Queen: The Complete Works

by Georg Purvis

  “I mean, [on] A Night At The Opera and Sheer Heart Attack, we had co-production credits on it, so it was sort of a slow thing when you’re first in the studio: you’re new, you’re beginners, you have to learn. And then it depends how long it takes. You have to get that confidence in the studio to know what to do in time, and then you can sort of perhaps take it over yourself. Whereas it depends on different people; some artists just don’t know what goes on in the studio at all. But we’ve always been very interested in working in studios, how to get the best out of them. It’s just been a natural extension really, to just produce our own.”

  Sessions were interrupted in August by preparations for what would become Queen’s first British dates since December 1975. As with any up-and-coming young band, they had fallen prey to the lure of different territories and sadly started to neglect their their mother country; the band wanted to thank their English fans for their continued support and arranged two shows in Edinburgh and one show in Cardiff, with an all-day free gig at Hyde Park as the climax of the proceedings. Only two new songs were premiered during this mini-tour: ‘Tie Your Mother Down’, which wasn’t performed at Hyde Park due to timing restraints, and ‘You Take My Breath Away’. This marked one of the rare occasions when new material was performed before its actual release.

  After the four dates, the band went back into the studio to finish up work on the album. “There are definitely different sounds and a few surprises on the album, but we’ve still maintained the basic Queen sound,” Freddie told Circus. “A Day At The Races is definitely a follow-up to A Night At The Opera, hence the title.” Brian, however, wanted to avoid the inevitable follow-up claims, saying, “I wish, in some ways, that we had put A Night At The Opera and A Day At The Races out together, because the material for both of them was more or less written at the same time, and it corresponds to an almost exactly similar period in our development. So I regard the two albums as completely parallel, and the fact that one came out after another is a shame, because it was looked on as a follow-up, whereas really it was sort of an extension of the first one.”

  John was keener on the technical side of things, and was pleased with the way the recording sessions went: “There’s a lot of stuff on our records, you know. Especially when you get the headphones on ... I suppose our thing is fairly modern in a way, because we do use the studio a lot. I suppose it sounds more modern in a way because of all the various multi-tracking we do. That wasn’t done five years ago because the facilities weren’t around. When we recorded our first album, sixteen-track machines were the thing. And we just used the facilities that they could do ... But now working in the studio is an art in itself, because you can come up with sounds that you could never reproduce on stage.”

  In the normal round of publicity, and perhaps in lieu of any concert performances, the band appeared at Kempton Park (a specially designed horse-racing track) on 16 October in a special race called the Day At The Races Hurdle. Sponsored by EMI Records and suggested by John Reid, the four showed up initially uninterested in the spectacle, but eventually warmed to the event as it was a beautiful day and attendance was high. The press were there in order to ask questions and hear the completed product, while two bands – Marmalade and The Tremoloes – were commissioned to entertain between races. John, Brian, Freddie and Roger were each asked to place a bet on a horse, which they duly did; little did any of them suspect that they all coincidentally bet on the same horse (Lanzarote, ridden by John Francombe), which turned out to be the winning horse of the day.

  The biggest event was supposed to take place on 1 December, when the band were slated to appear on ITV’s early evening magazine show Today With Bill Grundy but pulled out at the last minute. EMI provided a replacement in the form of The Sex Pistols; it was this appearance that shot them to overnight notoriety and spelled the end of Grundy’s primetime career. Instead, Freddie made a guest appearance on his friend Kenny Everett’s radio programme Be Bop Bonanza, in which the pair very nearly drowned in champagne while ‘reviewing’ the new album. At one point, Kenny threw his clipboard into Freddie’s lap and asked him to read the weather, which the vocalist reluctantly did – and still managed to get it wrong.

  Because of all the publicity, A Day At The Races went on to become Queen’s second No. 1 album in the UK upon its release in December. Additionally, EMI received the highest advance orders for the album of any they had released up to that point. In the States, the album reached No. 5, one position beneath its predecessor, but still a respectable showing. Reviews were mixed, as usual: Dave Marsh offered a tepid review, more or less reviewing Queen’s stage presence rather than the album itself. “In addition, to cement their ‘seriousness’, they use instrumental effects which hint at opera in the same way that bad movie music palely evokes the symphony,” he wrote, also remarking that “A Day At The Races is probably meant to be the sequel to Queen’s 1976 [sic] smash, A Night At The Opera, but nothing much has changed.”

  The Washington Post was cautious with its praise, calling out the obvious parallels between this album and its predecessor in a piece titled ‘Queen’s Déjà Vu “At The Races”’. “When A Night At The Opera, released at about this time last year, turned into one of 1976’s most popular albums, the four musicians in Queen ... had a tough decision to make. For their next effort they could either stick their necks out and try something new – or play it safe and deliver more of the same. It takes only a glance at the cover of A Day At The Races to determine the choice they made ... Once again, Queen ... has come up with a judicious blend of heavy metal rockers and classically influenced, almost operatic, torch songs. It’s the oddness of this combination that prevents Queen from being lumped together with all the other third-generation English heavy metal bands ... The only new departure here is ‘Teo Torriatte’, the album’s finale. The Beatles have sung in German and French, and Roxy Music in German, French, Italian and Latin, but never before has an English-speaking rock group attempted to sing a song in Japanese. Queen’s rendition of this May composition, which apparently translates as ‘Let Us Cling Together’, is a charming novelty – so don’t be surprised if it turns up again as the opening bars of next year’s Duck Soup.”

  “It’s important in rock to know when to move to new musical ground and when to stick with what you’ve got,” Winnipeg’s Free Press opined in a bizarre praise of creative arrested development. “By staying close to the perimeters of last year’s hugely successful A Night At The Opera, Queen has another massive bestseller in A Day At The Races. David Bowie could benefit from Queen’s counsel: Low, Bowie’s latest change of direction, adds to the Englishman’s colorful, elusive persona, but the album’s icy disorienting Kraftwerk Meets Eno experimentalist rock leaves me wanting less persona and more music. Bowie’s popularity will push Low into the Top Ten alongside A Day At The Races, but its stay there should be brief ... While this reliance on familiar strains puts Races in the shadow of Opera, the band has approached the individual tracks with a care and skill that gives them their own personality and punch. More than simply a repeat of its last work, Races is a reconfirmation of Queen’s position as the best of the third wave of English rock groups.”

  Circus damned the album the most with faint praise: “Let’s not fault Mercury’s fabrications for shrewd indulgence. Ostentation is the man’s strategy, and Queen albums beg to be judged by their pomp. Grandeur is the other side of pretension. And Freddie Mercury is abrasive – but oh so knowing. These Limey lads are effete, flaky and fey, but they’re not blase. With A Day At The Races, they’ve deserted art-rock entirely. They’re silly now. And wondrously shameless. Rule Britannia!” A review in Sounds hit a little too close to home: “It is too formulated, too smart ass, too reliant on trickery as a substitute for inspiration. Although I believe that Queen have produced some of the most impressive, majestic, sophisticated music of the decade over the last few years, there has to be a substance behind the frills. If I am wrong about this album, then apologies to an
yone misled by premature opinion.”

  This was a magnanimous gesture, and also a prescient one given the general opinion among Queen fans today (this author included) that A Day At The Races is arguably Queen’s finest moment ever.

  NEWS OF THE WORLD

  EMI EMA 784, October 1977 [4]

  Elektra 6E-112, November 1977 [3]

  EMI CDP 7 46209 2, December 1986

  Hollywood HR-61037-2, March 1991

  Parlophone CDPCSD 132, 1994

  ‘We Will Rock You’ (2’02), ‘We Are The Champions’ (3’02), ‘Sheer Heart Attack’ (3’27), ‘All Dead, All Dead’ (3’10), ‘Spread Your Wings’ (4’35), ‘Fight From The Inside’ (3’04), ‘Get Down, Make Love’ (3’51), ‘Sleeping On The Sidewalk’ (3’07), ‘Who Needs You’ (3’06), ‘It’s Late’ (6’26), ‘My Melancholy Blues’ (3’26)

  Bonus track on 1991 reissue: ‘We Will Rock You’ (ruined by Rick Rubin remix) (5’01)

  Bonus tracks on 2011 Universal Records deluxe reissue: ‘Feelings, Feelings’ (take 10, July 1977) (1’54), ‘Spread Your Wings’ (BBC version, October 1977) (5’25), ‘My Melancholy Blues’ (BBC version, October 1977) (3’12), ‘Sheer Heart Attack’ (live version, Paris, February 1979) (3’34), ‘We Will Rock You’ (fast live version, Tokyo, November 1982) (2’54)

  Bonus videos, 2011 iTunes-only editions: ‘My Melancholy Blues’ (live version, The Summit, December 1977), ‘Sheer Heart Attack’ (live version, Hammersmith Odeon, December 1979), ‘We Will Rock You’ (Queen Rocks version)

  Musicians: John Deacon (bass guitar, footstomps and handclaps on ‘We Will Rock You’, acoustic guitar on ‘Spread Your Wings’ and ‘Who Needs You’), Brian May (guitars, vocals, footstomps and handclaps on ‘We Will Rock You’, piano on ‘All Dead, All Dead’, lead vocals on ‘All Dead, All Dead’ and ‘Sleeping On The Sidewalk’, maracas on ‘Who Needs You’), Freddie Mercury (vocals, piano, footstomps and handclaps on ‘We Will Rock You’, cowbell on ‘Who Needs You’), Roger Taylor (drums, percussion, vocals, footstomps and handclaps on ‘We Will Rock You’, rhythm and bass guitars on ‘Sheer Heart Attack’ and ‘Fight From The Inside’, lead vocals on ‘Fight From The Inside’)

  Recorded: July–September 1977 at Basing Street Studios, London, and Wessex Studios, Highbury, London

  Producers: Queen, assisted by Mike Stone

  By 1977, with the seemingly overnight onslaught of punk rock, ‘dinosaur’ bands, as they were labelled, were forced to either adapt to the stylistic changes or, if they chose to remain set in their ways, be considered obsolete. Queen fell somewhere in between these two approaches: on the one hand, they weren’t too concerned about their acceptance among punk fans, but on the other, they knew that something had to give. The regal pomp and circumstance that dominated Queen’s first five releases established their sound and legacy, but they didn’t want to be considered a one-trick pony, releasing album after album of decadence and grandeur while simultaneously trying to top ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’.

  So they compromised. After a stately jaunt through America in the early part of 1977, before returning to Europe and, finally, London in the spring, the band took some time off to rethink their future. Roger, almost bursting at the seams in his desire to record some material outside the Queen canon, took the plunge and tried his hand at a solo recording (in the very strictest sense of the word by playing every instrument and singing every vocal himself). He recorded at least four songs at his home studio in the summer of 1977 – ‘Sheer Heart Attack’, which had been written during the sessions for that album in 1974 but remained uncompleted, ‘Fight From The Inside’, ‘Turn On The T.V.’ and a revamped version of Parliament’s ‘I Wanna Testify’ – and booked time to record them properly at Basing Street Studios whenever Queen weren’t working there.

  With Mike Stone assisting on production and engineering duties, the two songs he chose as ideally representative of his unique style were early forerunners of the style the band would adopt on their next album. Stripped back and with more emphasis on rhythm than lush overdubs, ‘I Wanna Testify’, backed with Roger’s original ‘Turn On The T.V.’, was released in August 1977, making barely a blip on the radar. Nevertheless, it was the creative liberation he needed and, with that feeling temporarily assuaged, he was ready to resume his role in Queen.

  The band alternated their studio time between Wessex, which had been first used on Sheer Heart Attack and later on A Day At The Races, and Basing Street, recording their own demos instead of bringing fragments to be fleshed out by the whole band at the studio. This latter approach, which gives the album its unique sound, was also a shortcoming: the band don’t sound as unified as they did on previous albums, and many of the songs come off as glorified demos (especially Roger’s two contributions). Only on ‘It’s Late’ and ‘We Are The Champions’ does the true Queen approach emerge and sound like all four band members were recording together in the same studio.

  Conversely, it’s that same disjointed feeling that gives News Of The World its fresh feeling. The band deliberately allowed themselves only ten weeks to record instead of their usual four months, and even scheduled an American tour for November as a deadline to further tighten the schedule. This gives the album a sense of urgency absent on their previous (or future) albums, and only John’s ‘Spread Your Wings’ and Brian’s ‘It’s Late’ exceed the four-minute mark, making the album one of their shortest since Sheer Heart Attack.

  The band regarded the album highly, and were mostly enthusiastic about the new stylistic shift. Brian explained to Circus in 1978, “It’s a spontaneous album. I think we’ve managed to cut through to the spontaneity lacking in our other albums. I have no apologies to make for any of our previous albums. We’re proud of them and wouldn’t have let them out if we weren’t. But I now feel some may have been over-produced, so we wanted to go with a more spontaneous, rock and roll based album. It was nice to do something that didn’t need such intensity. For example, with ‘Sleeping On The Sidewalk’, we did it in one take because it just seemed right the first time. We like to think of the album as a window on an unguarded moment, not a set-piece. Each cut seems to do that, from the participation songs [‘We Will Rock You’ and ‘We Are The Champions’] to Freddie’s mood pieces. Even his numbers on the album are different, from his heavy ‘Get Down, Make Love’ to ‘My Melancholy Blues’, which is just what it says.”

  Roger agreed with Brian’s observation, saying in a Christmas Eve 1977 BBC Radio One interview, “It’s really a new departure; it’s a more spontaneous album,” while Brian added that “Our separate identities do come to the fore on this album, on which every cut is completely different from the one before it and there’s no concept at all. Apart from each having contributed two tracks to the album, Roger and John have been much more involved in the playing.”

  The first part of Brian’s statement about no one song sounding like its predecessor is quite true: there are considerable stylistic changes apparent throughout the album, and in this respect it may well be Queen’s most adventurous and experimental album to date. In addition to the proto-punk of ‘Sheer Heart Attack’, the band also dabbled in new wave with ‘Fight From The Inside’ and even tackled funk (‘Get Down, Make Love’) and Latin music (‘Who Needs You’), genres that hadn’t previously been explored on any Queen album but which would eventually become commonplace in their work.

  There were the occasional throwbacks to some of the band’s more extravagant works, especially with ‘We Are The Champions’, which revolutionized power ballads nearly a decade before such an approach became acceptable, while, surprisingly, the typical piano-oriented ballads (‘All Dead, All Dead’ and ‘Spread Your Wings’) were generated by Brian and John respectively. In fact, Freddie was eager to expand beyond the traditional rock approach; he had stated in a January 1977 interview with Circus that “I really feel that, on the next album, we’re going to get it orchestrated by an orchestra. I think we’ve really done as much as we can with guitars.” While it’s not qui
te as shocking as Dick Rowe’s assertion that “guitar groups are on the way out,” Freddie may have merely been having fun at the expense of his interviewer. However, apart from ‘We Are The Champions’, his two contributions were as far away from traditional rock music as possible, hinting at his eagerness to expand his ideas beyond the traditional power trio format.

  Freddie continued with the assertion that “We always did it ourselves, and it was rewarding. But now we’ve done it, and it’s time to move on.” When asked if the next logical step was to introduce synthesizers, Freddie initially balked at the idea. “We’ve built up a terrible aversion to them, but you never know. To me, Brian always sounds better than a synthesizer.” Brian confirmed in a 1983 Guitar Player interview that the spacey sounds in the middle of ‘Get Down, Make Love’ were the product of a harmonizer, not a synthesizer in the strictest sense. “That’s a harmonizer thing, which I’ve really used as a noise more than a musical thing. It’s controllable because I had a special little pedal made for it, which means I can change the interval at which the harmonizer comes back, and it’s fed back on itself so it makes all swooping noises. It’s just an exercise in using that together with noises from Freddie; a sort of erotic interlude.” Additionally, creating dismay and criticism, the album was the band’s first not to feature the legend “no synthesizers” on the sleeve, something that had been traditional on the first five albums.

  It’s in the experimentation, though, that Queen are most successful. ‘We Will Rock You’ is a powerful opener and still, after nearly thirty years of exposure, remains one of the band’s most famous songs. The lighter moments, especially John’s ‘Who Needs You’ and Brian’s throwaway, slaphappy blues number ‘Sleeping On The Sidewalk’, are refreshing bursts of breeziness which would have undoubtedly been dropped if the band were trying to create another A Night At The Opera. Roger had strengthened his songwriting, and was showing himself to be an adept and multi-talented instrumentalist: he handled both rhythm guitar and bass on ‘Sheer Heart Attack’ and ‘Fight From The Inside’, and the latter would have been a solo recording were it not for some rudimentary guitar riffs from Brian.