

This is the opening night of the European tour, the first Queen tour for which there is some kind of documentation of every show.



Freddie has a word with the crowd before Mustapha. "Ok, just a thought. For those of you who don't know, tonight is our first night of the tour, and it's nice to see so many of you here." He then shouts, "Take that!" as he pours some beer on the front rows.



Brian May did his homework on the 6-week break and practiced the last bar of the Save Me solo, as he hadn't played the scale run up to this point in the song's touring life. He would never miss it again.



John Deacon's medium rocker Need Your Loving Tonight has a permanent place in the setlist for now, replacing You're My Best Friend.



Brian takes note of Switzerland's multilingualism before the brief acoustic segment, which remains a single song on this tour. "Good evening, guten abend, bonsoir, etcetera. Glad you're making a lot of noise, because we're gonna do something extremely quiet and delicate now. You'll get a little more woken up later on. This is called Love Of My Life." Instead of beginning the song, he continues: "We came here about a year and six months ago, I believe. And we made a live album, some of the tracks from which were in this stadium [a true statement!]. And on that you sang very well, so I hope you're going to sing tonight, ok?"



The band have introduced Battle Theme (for which Brian happily uses his analog delay) from the soon-to-be-released Flash Gordon soundtrack. They would also perform Flash and The Hero later in the tour, and Vultan's Theme would be heard in a few months later in Japan.



The second set of photos seen above was taken by Danilo Varello.



This article from a 1981 Italian magazine contains some pictures from this show:



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