Classical trumpeter, Alison Balsom OBE, to John Wilson, “This Cultural Life”, 4th September 2025, BBC Radio 4:
“Our whole family, we’re really big fans of Queen, and my love of Queen comes from the fact that my grandparents live in Knebworth and we used to see a lot of them, and I remember my mum and my uncle in particular being really excited about going to hear them across the fields. Me and my cousins and my brother, we weren’t old enough, and we were in my granny’s house just listening across the fields to this Queen concert – but the longing for this band…”
“Knebworth Village is some way away from Knebworth House where they were playing, but was it very clear?”
“Very clear. Very exciting. Very loud. And we’d gone down earlier in the day and we’d seen the excitement, and the fact that I think, at the time, you know, if the security guards weren’t watching, you could probably sneak in, and there was a lot of excitement and longing that that would be us.”
“This would have been 1986, so you would have been 7 years old.”
“Yes, it’s sort of become mythical in my head, the fact that they were really playing live. And I feel that around that age, 7 or 8, I had so many powerful and quality experiences of music that have stayed with me, and I think the rest of my life is, sort of, searching for those moments of inspiration again, you know, that feeling of like, ‘wow’, I’ve just discovered this for the first time.”
“You say that they were mythical, Queen, in your head at the time. It’s a legendary concert that, because I think it was the last time that Freddie Mercury ever performed live – so that was quite a concert to have heard…”
Henry Lytton Cobbold
@HenryCobboldKH
