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John Deacon Plays a National Anthem, and Queen Budapest (Live) Finally Gets the Reissue Fans Have Wanted for Years
A 27-song document of one night in Budapest, arriving October 30, 2026, that gives Queen's rhythm section its due.
The most curious credit on this release doesn't belong to Freddie Mercury or Brian May. It belongs to John Deacon, seated at a piano, playing Hungary's national anthem. Not bass. Not a Queen song. A bassist, on piano, opening a rock concert with a country's anthem — that's the detail buried inside Queen Budapest (Live), and it tells you this isn't a standard highlight reel dressed up as an album.
Queen Budapest (Live) lands October 30, 2026, credited to Queen Productions Ltd. and filed under Apple Music's Rock genre, a formality that undersells what's actually here: 27 songs pulled from a single Budapest concert, the same performance that supplied footage for the Hungarian Rhapsody documentary. Live albums built from documentary-adjacent footage tend to feel like leftovers packaged for completists. This one, at 27 tracks, is closer to a full accounting of the show than a highlight reel.
## A Tracklist That Spans the Whole Band
What's notable about the setlist isn't just its length — it's the range. Deep catalog pieces like "Seven Seas of Rhye," "Tie Your Mother Down," and "Tear It Up" sit alongside the stadium-anthem stretch of "Under Pressure," "I Want to Break Free," and "Who Wants to Live Forever." That's a band playing to its history and its hits in the same set, which is a different proposition than a greatest-hits victory lap. "One Vision," "Now I'm Here," "Is This the World We Created," and "Tutti Frutti" round out a list that reads less like a setlist and more like a band trying to cover every version of itself in one night.
## The Band Members Get Individual Moments
Concert films usually flatten a band into a single performing organism. This one doesn't. Brian May gets a dedicated guitar solo segment. Freddie Mercury gets his own solo performance stretch. And Deacon — usually the quietest presence in Queen's visual mythology — gets sustained camera attention here, turning in bass work that's described as genuinely noteworthy, delivered with a cool, unbothered demeanor that reads as its own kind of showmanship. Roger Taylor, meanwhile, is the constant underneath all of it, playing with the kind of energy that suggests he treated this night like it mattered.
That matters for how you should actually listen to this one. "A Kind of Magic" stands out as a song the Budapest crowd responded to with particular enthusiasm, which makes it worth cueing up first if you're sampling rather than committing to all 27 tracks in order. "Tutti Frutti," meanwhile, gets a rockabilly arrangement built on layered harmonies — and it's one of the rare moments where Deacon is clearly visible on camera, a small but real payoff for anyone who's spent years squinting at Queen footage trying to find him.
Then there's the tonal swing. After a set full of guitar theatrics and crowd-pleasing anthems, "Love of My Life" arrives stripped down, built to put Mercury's vocal front and center with nothing competing for attention. It's the kind of sequencing choice that only works because everything around it is loud — the quiet has to be earned, and on paper, this tracklist earns it.
What makes Queen Budapest (Live) worth attention isn't novelty — Queen live albums aren't rare. It's specificity. This is one night, fully documented, tied to a real film project, with individual band members getting room to be individually interesting rather than blurred into "Queen" as a brand. A bassist playing a national anthem on piano isn't a footnote. It's a preview of an album more interested in the four people in the band than in reproducing a highlight reel you've already seen.
The real test comes down to sequencing: does a 27-song set sustain the trade-off between deep cuts and anthems across a full listen, or does it work better as a documentary companion you dip into scene by scene? Either way, the Deacon anthem moment alone is reason enough to find out.
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