Queen
Queen I
★★★★
EMI
WORDS DENOTING regal splendour are clichéd when discussing Queen, but tasked with describing this extensive 2024 “rebuild” of the band’s 1973 debut, one must fall in. It comes in a plush purple box embossed with heraldic-looking gold script. It reminds you that Queen have the bottomless resources – and appetite, still – for exemplary archiving. In terms of re-animating the fledgling band’s unmistakable life force, it’s a royal flush. “Queen I is the debut album we always dreamed of bringing you,” Brian May and Roger Taylor have said, alluding to CD1’s stereo remix/forensic refurbishment of the original release’s compromised sonics.
Gone, you immediately notice, is the papery drum sound that at times made Queen’s exuberant hello feel waterlogged. Now, Taylor’s rapid-fire fills near the top of Great King Rat sound like a one-man Edinburgh Tattoo. Better yet, each little element of Queen I’s flamboyant, sometimes preposterous excess now has its own place in the sonic firmament, youthful, incomparable Freddie Mercury close enough to touch. Rest assured, though, that the integrity of the original recordings remains. There are no new overdubs.
Across six CDs, one vinyl LP and a lavish, 108-page book, this is Queen I viewed from various pertinent angles. CD2, also remixed for 2024, has versions of five of the LP’s songs taken from the famed prequel the band demoed at De Lane Lea Studios in London in January 1972, while CDs 5 and 6 demonstrate how Queen I material translated live, firstly via period sessions for BBC Radio (CD5), then largely via set stand-outs from the band’s celebrated March 1974 show at London’s Rainbow Theatre (CD6).
The latter disc also brings previously unreleased rarities including a cassette-sourced performance of Jesus – or “Big J”, as Mercury calls him – from London’s Imperial College in August, 1970; i.e., prior to John Deacon joining Queen on bass. Elsewhere, a rare performance of early Queen song Hangman recorded in San Diego in March ’76 is infinitely more meat-and-potatoes, its obvious debt to key early influence Free likely explaining why it was never given the studio treatment.
Perhaps CD4’s instrumental backing-track version of Queen I – “suitable for karaoke!” announces its sleeve – seems superfluous, a little gimmicky, but all is forgiven listening to CD3, where outtakes, studio chit-chat, guide vocals and false starts take us behind the veil. “Oh, it’s you Bulsara, you bastard! It’s you who’s flat!” laughs May after aborting a take of Mad The Swine, here restored to the original LP’s tracklisting. It’s just ‘bantz’, though, and the bond between he and Mercury is obvious. “All right Bry-sy!” parries/patronises Freddie seconds later, and off they go again.
Subtitled Queen I Sessions, CD3 is a fascinating glimpse into the groundbreaking complexity of what the band was attempting. We hear Mercury count in the bossa nova sections of Doing All Right, and note that this version leads with acoustic guitar, not piano. Further in, Liar’s primal riffage and operatic, one-word refrain have monolithic power, prompting Mercury to at one point shout, “Get a load of this!” Quite.
The story behind Queen I’s snatched, wee-small-hours recording stint at St Anne’s Court in Soho, London still seems romantic. Picture it: the console at Trident Studios still warm from David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardustsessions, and Queen’s four very different personalities jousting their way through the backwards guitars and daft, ‘books-with-maps’ melodrama of Mercury’s My Fairy King.
Yes, you can hear the influences, but May’s old-fireplace-and-a-sixpence-fired guitar sound and Mercury’s exotic, shapeshifting song structures trod pastures new, while Roger Taylor’s castrato-pitch vocal harmonies brought Carl Orff-like drama to the band’s upper strata. Queen had yet to rein in their virtuosity in the full service of songcraft, but they already sounded like nobody else. They were aiming higher, though, and felt the original version of Queen I was close, but no cigar. Between the lines, the 1973 version’s sleevenotes said as much: “[This] represents at least something of what Queen’s music has been the last three years.” The album was finished and mixed by November ’72, but a lengthy shop-around for deals meant it wasn’t released until July ’73. May recalled “feeling sick” at the loss of momentum, especially while attending a landmark 1972 gig by a certain glam icon: “Bowie had made his mark, and we were still struggling to put a record out.”
Now, more than a half-century on, May and Taylor can put all that angst and frustration behind them, presumably with the full blessing of reclusive former bandmate, John Deacon. Nothing here is done by halves, and the care and attention lavished upon this box set is obvious. “It’s been a delight to bring it up to where we wanted it to be,” notes Roger Taylor, but revisiting Queen I has also left him “amazed how bloody religious some of the lyrics are.”
This is not, it’s true, the cross-dressing, pointy-breasted Freddie Mercury of the I Want To Break Free video, far less the incorrigible thrill-seeker of Don’t Stop Me Now. Instead, the Zanzibar-born singer raised in the Iranian Parsi Zoroastrian faith brought rock processional Jesus – quite conceivably influenced by Andrew Lloyd Webber’s recently-premiered Jesus Christ Superstar – and Liar’s Catholic confession-box rifferama (“Father, I have sinned”). One verse of Jesus even finds Mercury watching Christ heal a leper with the touch of his hand. It was a tad unusual, certainly, but it was all grist to the Queen singer’s mill. Even more miraculous Freddie songs lay ahead.
Queen I is out 25 October on EMI.
ORDER: Amazon | Rough Trade
Tracklisting:
CD1: Queen I - 2024 Mix
Keep Yourself Alive
Doing All Right
Great King Rat
Mad The Swine
My Fairy King
Liar
The Night Comes Down
Modern Times Rock 'n' Roll
Son And Daughter
Jesus
Seven Seas Of Rhye...
CD2: De Lane Lea Demos - 2024 Mix
Keep Yourself Alive
The Night Comes Down
Great King Rat
Jesus
Liar
CD3: Queen I Sessions
Keep Yourself Alive (Trident Take 13 - Unused Master)
Doing All Right (Trident Take 1 - with Guide Vocal)
Great King Rat (De Lane Lea Take 1 - with Guide Vocal)
Mad The Swine (Trident Take 3 - with Guide Vocal)
My Fairy King (Trident Backing Track In Development)
Liar (Trident Take 1 – Unused Master)
The Night Comes Down (De Lane Lea Takes 1 & 2 - with Guide Vocal)
Modern Times Rock 'n' Roll (Trident Takes 8 & 9)
Son And Daughter (Trident Takes 1 & 2 - with Guide Vocal)
Jesus (De Lane Lea Take 2 - with Guide Vocal)
Seven Seas Of Rhye… (Trident Take 3)
See What A Fool I've Been (De Lane Lea Test Session)
CD4: Queen I Backing Tracks
Keep Yourself Alive
Doing All Right
Great King Rat
Mad The Swine
My Fairy King
Liar
The Night Comes Down
Modern Times Rock 'n' Roll
Son And Daughter
Jesus
Seven Seas Of Rhye…
CD5: Queen I At The BBC
My Fairy King (BBC Session 1, February 1973)
Keep Yourself Alive (BBC Session 1, February 1973)
Doing All Right (BBC Session 1, February 1973)
Liar (BBC Session 1, February 1973)
Keep Yourself Alive (BBC Session 2, July 1973)
Liar (BBC Session 2, July 1973)
Son And Daughter (BBC Session 2, July 1973)
Modern Times Rock 'n' Roll (BBC Session 3, December 1973)
Great King Rat (BBC Session 3, December 1973
Son And Daughter (BBC Session 3, December 1973
Modern Times Rock 'n' Roll (BBC Session 4, April 1974)
CD6: Queen I Live
Son And Daughter (Live at the Rainbow - March 1974)
Guitar Solo (Live at the Rainbow - March 1974)
Son And Daughter (Reprise) (Live at the Rainbow - March 1974)
Great King Rat (Live at the Rainbow - March 1974)
Keep Yourself Alive (Live at the Rainbow - March 1974)
Drum Solo (Live at the Rainbow - March 1974)
Keep Yourself Alive (Reprise) (Live at the Rainbow - March 1974)
Modern Times Rock 'n' Roll (Live at the Rainbow - March 1974)
Liar (Live at the Rainbow - March 1974)
Hangman (Live in San Diego - March 1976)
Doing All Right (Live in San Diego - March 1976)
Jesus (Live at Imperial College - August 1970)
I’m A Man (Live at Imperial College - August 1970)
LP: Queen I - 2024 Mix
Side One
Keep Yourself Alive
Doing All Right
Great King Rat
Mad The Swine
My Fairy King
Side Two
Liar
The Night Comes Down
Modern Times Rock 'n' Roll
Son And Daughter
Jesus
Seven Seas Of Rhye…
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Photo: Douglas Puddifoot/Queen Productions Ltd