 1981 tours, the band would play an improvisational jam before the start of the song then after the drum solo, it would morph into Taylor's tympani drum solo followed by May's echo-plexed guitar solo spot before either segueing into the "Brighton Rock" finale or a drum and guitar climax or segued into a Flash Gordon medley (which consisted of "Battle Theme"/"Flash's Theme"/"The Hero"). The band would not play it again until 1984 on The Works tour as part of a medley of old songs (with "Somebody to Love", "Killer Queen", "Seven Seas of Rhye", and "Liar").
In live performances, Mercury would often sing the line "all you people keep yourself alive" (which is sung only two times in the studio version) in place of the more-repeated line "it'll take you all your time and a money honey you'll survive".
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Famous quotes containing the words live and/or performances:
“No one is so old as to think he cannot live one more year.”
—Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BC)
“At one of the later performances you asked why they called it a “miracle,”
Since nothing ever happened. That, of course, was the miracle
But you wanted to know why so much action took on so much life
And still managed to remain itself, aloof, smiling and courteous.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)