Creativity Quote by Roger Andrew Taylor

There is a sly humility baked into Taylor's backstage brag. On the surface, he's describing a technical problem: crowds so loud the band can barely hear itself. Underneath, it's a flex with plausible deniability. Only legacy acts get to complain that their own show has been drowned out by the audience, and only a certain kind of legacy act gets to frame that as evidence of cultural endurance rather than sonic chaos.

The time-travel move to 1983 does most of the work. It's not nostalgia as scrapbook; it's nostalgia as receipt. Taylor is anchoring the present to a very specific era when arena rock still had mass gravity, when fandom was physical and a band like Queen could trigger collective hysteria at scale. By calling the current reaction "very similar" while noting it's not "on a much bigger scale", he toggles between reverence and realism: the band isn't pretending the world is the same, but it is insisting the emotional circuitry still fires.

The key phrase is "threw us back". The audience is cast as the agent of memory, not the performer. That subtly shifts credit away from the stage and toward the crowd, a smart rhetorical move in an era when veteran acts are constantly judged for relevance. Taylor isn't asking you to believe in a comeback narrative; he's offering a continuity narrative. The subtext: if the room is still loud enough to erase the PA, the band hasn't just survived time. It's still capable of producing the kind of communal roar that turns a concert into a referendum on belonging.