The United States brashly hosts and boasts the best (and sometimes worst) of many things, and, whatever they are, they’re sure to be the BIGGEST! America was and still is the market to crack for any aspiring rock band, and, if you don’t make it in America, you haven’t really made it. New York City might be the Big Apple but, in the 1970s and 80s, all of America was a big ripe peach just waiting to be plucked. Among British rock bands there evolved a form of colonial ethos that it was somehow our historical right as polite pirates to plunder the new world, then take off with the treasure and sail home – without upsetting anybody too much. Fred boldly wanted to be ‘Queen of America’. And in order to conquer the vast, segmented and uncrowned territory, Queen tours needed to cover all markets: the rock ’n’ roll heartlands of the Mid-West, the raucous South, the major cosmopolitan cities, east and west coastlines, and countless other towns with a horse and an arena.
