- It took off like a rocket. Suddenly we were
in demand. Suddenly we were looking like we were'nt gonna be
in debt, and, um, incridible.
- It's, it's four writers that write very different songs.
- They were not individual songs done like it was someone's
solo record. It was, it was individual songs as part of the
queen aesthetic.
- I love artist who take big risks. It's just more fun for the rest of us.
- We needed a big turning point. And so we sorta banked
everything on the album, you know, and I don't know
maybe that was one of the reasons we released a rather daring record as a single.
- Sometimes, a band produces an album that
is just so... seminal,
I suppose, that you know that nothing's ever
going to be the same ever again with that band.
- There comes a moment where a band gets so big, yeah,
or arrive in people's consciousness to such an extent, that even people
who aren't into music, know who they are.
I got a, a white label through from EMI of the first album
and hadn't really heard anything about them. Put the needle on
the vinyl, and it was "Keep Yourself Alive", and you know, the
guitar intro... and within 15
seconds i just thought: "Wow!" you know, "Who is this?"
- I heard the "Queen" album and I absolutely loved it, it was like
a beautyfuly cut jewel landing in your lap ready to go. It was
perfection, because unlike most first albums,
it had a... it had a proportion, a size to it.
- It was always part of what we wanted to achieve, that's the vision we had
in our heads, of, of what our sound should be, absolutely broad,
absolutely incredibly deep, and incredibly wide.
- The one word that, that I think in itself sums it all up, is
layered. It was a very layered sound, you know, layered
guitars, ah, layered voices, and lots of them,
big production. - Well, it was '73 there, before us,
in, ah, in England. We thought they were good because I,
like, would come in during their last two songs, which was
"Keep Yourself Alive" and "Liar". And they was, those were good songs, you know,
I didn't see the rest of the set, but Freddie said: "What do you think?
"What do you think?" I said: "You were alright, you're gonna be fine,
"'cause you got songs."
- They were hugely ambitious in a fabulously old fashioned
british kind of old way. I mean, these were not, they were not gonna get
slowed down by record companies, by, you know, by
narcotic intake, by any of that. Whatever the hell was going on, they
they were going for the big one. - When you start up in this business, you have
to be confident. A new band has got to have a real confidence in yourself, but you
have to have a... a certain amount of arrogance, and that ego, and whatever, because
you have to believe in what you do. So, we had that sort of confidence,
in actually knowing that we were going to get through to the public.
- They were definitely a start of something, they were headlining acts.
"Killer Queen" had seen to that. - Queen always had a momentum.
I had seen artists make wonderful albums, that because they didn't
have momentum, the public didn't give them the time necessary.
Queen had momentum. - Immidiatly prior to "Night At The Opera"
we, we were really going through a difficult period. We had
a very successful album, "Sheer Heart Attack", we thought it was, you know,
we thought it was a very good album, and it done very well. We had a major
worldwide hit with "Killer Queen", and we were broke.
And, um, and we wanted to know why.
- When we were planning to put this record out, "A Night At The Opera",
the first track on the record, "Death On Two Legs" was a
pretty obvious statement from Freddie's point of view, as to,
ah, the kind of people he'd been in business with.
- There's a sense of humor to it, but with Freddie there was alot of anger there.
- He was very agrieved at our management, at the time,
who, he felt, didn't respect him, hadn't paid him,
had stolen from him, you know, whatever...
and he wanted to put it down on record.
- Musically it's great, too. The riff is great. Of course I didn't invent the riff, this is Freddie's riff
'cause it was done on piano first. But it's a, it works great on guitar, this...
I think even we were a bit taken aback with the...
with how vicious Freddie wanted it to be. I remember thinking: "Ooh..."
But, it was what Freddie wanted, you know, and the kind of unwritten
law was that the author of the song got his own way.
- Sometimes, we just disagreed, and in the end,
what just happened is the writer is... is the boss, of... 'cause he
can say: "Yeah, look, this is the way I want the song, and it's the
"way I'm gonna have it."
- To cut a very long story short, we... we agreed that we would
go with John Reid as our manager. And John Reid's plan, you know,
'cause we said: "Yeah, how do we get out of this?" His plan was:
"OK, boys, I will deal with the financial situation, you guys
"go back in the studio and make the best album you've ever made."
- I think maybe we were subconsiously influenced by the fact,
by the Beatles albums, I think, really. Um, especially the later ones
like, you know, like "Rubber Soul", "Revolver" and "Abbey Road".
They were, They were very eclectic albums.
- In those days, alot of the effects that we used were
natural effects as opposed to digitals we use today.
- The things that we did on the lead vocals were this,
is that we needed the megaphone effect, you know, the old megaphone,
from the old salad days. - He was singing it in the studio, it was being fed into
the console. The console was then sending it out to
a pair of headphones, which were in a metal can, and then
a microphone was in the metal can, recording the voice coming out of the can.
And that is what went to tape.
- We had background vocals bits as well, where the whole band's saying...
and they should be coming in about now.
We also ran out of tracks, so when we need two guitars,
we also did those on the vocal tracks.
- What they did with, you know, this album, "Night At The Opera", is
just take, sorta, recording techniques to a... to an area that
they'd never gone before. They pushed the technology to it's very limits.
- We had a fabulous engineer in Mike Stone, you know, I've...
I've said this more than once, I'm sure, but Mike Stone is really the
unsung hero of this whole thing. Right the way through, from the first 3 albums
to "A Night At The Opera" to "A Day At The Races" which he,
he really just produced with us, 'cause we had already had gone somewhere else by then.
And the guy was really a phenomenon. I remember it as being
a very good time, very creative time. We were a good team, it was
a great team. You know, between us and Roy and Mike.
Stupendous team in the studio. - It sounded to me like Queen
was... was on this path, and
when they hit "A Night At The Opera" it was,
it was like their wings had spread, they took everything they had learned from,
from touring all over the place, and having recorded before,
they had finally found their voice. And...
and that's what makes that record so magic.
- We love the studio. We always did, and I still do, because it's
an open canvas, and you can do anything you want.
And we were kind of deciples of Hendrix and The Beatles,
particularly the way the used studios as, almost like an instrument.
But obviously we, we had more technology than they had had, so
we pushed things alot further. - Being in a studio with Queen was facinating,
but very long winded, because they were such perfectionists.
One day I spent with them, I don't think they did more than
about 30 seconds of what actually ended up on a record. So
it wasn't perhaps my favorite, not being a musical technician,
my favorite way of seeing them. I liked to see them live.
- I had never really heard a band in it's entirety
quite like that. You know, you heard bands of different cuts for
different people, but not as varied as this, and it probably reflected the fact
that they all did right, and they all did have something to do
with the producing of the record, the production of the record.
- It reminds me alot of the Beatles, that you had this kind of four equal people
and at the same time, they had these influences that extended way beyond
the kind of blues background that was, sorta the usual influence of bands
at that time. - It was slightly different from your avarage
rock song, 'cause it's basically in 6/8 time, which is
basically waltz time. It was sorta... it was very sort of...
It's a great time signature to play in, it rolls,
it has a certain unstoppable rolling quality.
I made up a very rough demo of it, and I remember turning
around to Brian: "So, what do you think of that?" He looked at me, he said:
"You are joking, aren't you? You are joking?" and I said: "No,
"No, Brian, deadly serious. You know, it's about a car,
"and you know, and you know, somebody who's in love with it..."
- He'll tell it's written about someone else, you know, but we know the truth, don't we Rog?
And, I mean, Roger was always into fast things, you know, fast cars, etc. etc...
It's very tuneful, but of course the vocal is the theme,
yeah, the vocal is the song, and that's a very memorable piece of writing there.
- It's just so excessive, you know, the way the vocals are all treated
and things going off backwards, and god knows how much overdubbing
and multi-tracking are... I've always been in love with producers
who don't know when to stop, and I think Roy Thomas Baker was
very very good at knowing how, how to go too far, but just enough too far.
And I think he at this point, is coming into his own just the way the band did,
they were very much in tune with each other at that point.
- The was no one writer, yet there was one
Queen sound. And you could hear all the differences in the song, but you could hear,
with the vocal sounds, and the guitar sounds and the drum sounds, etc.
which is one of the things which is important to me is to make sure that
when people hear a song for the first time, even if they don't know how it is,
on the radio, they could hear instantly it was Queen.
- Normally, I think, any other band that's saying that lyric: "You're my best friend",
then people would throw things at them, they would go... they would burn their records,
you know, live on the radio. But what a beautifull song. Just
the conviction of doing a simple pop song, well crafted...
- All of a sudden, John Deacon emerged from his vows of silence
to, to speak up that he wanted his song out as a single.
- He didn't write that many, but, you know, if you think about it: "Another One Bites The Dust",
"You're My Best Friend", "I Want To Break Free"...
Big, big hits. And "You're My Best Friend" is still one of the most
played tracks in American radio. - "You're My Best Friend" was a significant
song as far as radio is concerened in the United States. I mean, I think that
it was a kind of friendlier, more accesible song, to some of the stuff Queen was doing.
- John was always a dark horse. He always was, you know, he's the guy
who doesn't say very much. Up to a certain point. I mean, he would go nuts
sometimes and say alot, but generally he was the quiet guy,
and he would come in and we'd say: "Have you got anything?", He'd go:
"Oh, I've got this. I don't know", you know, "Don't know if it's any good, but we could
"try this." You know, very self effacing. - I think they encouraged him, the other guys wanted
ah, the more... to have more of a staking, 'cause after all, the songwriting...
you know, there's all those extra royalties, and that's often an issue with rock n' roll bands,
and quite often, a reason why some of them break up. So they wanted to make sure...
I know Freddie, I mean, even as early as Queen too, he'd been encouraging
John to contribute, and I think John was just a little
reticent. He was the last to join, and, and he was certainly
the most shy. - He'd just write in that on area, which he likes,
which is, almost like a motown, sort of... and I love that, 'cause I love to sing on songs like
that. So he's very different, I mean, you can never call his songs heavy.
- It was written on a Fender Rhodes...
John played it. John played his own keyboards. And John,
as far as I know, wrote the song about his
lovely lady wife. Further than that, you would have to as John.
And I don't think he's probably in the mood to answer, at this point.
- And it's a shame that, you know, he, he really feels that he doesn't
want to be part of the music business, ah, these days. I see his point,
in some ways, but, um, you know, he just
sort of doesn't really want to, he doesn't like meeting people alot, and...
and he has opted for the quiet life, although,
he approves of what we do, and has said so.
- The vocal harmonies, you know, on a Queen record, are gonna provided...
with unity, regardless of what the kind of, you know, individual style of
a particular song is. You know, there's something that's, you know, instantly
identifiable about what they do.
- The three voices that we had blended instantly, and sounded very big.
- They interacted quite magically, and we all had
different qualities in our voices, and I had a sort of high
serin quality, Freddie had an incredibly powerfull quality in
most ranges, and Brian had a very nice quality in the lower range,
and so that three made a very good combination, but what we would do is
we would not take a single part each, we would all
together sing every part. - So, as soon as the three of us
sang a line, it already sounded quite big. You double track that, it sounds
very big. And then we would sing the next line, and the next line...
- So, you really were looking after both ends of the
sort of spectrum, there, in fact all ends, and you were covering everything,
so it came out particularly strong, and...
and that was really ofthe Queen sound, I think, the fact that the three of us
sang every part.
- It's the backing vocals there...
- The skill that they could just build those layers and layers and layers of harmony
and, and make the whole thing work rather than you focus on elements of it,
as... and then, you know, forget the rest, that, I think, is what always
was the thing that made them stand out from anybody else.
- Well, there was never any question of writing a single, you did... we just wrote
albums and then... you know, so they, they would really
by consensus it would be: "Ah, that sounds like the first single"
you know, and then... and then maybe there might be some argument.
- Obviously, you have certain... of your own babies, if you wrote the song, and you want them
to be, um, heard in a
wide area. - Usually the writer of that particular, right, song
would be arguing that he should have the single.
- And if you miss that opportunity, it's kind of gone forever, and in my case...
I think we all had things like that, that we felt sad about. In my case there's
things like "Long Away", "'39" off this album,
you know, which... which could have been a single and part of me wishes they had been,
because they had been much more in the public consciousness, um,
you know, songs become hooked into people's lives in a very wonderful way, you know,
you hear a song that reminds you of being on a beach somewhere, in a particular
time, with a particular person, and if... generally if the song
hasn't become a single, it doesn't have that opportunity to, to become part of,
of life.
- It was meant to be sort of, um, science
fiction space folk. - I rememer waking up with the idea,
thinking: "Alot of people do folk songs with acoustic guitars about sailors
that went off on a long trip, and nobody ever did anything about a spaceship.
and spacemen who go off, and the whole story seemed to be
very appealing to me, of the guy going off, um, to search
for new lands, um, in a spaceship, um,
but becuase of the relativistic general relativity
time dialation effect, he's going at speeds near to,
to light speed, so his perception of time is
completely different from the people back home. He comes back after what he's...
he thinks is a year, but to the people back on earth it's been a hundred years.
The middle part is of course the, the journey itself and it goes through
very strange chords, it's a tour de force for Roger, who does this very
high ethereal vocal. It's very much like science fiction
movies where... when we were kids, that's kind of the effect I was looking for.
The only thing to add to that is, perhaps that, um, all songs
have more layers in than, very often, the writer even realises, and I'm
sure there's a lot of, this feeling of what it's like to be on tour
and come back and... and find life very changed when you get back, um,
it was a pretty difficult thing to adjust to, and I think we all,
we all suffered from it. - Well, Brian did work his ass off on this album, actually,
I have to say. - Brian is one of the great rock guitarists, I mean,
you know, there's no argument here. - He's a wonderful guitar player. He's... and
brilliant musician. We make a very good noise together on stage, and it's quite
a magical thing, and it's a big wow.
- I mean, there are certain points about Freddie Mercury that are so obvious, that it's easy to miss them,
you know, eh, and in a sense, the... the kind of theatricality, running through
a veriety of different styles, is what drew him to
you know, ah, you know, music hall, you know, is what drew him
to glam rock, you know, it's what he liked about metal, it's what he liked about
the rock n' roll that he liked, you know, that, there was... I mean, running
through all that was just this element of performance, and inventing a character,
theatricality. - He could take a broad range of emotions
in his psyche, and that did include a little nostalgia
but not nostalgia in the corny, looking back sense,
but, calling some of that emotion and bring it into the
dynamic present. And that's obviously what he did with "Seaside Rendezvous".
- I like to capture a song very quickly, so that it's fresh. And then you can work
on it afterwards. But, I mean, I hate, sort of...
trying to write a song, and if it's not coming, "Oh, come on, let's try this..."
It either comes quickly, and then you have it, you know, like the basic
skeleton, and then I say: "Yes, we have a song, and now..." then we can start putting in all the
clever bits. - One sweaty afternoon I was with Freddie, just
the two of us there, I think, we did alot of those things,
we would ta... we did the tap dancing, was... thimbles on the fingers,
on the metal bit on the top of the desk, and...
and, I think I did a little brass section and Fred was doing the woodwind
with his mouth, you know... it was like
experimentation, but we were sort of laughing at the same time, and...
but, I think it turned out rather well, it was meant to be cod, and...
cod it was.
- You never got a sense that this band was taking itself too seriously,
there was a kind of wit, and a campiness, a...
self irony, ah, that was, that was really
a pleasure. - This is a George Formby, genuine
George Formby ukulele, it has even... there you can see his picture, and this is,
this is the instrument my dad carried with him, all through the war, the second world war...
It's a ukulele banjo, it's not a ukulele or a banjo, it's a ukulele banjo.
And, um, makes this particular sound, which was part of my upbringing.
My dad used to sit and put this on his knee and get a...
This is how I learned the guitar. The chord shapes that my dad taught me, to
play things like that, transfered quite easily to the guitar, and I remember I got,
I got the guitar for my 7th birthday, and started working out the chords for the guitar.
So the idea of "Good Company", obviously comes from here, ah, it's like...
It's been twenty years, you know...
- It also developed to another place, which is the place of the jazz band, and
that's pretty much part of my childhood too, the dixieland jazz band, was
kind of revived when I was a kid, and there was a wonderfull group called
The Temperant Seven, who played a mixture of dixieland and very arranged
pseudo '20s music. And I learned alot of my arrangement from,
from those guys. So when it came to doing the, the solo part for "Good Company",
I wanted it to sound like a jazz band, and of course, I wanted the guitar
to be the jazz band. It was very work intensive, every... every note was done separately
to get the actual proper trumpet sounds, and the trombone sounds, etc.
Very painstaking, but a lot of fun, 'cause it had never been done before.
I don't think I would do itthese days, really, unless the was a very good reason.
Just love this stuff, it was wonderful to be able to take the time to do this stuff
in the studio, which I'd always dreamed of doing, I guess. That's the great
thing about "Night At The Opera", we had the time... that we were given the
opportunity to explore all those avenues, rather than be rushing in and out.
- It's hard to believe that it is guitar, and that somebody had actually created that.
I mean, am I a Queen fan? is that a Queen fan, I don't know... I mean, you know,
even if I wasn't a fan, you'd have to just go: "What is that? How did that happen?
"Who was responsible for that?" - This is roughly what they sound like, without anything else...
And the bells...
- When you hear any other vocalist trying to sing
a Queen song, it's not until you hear them trying,
that you realise what an incredible vocalist Freddie was, what a range he had,
what great expression he had, and how
idiosynchratic some of the songs were, in terms of being written for him,
and his way of expressing lyrics in a song.
- Basically, I... I think if you sort of put them all in one bag,
I think my songs are all under the label: "Emotion",
you know, it's emotion and feeling, so, I mean, I write songs that alot of people
have written before, it's always to do with love and emotion, you know, I'm just a true romantic.
And I think everybody's written songs in that field, I just
write it in my own way, so that they carry a different, sort of...
it's a different texture or whatever. - Some of them were obviously about Mary,
who he was very fond of, um, and was his best friend
I think all his life. - That's fascinating in itself, that she... it really was
ironically, the love of his... not withstanding, whatever, his sexual life,
was that... actually she was the love of his life. That was fabulous,
I was, I mean, I have these wondefull pictures, they're all pretty, and you can see
that Freddie loves her.
- It's some lovely backing harmonies from Freddie on this as well. Freddie had the ability to
sing multi-tracked so accurately that it would actually
phase... one take would phase with another, because he would sing it
so singularly each time. It's beautyfull backing harmonies.
- It's the background vocals.
And they blossom there...
- I just remember him doing it in the studio, um...
He had a wonderfull touch on the piano, Freddie. Really didn't
think he did, you know, he was very depricating about his piano playing, and in
later years, really didn't do any of it. Um, he played less and less
piano on stage, because he wanted to run around and deliver to the audience, which he
did so magnificantly. He didn't have the classical range, but
he could play what came from him, inside him, like nobody else, with incredible
rythem, incredible passion and feeling.
- But I love this song, and pretty much every concert we play, I sing
this song for Freddie. And I find it much more
satisfying than singing one of my own songs. It's because it seems to
bring back so much of Freddie, with me and with the audience.
- We didn't really realise, for years, Brian and myself, I'm really speaking for
him now... and probably john, um, we didn't realise how great he was,
actually. People forget he's actually a great musician, and...
and that sort of pisses me off sometimes, 'cause, I mean, the say: "He's a great showman",
you know, it wasn't just showman, it was, actually he was a brilliant musician, and...
and quite an inspirational one, and um... So, you know, I think there
should be a bit more balance there, I mean, you know, it wasn't just all about
getting people to go: "Hey, hey", you know, it was...
He was a great musician.
- So much has been said about "Bohemian Rhapsody", of course, and it's Freddie's baby,
it always will be, it's Freddie's dream. Of course we all contributed pieces
to it, but really he, he's the mastermind. It is an amazing
conception, in my opinion. - I have to say, it was definitely my
choice for a single, 'cause I love the original melody of the, you know,
"Mama, just killed a man..." that, that was very strong, I love the beginning of it.
But it wasn't, wasn't obvious. In those days, you know, singles would, they had to be
no longer than 3 minutes, and, you know, had to grab you.
- There was some concern on the part of Elektra, I just happened to walk into the
presidential office one day, and he said: "Look what your band sent us."
and it was this single, and he...
he sort of, he said that sort of half jokingly, and he played all
5 minutes and 55 seconds of it and said: "Whadda 'ya think?", I said:
"You got a high class problem, release it." - It's a monster, isn't it? It's one of those...
'cause it's not gonna go away, it's just gonna go where it supposed to go.
- It's a piece of art, let's be honest about it. I don't... it was great rock n' roll,
it's fair enough if it's great rock n' roll, it doesn't have to all be art,
but that is art. - There was no record company invention
going on here, there wasn't any... we weren't smarter than anybody else,
we just had a tiger by the tail, and the only place we were
smart, was we said yes more often than we said no.
- It was on of the most expensive records ever made, and it took 'em
over 3 weeks to cut this one single. But the,
the layers of guitars, and the overdubs of vocals
and then when I got to see the video, and you
realised that Freddie Mercury was so charismatic and
so unique.
- My favorite solo is in... again, what I liked about Queen was...
and, and Brian's playing, is that it is... you try and make a little
statement, you try to have, like, a beginning, a middle and an end, and some kind of dynamic
change in a solo. - I find it easier to, um...
to get into it with other people's songs than my own, I think, and...
because the inspiration comes from a separate place, and perhaps you feel more free.
So with Freddie's stuff, I always could hear the solo long before I played it,
on his tracks, because they just invited something. For this I use these
two pickups out of phase, again, which is a favorite, because it makes it
scream. It really makes the harmonics come out. It'll be different
every time I play it, but basically it, it has that screaming kind of quality to it.
- It is the crossing-the-threshold album, ah, for Queen, I think, from,
from popularity into, sort of, you know, superstardom.
- It took them to a completely different level, both in
terms of their sales, and in terms of the perception of the band,
and in terms of their live shows.
- The oppurtunity to play Hyde Park came up, and they said: "You're gonna have
this new site, which had never been played before, you can play it for free, and
there's no limit to the amount of people you can get there.", which was amazing for us.
- The thought of being able to put that show on,
and be able to get it across to more than a
100,000 people, was really beyond our imagining. It was a major
step in Queen realising what
they could do. And, and of course they went on to do it.
- Freddie could play in front of a 100 people and act like a total star, and here
he had, you know, all of London at his feet, and clearly in his element.
You know, he's... he had the kind of charisma that I think, the world was just
about small enough a stage for him to feel comfortable on.
- I think, what happens when a band hits that stride, it's so true
that the fans can't help but feel it. And that's why it translates
to a record that just resonates. And then it
becomes almost iconic for that band and their fans.
- I think it just started off as a band with a singer, and then
they found all this great stuff hidden away in everybo... in every one of them, you know.
- The size of it, the perfection of it
the willingness to go everywhere, from music hall
to jazz, and to have them wear
those different musical costumes close to their skin
and part of who they were, it was not fake, it was
always genuine, and you can always tell the difference.
- In England and Europe and Australia,
I think it defined us, it defined us as, as
something big, something exciting,
something significant. - It was the... it was our sort of epiphany, it was our
turning point, and I would say, ah... so in that sense
with the single that came from it and, and the album, it was really
probably the most important album ever made.
-- Transcribed and synced by Ronnie Har-Paz --