Queen: The Complete Works (8 page)

Recorded
: August 1973 at Trident Studios, London

Producers
: Queen and Robin Geoffrey Cable (
‘Nevermore’ and ‘Funny How Love Is’
), Queen, Robin Geoffrey Cable, and Roy Thomas Baker (
‘The March Of The Black Queen’
), Queen and Roy Thomas Baker (
all other tracks
)

“Considering the abuse we’ve had lately, I’m surprised that the new LP has done so well. I suppose it’s basically because people like the band.” These words were spoken by Roger Taylor to
Sounds
mere weeks after Queen’s second album was released. Still considered something of a cult band – thanks in no small part to the virtual failure of their debut album and single – Queen had toured Britain relentlessly in the latter part of 1973, playing wherever they could and hoping to gain as much exposure as possible. They were even invited to perform on a few BBC radio specials: their September gig at the Golders Green Hippodrome was broadcast on
In Concert
, and in December they played again on John Peel’s
Sounds Of The Seventies
, their third appearance on that show in twelve months.

All this publicity should have been beneficial to Queen but they were still receiving negative press, lambasting them for being too excessive and self-indulgent. Listening to their first album, it’s difficult to agree with that criticism, but it certainly seems more justified after a run-through of their second release, unimaginatively titled
Queen II
. “To me,
Queen II
was the sort of emotional music we’d always wanted to be able to play,” Brian said, “although we couldn’t play most of it on stage because it was too complicated. We were trying to push studio techniques to a new limit for rock groups – it was fulfilling all our dreams because we didn’t have much opportunity for that on the first album. It went through our minds to call the album
Over the Top
.”

However, it is this album that has remained, along with
A Day At The Races
, a fan favourite to this day. It shows Queen at their finest, producing music that was deliberately not tailored for the hit parade.
Queen II
is a superior collection of complex music awash in guitar
layers, vocal overdubs and ambiguous lyrics. Some have even argued that it’s the band’s own version of a concept album, like The Beatles’
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
of 1967, which every band since had attempted to imitate. Some were successful – Pink Floyd’s
Dark Side Of The Moon
, The Who’s
Tommy
, Genesis’
The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway
and even Yes’ fascinating
Relayer
. But most were just extravagant, overproduced affairs straining towards a theme that was too muddled or so overwritten that the result seemed contrived and pompous. This was not the case with
Queen II
; not a concept album but a collection of songs with a loose theme running throughout. If
A Night At The Opera
was Queen’s
Sgt. Pepper
, then this album was their
Revolver
.

Sessions for the album took place almost as soon as sessions for the debut had wrapped up. In August 1973, the band went back to Trident Studios with Roy Thomas Baker and Mike Stone, and demanded of the Sheffields the necessary studio time to complete this album instead of recording during down-time. The result of that meeting enabled Queen to complete the album within the month; the band had several ideas they wanted to explore, and were able to flesh them out fully with the additional time granted. Interestingly, several songs that had already appeared in concert but not on the debut album were recorded: ‘Father To Son’, ‘Ogre Battle’, ‘White Queen (As It Began)’ and ‘Procession’ had all been premiered as early as 1972, with some of the songs dating back to at least 1969. A notable omission from the sessions was ‘Stone Cold Crazy’, which had been in the set list for years; that song would be revisited for their next album, though in a more accelerated form. Several outtakes from the August sessions indicate that portions of ‘The Prophets Song’ were also rehearsed; that song would finally appear on
A Night At The Opera
over two years later.

Clearly, the band were in a creative period: Brian and Freddie were both writing beautiful and innovative songs, emerging as a new kind of songwriting team. Although they wouldn’t collaborate, per se, until ‘Is This The World We Created...?’ nearly a decade later, they were instinctively adept at synergistic teamwork. It’s obvious that Freddie wrote ‘The March Of The Black Queen’ after hearing ‘White Queen (As It Began)’; Freddie’s new composition then inspired Brian to restructure ‘Father To Son’ as a powerful tour de force, leading Freddie to rethink his own ‘Ogre Battle’. ‘Nevermore’ and ‘Some Day, One Day’ sound like cousins, both articulating a similar theme of abandoned love.

It was because of this kind of creativity, and the distinctly loose yet interdependent lyrical theme running throughout the songs, that they decided to label the album sides ‘Side White’ (Brian’s songs) and ‘Side Black’ (Freddie’s songs). Notice the distinct light and shade in all the songs: Brian’s forceful ‘Father To Son’ blends together several dark passages before light dawns towards the end with a singalong acoustic segment, and segues effortlessly into the more elegant and textural ‘White Queen (As It Began)’. Freddie’s comic-relief number ‘The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke’ diminishes gradually into the mournful ‘Nevermore’, which in turn descends into the sinister ‘The March Of The Black Queen’, making the album a veritable panoply of sounds and sensations.

Roger, too, was adapting to the new songwriting approach. His first composition for Queen, ‘Modern Times Rock ‘n’ Roll’, wasn’t the most promising, and although most listeners regarded his second song, ‘The Loser In The End’, as far worse, it ties in beautifully with ‘Father To Son’, a song which inspired Roger to write his paean to mothers everywhere. Only John didn’t contribute any songs to the album; still regarding himself as “the new boy”, it would take extenuating circumstances (Brian’s hepatitis and ulcer the following year) for him to finally write his first song. Perhaps he just couldn’t relate to the darker themes of the album, and, since he would later be known for writing strictly pop songs, it’s impossible to imagine a lighthearted pop-rock ditty fitting anywhere within this seamless album.

Production duties were split between Roy Thomas Baker and the band, but John Anthony wasn’t back on board. There was animosity between Freddie and Anthony, a clash of egos in a creative environment with neither side willing to compromise; the more amicable Baker was preferred and put in charge of identifying each member’s creative forte and channelling it into something cohesive. Because of the range of musical experimentation in the album, Baker must have been overwhelmed by all the new and unfamiliar sounds, so it’s not surprising that a second producer was invited to assist him. Initially, David Bowie was approached to produce the album (he had accepted this type of invitation for Lou Reed’s
Transformer
in 1972); though flattered, Bowie declined because he was currently busy recording
Pin Ups
before commencing another new and ambitious
project, eventually released as
Diamond Dogs
. So the band approached another familiar face and asked Robin Geoffrey Cable to help with some of the band’s loftier ambitions.

Queen had certainly changed within a year: each band member was becoming more outspoken with his ideas, none more so than Freddie. It must have been a marked contrast to Cable, who had first met the vocalist when he was a timid, reserved person, and was suddenly confronted with a song like ‘The March Of The Black Queen’. Since that song was co-produced by Cable, Baker and the band, he was asked to help with ‘Nevermore’ and ‘Funny How Love Is’, a song that he must have felt more at home with, as it resembled the ‘wall of sound’ technique made famous by Phil Spector in the 1960s. This was the technique used by Cable when recording ‘I Can Hear Music’ and ‘Goin’ Back’ with Freddie, tracks released in mid-1973 under the pseudonym Larry Lurex.

Elsewhere on the album, the band strayed close to overproduction, but considering the times and the songs that were being submitted for recording, arrangements that may have been labelled then as contrived and self-indulgent are now considered classic. The best-produced song is undoubtedly ‘The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke’, inspired by Hendrix with the panning of sounds from side to side; it takes repeated listens to experience all that is going on, and is best investigated using headphones. The drum sound had improved considerably, with Roger achieving a thunderous attack on his own composition, ‘The Loser In The End’. On other songs, the instruments aren’t very clear and can sometimes be difficult to differentiate, but it all adds to the mood and atmosphere of the album. While Queen would sound clearer and more accomplished on subsequent albums, they would never sound better.

“For some strange reason we seemed to get a rather different feel on the album,” Brian observed to BBC’s Radio One in 1983, “because of the way we were forced to record it, and even allowing for the problems we had none of us were really displeased with the result ... Led Zeppelin and The Who are probably in there somewhere because they were among our favourite groups, but what we are trying to do differently from either of those groups was this sort of layered sound. The Who had the open-chord guitar sound, and there’s a bit of that in ‘Father To Son’, but our sound is more based on the overdriven guitar sound, which is used for the main bulk of the song, but I also wanted to build up textures behind the main melody lines.”

The band all individually later admitted that they were like children let loose in the candy store, using the studio as an instrument and getting bogged down by production touches. John told the specialty magazine release
Queen File
in 1974, “
Queen II
, like the other albums, is good because of the time we spent on the production. On
Queen II
we did all the guitar overdubs, the acoustics, bells, lots of piano; in other words, everything! We go to all the mixes, we don’t just leave it to the producer. Even after the mixing we spent two weeks at Trident whilst the album was being cut.” Freddie told
Sounds
in 1976, “I did discipline myself ... Take vocals, because they’re my forte – especially harmonies and those kind of things. On
Queen II
[we went] berserk.” Brian told
Sounds
in 1984, “When
Queen II
came out it didn’t connect with everyone. A lot of people thought we’d forsaken rock music. They said, ‘Why don’t you play things like “Liar” and “Keep Yourself Alive”?’, which were on the first album. All we could say was, ‘Give it another listen, it’s there, but it’s all layered, it’s a new approach.’ Nowadays people say, ‘Why don’t you play like
Queen II
?’ A lot of our close fans think that, and I still like that album a lot. It’s not perfect, it has the imperfections of youth and the excesses of youth, but I think that was our biggest single step ever ... [It] did OK but we felt it had been misunderstood by a lot of people ... We were slated for that album by the critics; the critics unanimously hated it, wrote it off as worse than rubbish.”

The album cover became an instant icon in the glam rock circle, and also launched Queen’s foray into music videos the following year. “It was just one of those flashes of inspiration that happens sometimes,” explained photographer Mick Rock, who had shown Freddie a photograph of Marlene Dietrich. “There was a feeling that [echoing the Dietrich pose] might be pretentious. To Freddie, that word was meaningless – ‘but is it fabulous?’ was all that mattered. Those were the days of androgyny, and Freddie was prepared to push it quite a way.” Added Freddie, “It doesn’t have any special meaning, but we were fascinated with this type of thing, and the wardrobe we used at the time described it perfectly well.”

Freddie, at the six o’clock position, is flanked by John and Roger at either side while Brian, being the tallest, appears above Freddie. With hooded eyes and features white and waxen, the four unsmiling faces stare emotionlessly. Dressed in all black and set against a stark black backdrop, the only other colour comes
from Freddie’s attenuated hands, crossed protectively over his chest. There wasn’t any hidden meaning in the photograph, and it contrasted beautifully with the inner, which is the exact opposite of the front cover: the band are dressed in all white, Freddie hiding all but the top half of his face with a white fur blanket as the others stare at the camera in an almost bemused manner, mirroring their respective positions on the front (only Roger and John are switched). Still, it’s moody and strangely dark, despite the overall use of white and light: both portraits are the visual equivalent of the aural light and shade present in the songs on the album.

The sessions concluded fairly quickly, with eleven complete songs ready plus ‘See What A Fool I’ve Been’, ultimately released as the B-side of ‘Seven Seas Of Rhye’ but not on the album itself. (The non-album B-side was later released on the 1991 remaster, along with two remixes of ‘Ogre Battle’ and ‘Seven Seas Of Rhye’, the latter receiving high praise from Freddie. Twenty years after its initial reissue, Universal Records once again remastered it and released a deluxe edition, with a bonus disc of largely arbitrary selections; all good separately, but as bonuses, they were minimal.) But the band already had another tour scheduled and decided it was too soon to release yet another album. Other circumstances, including minor errors in the mixes and artwork, resulted in further delays; John, quite reasonably, insisted he be credited correctly instead of as Deacon John. The album finally emerged in March 1974, a mere fortnight after the smash success of ‘Seven Seas Of Rhye’. Reviews ranged from the good (
Sounds
: “this album captures them in their finest hour”,
Disc
: “standards are very high”) to the middling (
Melody Maker
: “there’s no depth of sound or feeling”) to the downright bad (
Record Mirror
: “the dregs of glam rock”). Surprisingly,
Rolling Stone
was relatively supportive (at least regarding the first side), gushing that it “is quite an improvement, containing many of the same muddled tendencies, but with the saving grace of timely and well-chosen power chords and some rather pretty tunes”, while describing the second side as “a lyrically muddled fairy-tale world with none of Genesis’ wit or sophistication. They’ve also appropriated the most irritating elements of Yes’ style: histrionic vocals, abrupt and pointless compositional complexity, and a dearth of melody,” ultimately concluding that it “remains a floundering and sadly unoriginal affair.”