From Queenpedia.com
With the Queen + Paul Rodgers touring band already a well-oiled machine, it should come as no surprise that a live album was going to be the first recorded evidence of the new partnership. Recorded on a particularly good night during the band's brief jaunt throughout Great Britain in May 2005, the album shows that Paul Rodgers had by this point now shown his worth, and that the audience wasn't exactly pelting him with beer bottles and rotten tomatoes. Spike Edney, Danny Miranda, and Jamie Moses, sidemen extraordinaire, are also warmly received, adding their own unique touches to the songs without threatening to overshadow the three main attractions. However, there's a kind of blandness to the songs chosen: all the familiar hits are here, with a vast majority of it already appearing on previous Queen live albums (only the selections from The Miracle and Innuendo had obviously not been previously represented on a live album, though they had all been performed at the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert), and only two "new" songs – Say It's Not True and a cover of Sandy Denny's Let There Be Drums – make the grade. (The inclusion of Last Horizon is dubious, considering it's a Brian May solo song, and Queen had never in the past included solo songs in band sets.) The only refreshing aspects of the concert, then, are Paul Rodgers's songs, performed wonderfully by the band and sung superbly by the man; it's also apparent, though understandable, that Rodgers feels the most comfortable with these songs. For all his strengths as a vocalist, he never seems to fully get behind the Queen material. Still, there are unique touches that fans will appreciate: the White Man intro to Fat Bottomed Girls; the slowed down first verse and chorus of Hammer To Fall (even though many will falsely and tantalizingly believe that Brian was playing the intro to It's Late); and the appearance of Freddie for the first, ballad half of Bohemian Rhapsody. Roger and Brian, too, get a chance to sing lead vocals on a handful of songs, adding a certain sentimentality to them that Paul might otherwise have not been able to deliver. However, there are two main points to the album that are unforgivable: the title, which comes across as simultaneously lame and self-indulgent (if this was, according to all parties involved, a new band, then what exactly are they returning from?), and the artwork, only adding to longtime designer Richard Gray's steady decline in quality. (Then again, it's been posited that a number of far superior alternatives were proposed, so this most likely isn't the fault of Gray, but of the quality control department.) Quite why Live In Sheffield couldn't have been used along with a shot of the band onstage in front of their impressive lighting rig is beyond comprehension. Then again, in this day and age of live albums appearing almost overnight on torrent websites, was Return Of The Champions all that necessary? It reached #12 in the UK, and the companion live DVD was probably more worthwhile than the CD, but Queen + Paul Rodgers would have been better advised to have struck a deal with an online music distributor like TheMusic.com and allowed each show to have been recorded and filmed, to be purchased by fans with all proceeds going to a charity (say, the Mercury Phoenix Trust). Instead, online downloads were available from Queenonline, with the option to purchase a £5 blank CD to burn them all to one disc. Mmhmm. As good a live album and introduction to this partnership as Return Of The Champions may be, it's unfair to Paul, who is singing a set of primarily Queen tunes. Comparisons to Freddie were inevitable, and while most reviews ranged from fair to good, the band would have probably been better off eschewing the live album idea and instead making The Cosmos Rocks their first full-blown debut. However, this is all said with hindsight: the partnership was borne out of a live collaboration, and to have immediately jumped into the studio and started working on their own material without even testing the waters would be like diving off the high dive before knowing how to swim. It's fortunate that the collaboration worked so well, and the band spent the next few months essentially touring behind the album, but the real success of the partnership lay in what they could come up with in the studio. Tracklists
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