Concerts for the People of Kampuchea, Hammersmith Odeon, London, Britain, 12-26-1979 to 12-29-1979: Part 1: Queen

I mentioned the other day that I'm going to put more effort into posting big "various artists" concerts (with Live Aid being the most famous example), since those seem to get overlooked. A commenter then made the suggestion that I post the Concerts for the People of Kampuchea because the official double album that was released of those 1979 concerts was only ever released on vinyl and is long out of print. I decided that was a very good idea, because I don't think anyone else has ever put together all the well recorded songs for it.

The Concerts for the People of Kampuchea were actually a series of four concerts at the Hammersmith Odeon in London, from December 26 to December 29, 1979. These benefit concerts took place for the timely and controversial issue of what had happened to the country of Cambodia, as it is generally known in the West, or Kampuchea, as it is generally known in the East, including by the people of that country. I'm going to refer to it as Cambodia, since that's what I'm used to. Anyway, from 1975 to 1978, the country was ruled by Pol Pot, leader of the Khmer Rouge, a Communist political party. The country was devastated by their extreme measures, with about two million, or one-fourth of the entire population, killed during those few years. At the end of 1978, the neighboring country of Vietnam invaded Cambodia and easily took it over, since most Cambodians wanted the reign of terror to end by then.

Paul McCartney was the main musical force behind organizing the concerts, just as his fellow Beatle George Harrison organized the Concert for Bangladesh back in 1971. But, unusually for a rock concert, the United Nations was also officially involved with the concerts. I gather they handled the relief efforts from the money the concerts raised. Cambodia had been devastated by war even before the Khmer Rouge took it over, so they definitely needed help then. But for some people it was controversial for Western, capitalist countries to help a country that had recently been conquered by Vietnam, a Communist country at the time. A few years later, the US and its allies put an economic boycott on Vietnam because they refused to withdraw their army from Cambodia. But Vietnam withdrew in 1992 and the boycott ended. Cambodia slowly recovered, though remnants of the Khmer Rouge sustained an insurgency until the end of the 1990s. Unfortunately, its government is basically a dictatorship as I write this in 2023.

Anyway, let's get to the music. A double album of highlights from the four nights of music was released in 1981. However, it didn't do that well since it only had a couple, or sometimes even just one, song per artist, and often they weren't their best known songs. For instance, the only Queen song on the album was "Now I'm Here," which is a nice song, but far from one of their better known ones. The album quickly went out of print, and has stayed that way due to the difficulty of keeping the legal rights to all the different musical acts.

Luckily though, I was able to find a lot more material than just what was on the official album. In the case of Queen, they played a full concert that was nearly two hours long. They were the one and only musical act for the first night out of the four nights. Many more songs somehow emerged in soundboard quality on bootlegs. However, for some of the songs, there are only audience bootleg versions. I decided to keep the sound quality high for this entire series of concerts, so I have only included here the songs with soundboard level quality. That makes up a majority of the Queen show, including most of their best known songs, but not all of it. What's here is about an hour and ten minutes from a concert that was about an hour and 50 minutes long.

However, one extremely key song wasn't one of those with soundboard quality: "Bohemian Rhapsody." That's become their best known song, and is considered one of the most famous songs of all time, so I felt I couldn't leave it out. Instead, I took the audience bootleg version and used whatever audio editing tricks I had to try to make it sound a little better. One thing that helped me is that the vocals in the middle section, the acappella "opera section," were in fact just a recording from the record version. This was standard procedure for Queen concerts, because they felt they couldn't do that section justice with live vocals due to many, many vocal overdubs for that part. So I patched in the record version for that section, essentially replacing the vocals there. As expected, it was an exact match for the timing and the musical key, and it sounded much better. That's why that one song has "[Edit]" in the title.

I also put in some effort to make sure this recording flowed smoothly, despite the missing songs. Sometimes I had to fiddle with the song transitions to do that, for instance if the recording of one song ended with lots of cheering and the next song started out with near silence. It should all sound good now.

This album is one hour and ten minutes long.

01 We Will Rock You [Fast Version] (Queen)
02 talk (Queen)
03 Let Me Entertain You (Queen)
04 Somebody to Love (Queen)
05 talk (Queen)
06 Death on Two Legs (Queen)
07 Killer Queen (Queen)
08 I'm in Love with My Car (Queen)
09 You're My Best Friend (Queen)
10 talk (Queen)
11 Save Me (Queen)
12 Now I'm Here (Queen)
13 Don't Stop Me Now (Queen)
14 Love of My Life (Queen)
15 talk (Queen)
16 '39 (Queen)
17 talk (Queen)
18 Crazy Little Thing Called Love (Queen)
19 Bohemian Rhapsody [Edit] (Queen)
20 Tie Your Mother Down (Queen)
21 Sheer Heart Attack (Queen)
22 talk (Queen)
23 We Will Rock You - We Are the Champions (Queen)
24 talk (Queen)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15511423/ConcrtsforthPeoplofKmpchea_1979_Day1Quen.zip.html

The cover photo is from this exact concert. However, it only shows lead singer Freddie Mercury and guitarist Brian May.