City:	Leeds, UK
Venue:	Town Hall
Date:	November 12, 1973

This is the first show of Queen's first UK tour. Jack Nelson of Trident persuaded Mott The Hoople's manager Bob Hirschmann to allow Queen to be the support act for their tour. Hirschmann initially hesitated but eventually agreed. Queen would get plenty of valuable experience while out on tour for a couple months. They would continue to use the tape of Procession as their introduction music before walking on stage to begin the show with Father To Son. Queen were one of the first bands to open a rock show in such a dramatic way, and were perhaps influenced by Yes who started doing this in 1972, using the tail end of The Firebird by Igor Stravinsky. Brian May is asked (on 9-24-82, later published in the Jan '83 issue of Guitar Player magazine), "When did you start doing your extended onstage solo?" BM: "The first time we went out with Mott The Hoople. It wasn't very long in those days. It would be about half a minute." This pretty well indicates that they performed Son And Daughter more like the record version before the '73 tour (except for the radio show in September, which Brian must have forgotten about, quite understandably after all that time). Brian later reflected on the period: "On tour as support to Mott The Hoople, I was always conscious that we were in the presence of something great, something highly evolved, close to the centre of the Spirit of Rock 'n' Roll, something to breathe in and learn from." In a 1998 radio spot, he expanded: "Mott The Hoople was really our first experience of life on the road, and a pretty blinding experience it was, I must say. It's always remained close to my heart, 'cause we grew up on that tour. We had to. It was just insanity. And to survive you had to adapt; you had to become a rock 'n' roll kind of animal and in the good sense of the word, you know. And, yeah, it was phenomenal. And I used to watch them do 'All The Way From Memphis' [which May had covered on his solo album Another World, the subject of this interview] every night, and every night the place would erupt; it was like an earthquake. They really were a fantastic band live. Should have stayed together, I have to say." Morgan Fisher was Mott The Hoople's keyboardist at the time. He would later be Queen's auxiliary keyboardist for the first half of 1982. These pictures were first seen on YouTube.

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