A career-defining classic: Queen – A Night at the Opera

You may prefer the heaviness of the first three albums or the commercialism of the mid-eighties but with their fourth album, Queen burst into the mainstream and created (in my opinion) their masterpiece.

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1. Death on Two Legs (Dedicated To…) (Mercury)
2. Lazing on a Sunday Afternoon (Mercury)
3. I’m In Love With My Car (Taylor)
4. You’re My Best Friend (Deacon)
5. ’39 (May)
6. Sweet Lady (May)
7. Seaside Rendezvous (Mercury)
8. The Prophet’s Song (May)
9. Love of My Life (Mercury)
10. Good Company (May)
11. Bohemian Rhapsody (Mercury)
12. God Save the Queen (Trad arr May)

FREDDIE MERCURY: lead vocals, piano
BRIAN MAY: guitars, stringed instruments, vocals, lead vocals on 5 and 10
ROGER TAYLOR: drums, percussion, vocals, lead vocal on 3
JOHN DEACON: bass, electric piano on 4

Produced by Queen and Roy Thomas Baker

Queen had arrived. Two hit albums and three hit singles meant they were a fixture on the scene but it took a multi-genre epic and its equally eclectic parent album to make them truly major and guarantee that they’d be staying in the public consciousness for longer than the likes of Bad Company or Mott the Hoople.

The release of Bohemian Rhapsody as a single on October 31st was one the band had had to fight for – running at just under six minutes and alternating between opera and hard rock with three or four different sections it wasn’t the kind of thing a record company chose as a single and only when Capital Radio’s Kenny Everett played short snippets did demand arise to hear the whole thing and for a single release. Four weeks later, it peaked at number one just as the album made its chart debut. But we will analyse the song and its success further down.

The album too showed a stylistic branching out. Queen had never been just any old band in terms of songwriting and had already proved themselves just as capable of writing two-minute vignettes as side-long epics but now the eclecticism that had only come out in brief gasps on songs like Bring Back That Leroy Brown was reigning supreme. Freddie Mercury’s songwriting was becoming so naturalised to English whimsy that you could barely guess that for the first 17 years of his life he had divided his time between Africa and India as Farokh Bulsara (he adopted the name Freddie at his Anglophone boarding school in India). Lazing on a Sunday Afternoon summarised a week in the life of a Victorian socialite while Seaside Rendezvous saw Mercury and Roger Taylor playing rather more than just “tiddly-om-pom-pom” on scat brass, though the opener Death on Two Legs proved he could still tear into his former manager in true rock n roll style and the piano-driven Love Of My Life, though tender, sounds like it’s being sung by a man not taking himself too seriously, a recurring hallmark of Mercury’s vocal work.

Brian May too was truly multi-faceted here providing straight-down-the-line hard rock in Sweet Lady but getting totally poetic too (“You call me sweet like I’m some kind of cheese”) and keeping to the band’s prog-metal roots in the epic Prophet’s Song. I do however find his self-sung acoustic contributions here to be somewhat ill-advised – ’39 is pretentious sci-fi under a pseudo-WW2 title (though it became a live favourite) and the ukulele-led Good Company has a somewhat throwaway feel to it.

But even Roger Taylor and John Deacon shine brighter than usual here – you wonder what producer Roy Thomas Baker was putting in their tea. Taylor’s I’m In Love With My Car took his obsession with fifties paraphernalia to a whole new level as he hollered his hymn to hubcaps and carburettors which became his live anthem and best known song for some years (the first Taylor track to make a Queen A-side was Radio Ga-Ga in 1984).

But it was bassist John Deacon who came up with the biggest surprise. You’re My Best Friend was only the second song he had contributed to a Queen album but this simple electric piano-driven tribute to his newlywed bride (forty years later they’re still together and have six children) is just that. With Deacon you often got the impression he’d really rather be off watching his kids compete in the sack race but his writing here is so unpretentious that it provides the perfect contrast to Mercury’s vocal. The fact that it was chosen as the follow-up single to Bohemian Rhapsody and followed it into the top ten speaks volumes.

Bohemian Rhapsody itself needs no introduction. Opening with a three-part harmony by Mercury, May and Taylor it laces neatly into a  two-verse piano ballad before a frenetic guitar solo showers over the sound, giving way to disconnected but highly enjoyable bits of faux-opera (perhaps this gave the album its title) then a rock anthem with more guitar than vocal finally leading back into a reprise of the piano ballad melody and the sentiment that “Nothing really matters” before a final short piano and vocal gives way to the clash of a gong.

On the album, the perfect way to follow this was with May’s guitar arrangement of the UK national anthem which was played over the speaker systems at the end of Queen concerts and which May had the privilege of playing on the roof of Buckingham Palace in 2002 at Elizabeth II’s Golden Jubilee rock concert.

1975 left many fine albums that have stood the test of time:

• The Eagles’ One of These Nights where country and rock had never been so well wed.
• Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks where the collapse of his marriage appeared to have given his creativity a long-overdue second wind.
• Fleetwood Mac‘s self-titled first effort with Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks which brought them back to success and still sounds fresh long after you’ve played Rumours to death.
• Little Feat’s The Last Record Album which proved that although Lowell George seemed to be losing inspiration as a writer, he could still produce a fine album that brought out the best in the eclectic six-piece.
• Thin Lizzy’s Fighting where the twin guitar sound of Brian Robertson and Scott Gorham gelled perfectly with Phil Lynott’s folk sensibilities.

But A Night at the Opera still tops them all for sheer eclecticism and colour.

SINGLE STATS: Bohemian Rhapsody pushed Billy Connolly’s parody of Tammy Wynette’s D.I.V.O.R.C.E. off the top spot on November 29th. It remained there for nine weeks tying with Paul Anka’s Diana for the most consecutive weeks at No 1. Ultimately the song with the line “Mama Mia let me go” was toppled by ABBA’s Mamma Mia with its line “Why why did I ever let you go”. Just one of life’s little ironies.

ADDITIONAL STAT: Only two other singles tied with the nine-week record before Bryan Adams broke them all with his 16-week run in 1991. They were Wings’ Mull of Kintyre and John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John’s You’re The One That I Want.

ALBUM STATS: The album topped the UK chart for the last two weeks of 1975 supplanting Perry Como’s 40 Greatest Hits. Perry briefly got his own back the following week only for A Night at the Opera to topple him once again for another two weeks only to be supplanted for good by The Best Of Roy Orbison.

No 2s: Queen – Sheer Heart Attack

I should have done this one last year really, given my pattern of doing albums that have reached anniversaries that are multiples of five and/or ten. Anyway, here’s a look at Queen’s third album in little more than a year, which peaked at No 2 as did its trailer single.

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1. Brighton Rock (May)
2. Killer Queen (Mercury)
3. Tenement Funster (Taylor)   COMPOSER: lead vocals
4. Flick of the Wrist (Mercury)
5. Lily of the Valley (Mercury)
6. Now I’m Here (May)
7. In the Lap of the Gods (Mercury)   RT: screams
8. Stone Cold Crazy (Queen)
9. Dear Friends (May)   COMPOSER: piano
10. Misfire (Deacon)   COMPOSER: guitars
11. Bring Back That Leroy Brown (Mercury)   BM: banjo ukulele; JD: double bass
12. She Makes Me… (Stormtropper in Stilettos) (May)   COMPOSER: lead vocals
13. In the Lap of the Gods (Mercury)   RT: screams

FREDDIE MERCURY: lead vocals, piano
BRIAN MAY: lead guitar, backing vocals
ROGER TAYLOR: drums, percussion, backing vocals
JOHN DEACON: bass guitar

Produced by Roy Thomas Baker and Queen

1974 was the year when Queen broke through. The major successes of Bohemian Rhapsody and what would lie beyond it were still in the future but their second single Seven Seas of Rhye and its parent album Queen II had earned respectable chart positions and their flop debut from the previous year also made the first of many minor appearances in the UK albums chart on the back of them. The only way forward was to follow up and quickly. A mere eight months to the day of Queen II’s release, Sheer Heart Attack was out in the stores.

Where the first album had essentially been a collection of songs Freddie Mercury and Brian May had accumulated over the years and Queen II had been two side-long concept suites, Sheer Heart Attack was still very much of a piece but this time consisting largely of shorter songs. This may show some influence from the Beatles’ Abbey Road, released a mere half-decade before, but where that album at least had most of the long songs on side one and the short vignettes dominating the flip side, this album, in my opinion, gets into the shorter numbers too soon. Brighton Rock is an awesome opener, its seaside sounds effectively picking up where Queen II had left off with Seven Seas of Rhye but giving way to a far less innocent tale of a dirty weekend, the Rock of the title referring purely to the song’s genre. As much as anything else, it’s a showcase for May’s guitar pyrotechnics on his self-made Red Special, his performance of the solo on Queen’s live BBC performance that year is truly spectacular. The hit, Killer Queen brings the whole thing back onto dry land and quieter territory  – driven by fingerclicks and Mercury’s piano, a delicious cocktail of Marie Antoinette, dynamite, the Cold War and Geisha girls with an equally delicious solo from Brian May, probably his first truly great moment. This track remains great for me long after I’ve heard Bohemian Rhapsody on one too many “best of all time” shows.

A medley of three tracks follows. Of course, Roger Taylor had to get his bit in and as with his two previous contributions, the themes of Tenement Funster are straight out of the 1950s rock ‘n’ roll culture but the echoey acoustic guitar intro is positively gothic but the trouble with the song, as with many on the album is that, as brilliant as it is, it’s just over too soon. You can’t blame the Beatles for their last recording together consisting largely of unfinished work – they strung it together with such style. But Queen were green and firing on all cylinders and both Tenement Funster and the gorgeous Lily of the Valley are far too short and could have been developed further. The latter shows Mercury probably had a whole wealth of songs about Rhye and its Seven Seas in mind, maybe a concept album would have been forthcoming. In between these tracks came Flick of the Wrist – billed as a double A-side with Killer Queen, it gained considerably less airplay – sadly the single edit which features the final “Baby you’ve been had” line is not easily available with the deletion of the Queen singles box sets and its lack of availability on the recent remaster of Sheer Heart Attack.

The side closes with the album’s second single, Brian May’s Now I’m Here, a rocker detailing Queen’s recent experience of touring America as opening act for Mott the Hoople (their keyboard player Morgan Fisher would play on the song at the legendary Milton Keynes Bowl concert in 1982). “Now I’m here/Now I’m there”, never in one city more than a day, May feels he is a mere newborn babe in the business but Mott have taken his hand – still can’t figure out why he and Peaches were in the dungeon though…

You could be forgiven for thinking that In the Lap of the Gods (Revisited) was simply a reprise of In the Lap of the Gods – they are in fact two different songs and would have been better suffixed with Part 1/Part 2. The first is a largely a capella track opening another long medley. It’s probably a measure of how quickly they’re over that I’m finding it easier to recount the trivia than anything else. Stone Cold Crazy was the first track to be credited to all four members while Misfire marked John Deacon’s first contribution, notable for his playing of practically every guitar on the track and violence as metaphor for heartache prefiguring the way Deacon would do so more famously on Another One Bites the Dust. Bring Back That Leroy Brown is fun, not least for May’s ukulele break though one wonders how many British kids already knew about Bad Bad Leroy Brown – the then-recently deceased Jim Croce had had no UK hits so it shows Mercury must have had some seriously underground taste or perhaps been glued to Live at the BBC when that record was released the previous year. The breakneck pace is punctuated only with May’s tender piano ballad Dear Friends.

Then it’s back to the standard stuff for the last two numbers – the May-led She Makes Me and In the Lap of The Gods… Revisited whose la-la-las were also a feature of Queen’s final tour with Mercury in 1986 which otherwise majored mostly on hit singles.

A great album but let down somewhat by the brevity of most of the songs. Still, Bohemian Rhapsody was just around the corner.

SINGLE STATS: Killer Queen peaked at No 2, held off the top by David Essex’s Gonna Make You a Star.

ALBUM STATS: The album also peaked at No 2 – this time the culprit was Freddie’s mate Elton John with his Greatest Hits album.

The Red, the Blue and the Queen: A year on top in 1989

Three albums that topped the UK chart in 1989 – the third from Simply Red, the second from Deacon Blue and, after a long gap, the twelfth from Queen (not counting the Flash Gordon soundtrack).

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Simply Red
A New Flame

For their third album, Simply Red returned to Stewart Levine who had produced their debut Picture Book. They also added Ian Kirkham on saxophone, giving the album a brassier sound than they’d had with just Tim Kellett on trumpet, and replaced original guitarist Sylvan Richardson with Brazilian Heitor TP.

The resulting album bore a smoother sound than the first two but this worked well on You’ve Got It and Love Lays Its Tune, the former a leftover from frontman Mick Hucknall’s brief collaboration with Lamont Dozier as was the brass-driven political number Turn It Up. Politics featured elsewhere too on anti-Maggie rant She’ll Have To Go – Hucknall had clearly been influenced by the early 70s output of Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder when those men were discovering that soul music didn’t have to be about love and romance.

Indeed the album comes over largely as a tribute to Hucknall’s influences –  closer Enough is written with Crusaders’ keyboard man Joe Sample while the two covers here, of Barry White album track It’s Only Love and Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes’ classic If You Don’t Know Me By Now, became the biggest hits – though the great title track wasn’t far behind.

A listenable piece of work but the best was yet to come on 1991’s Stars.

Deacon Blue
When the World Knows Your Name

After creating a cult favourite in their debut album Raintown, Ricky Ross, his fiancée Lorraine McIntosh and their four mates struck it big in the autumn of 1988 as Real Gone Kid, the trailer single for the second album sailed to No 8 with its infectious piano and backing vocals.

An unusually long gap of around six months – interrupted only by the release of follow-up single Wages Day – followed before the arrival of the album, which entered the UK chart at No 1.

The subject matter is brighter and happier than on Raintown, moving away from laments of unemployment in Glasgow to blowing wages on Friday night, Scottish blues singers, the human heart and even, in Real Gone Kid, a tribute to Maria McKee whose band, Lone Justice, Deacon Blue had opened for prior to the release of Raintown.

Right from Douglas Vipond’s opening drum break on Queen of the New Year you know you’re in for something special. Queen, along with most of the album’s heavier tracks is co-written with keyboard man James Prime. This works best on the rocking, anthemic The World is Lit By Lightning – why the heck wasn’t it brought out as a single.

Ricky Ross’s lyrics are more poetic here and less pretentious than on Raintown – his melodies complement these perfectly from the bleak Love & Regret (livened up by a piercing slide guitar solo from the late Graeme Kelling) to the romance of Circus Lights, Silhouettes (with a lovely solo line for McIntosh) and Your Constant Heart.

Bassman Ewen Vernal (with Capercaillie since 1997) gets a credit on closing track Orphans, written after Ross saw a man on a train become fascinated when he realised some children on board were from an orphanage – a poignant ending to an excellent album.

Queen
The Miracle

Since A Kind of Magic (1986) and its triumphant tour’s conclusion at Knebworth, Queen had gone strangely quiet. Drummer Roger Taylor made an album with side project The Cross, guitarist Brian May produced records for spoof rockers Bad News and his new paramour, similarly follicled Eastenders actress Anita Dobson (the tabloid reaction is chronicled here on Scandal) while Freddie Mercury pursued his passion for opera, collaborating with Spanish diva Montserrat Caballe on the classic Barcelona.

They broke their silence when I Want It All burst onto the airwaves in May 1989 trailering the album a few weeks later.

For the first time, all composition credits went to the whole group (symbolised by the somewhat alarming gestalt band image adorning the cover) adding to the fun of guessing who mainly wrote what. I Want It All was unmistakably May’s while it didn’t take much guesswork to attribute the Beatlesque title track to Mercury. Roger Taylor tried to do a Michael Jackson on The Invisible Man while bassist John Deacon mostly seemed content to dwell in Mercury’s shadow – if the split credits on Wikipedia are anything to go by – much as he did on the previous album with Friends Will Be Friends. Their Rain Must Fall is the stuff club mixes are made of though My Baby Does Me is something of a filler.

The songs that bookend the main album (the original CD featured two bonus tracks) are the ones that signal the future here, ironically by being nostalgic. The first two tracks, Party and Khashoggi’s Ship come pretty much as one piece remembering wild nights out with millionaires while Was It All Worth It rounds off the set with a valedictory feeling akin to My Way – Mercury, although he had not made it public, had by now already been diagnosed with AIDS. This also explained why there was no tour to promote The Miracle – or its follow-up Innuendo, by which time Mercury had only months to live anyhow.

Some great tracks but not one of their best in my book. The most worthwhile surfaced on the compilation Greatest Hits II.

FACT: Only three songs had been credited as written by the whole band before. They were, in reverse order, the 1985 hit One Vision, Under Pressure their chart-topping collaboration with David Bowie  and Stone Cold Crazy from the 1974 album Sheer Heart Attack.

Queen – Jazz

Released November 10th 1978
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1. Mustapha (Freddie Mercury)
2. Fat Bottomed Girls (Brian May)
3. Jealousy (Freddie Mercury)
4. Bicycle Race (Freddie Mercury)
5. If You Can’t Beat Them (John Deacon)
6. Let Me Entertain You (Freddie Mercury)
7. Dead On Time (Brian May)
8. In Only Seven Days (John Deacon)
9. Dreamers Ball (Brian May)
10. Fun It* (Roger Taylor)
11. Leaving Home Ain’t Easy* (Brian May)
12. Don’t Stop Me Now (Freddie Mercury)
13. More of That Jazz (Roger Taylor)

*Lead vocals are by song’s composer as opposed to Freddie Mercury

Produced by Queen and Roy Thomas Baker

FREDDIE MERCURY: lead vocals, piano
BRIAN MAY: lead guitar, vocals
ROGER TAYLOR: drums, vocals and pretty much everything on his own songs
JOHN DEACON: bass, guitars on In Only Seven Days

For their seventh album Queen reunited with Roy Thomas Baker who had produced their first four. Why they didn’t carry on together after the dizzy heights of A Night at the Opera (1975) and the nine-week #1 reign of Bohemian Rhapsody is anybody’s guess but the hits and anthems had kept on coming in the interim.

They don’t stop here either – appropriately one of them is Freddie Mercury’s wild man anthem Don’t Stop Me Now, later taken to number one by McFly. The trailer single was the double A-side of Bicycle Race (Mercury) and Fat Bottomed Girls (May) which cleverly referenced one another in their lyrics and still make great listening today.

As with the previous album (News of the World, 1977), John Deacon and Roger Taylor’s songwriting contributions number at two each. Deacon churns out a filler on If You Can’t Beat ‘Em but comes up trumps with the holiday romance In Only Seven Days. Taylor on the other hand seems content mostly to confine himself to light disco numbers that seem to be over as soon as they’ve begun. Fun It is typical of his “Let’s all be teenagers having a party” themed songs. Closing track More of That Jazz (the only Queen album closer to not credit either Mercury or May as writers) manages a vaguely political lyric but the song is mostly notable for its samples of other tracks on the album as the set draws to a close.

Brian May contributes his usual 40% or so of songs most of them in the second half. The best of them is Dreamer’s Ball, his musical tribute to the recently departed Elvis Presley. “The things you have to do for money” he famously joked after playing the song on the Live Killers album the following year. Otherwise, Dead On Time is an all out rocker but Leaving Home Ain’t Easy, which May sings lead on, should probably have been kept for a b-side.

Freddie Mercury of course is magnificent throughout. He kicks off the album with the kind of vocal cry that might have indicated a call to prayer in his parents’ native India. He’d alluded to Islam with the cries of Bismillah (meaning “in the name of Allah”) in Bohemian Rhapsody but really takes them to town here. Jealousy is a Mercury piano ballad par excellence easily on a par with You Take My Breath Away and The Millionaire Waltz (both A Day at the Races, 1978) while Let Me Entertain You does exactly what it says on the tin. It’s a pity that Queen’s later attempts to woo a more commercial sound elbowed songs like these aside in their live sets. The following year’s Live Killers is recommended companion listening – it truly marks the end of an era for Queen before The Game (1980) finally laid to rest their perennial boast of “no synthesisers” and wooed first disco then all out stadium rock in the 1980s.

Not one of their best but by no means unlistenable.