Long live the Queen

This album was a long time coming. In early August, I got wind on the Internet and in rock magazines that it was scheduled for a September release. It still wasn't out by the time I left the UK in mid-September although a copy of Mojo that I picked up then had already reviewed it. It should be out in the stores any day now.

Any day now dragged on till November. In between, everytime I walked past a record shop, I'd pop in to ask. I got a whole range of negative responses from salespeople ranging from the clueless (how can anyone who works in a music shop not know who Queen is) to the argumentative (who wanted to know how could Queen possibly have a new album when they have no lead singer).

Then last Thursday, one of my colleagues, also a Queen fan, said it had to be in the stores now because Amazon had finally started selling it. I happened to be going downtown that day, so I hit almost all the music shops in the shopping district. And got the same range of clueless answers from the salespeople.

And then I walked into Borders. And found it -- just the one copy buried among the old Queen stuff. You'd expect stacks of it to be piled high on the new releases shelf but no, there was just the one sole copy hidden away. Like they'd only brought in one copy because they weren't sure that it would sell.

I pounced on it like it was gold and when I went back to the office, waved it triumphantly at my colleague. He thinks I probably have the only copy in Singapore.

That was exactly a week ago. It should be properly in the stores now. Even if I'd ordered it from Amazon in the first instance, it would have arrived.

I only waited till now to blog about it because I was persuaded to write a review. I did it because someone suggested it; because there was no review filed for this week, the regular music guy being on reservist training; and it was one of those easy-peasy things that wrote itself in 10 minutes.

The practice is that inhouse reviewers don't get paid, even if they do it on top of their normal duties. The kickback is that they get to keep the review copy. However, this was moot to me since I already have my own copy. So I did it for fun, basically. But then somebody else took the fun out of it so I don't think I'll do this again.