THE HISTORY OF ROCK- 1976 (PART 2)
Of all four albums, Queen II remains firmly my favourite. A work that brimmed over with inventiveness, it was Queen at their most consistent and certainly at their most mature, musically. The songs were outstanding, complemented brilliantly on record by their instrumental skill. Brian May’s role as guitarist on Queen II was not as guitar hero, but of one who worked totally with the group to give a strong, unique sound. And I don’t think that Freddie Mercury has out-matched his Queen II performance on any other record.
The album had most of what is good about Queen. The songs reflected versatility in that department. From May came the classic in the moving “Some Day One Day ”, and, of course, Mercury penned the first hit single, “Seven Seas Of Rhye”, while the two contributed the tracks that were to form the loose concept of the album, “White Queen (As It Began)” (May) and “The March Of The Black Queen" (Mercury), the battle between good and evil. Mercury also gave us the ravaging “Ogre Battle”, with its savage battle sequence.
To me, Queen II was an album which gave the band a direction, and to dabble adventurously with rock at such an early stage in their career was a move that displayed unusual confidence in their own ability. Strangely enough, the subsequent albums, Sheer Heart Attack and A Night At The Opera, have not portrayed the unity evident on Queen II.
May: “I must admit it’s my favourite. It was the first time we’ve been able to-having got all those things out of our system on the first album- construct an album from a white sheet of paper. Everything that went on that album, we’d decided was right for the album out of a lot of songs we had around at the time. We really did try and shape it into a coherent whole, both musically and thematically.
“It really was, I think, the most considered album, because that album had been dreamed of right back before we made the first album. We knew we were getting all the stuff out of our systems so that we could concentrate on making an album and doing all these orchestral things that we’d always wanted to do with guitars and voices; doing the more fairly emotional songs and structured songs, which we couldn’t even think of doing on stage but which we could do on album. All that was safe for the second album.
“The songs have a lot of meaning for us, and for our audience. That album crystallised what Queen was, I think, because, at that time, all the equipment we had to offer was on display in a way, the songwriting and the means of treating an album separate from a stage show. I think that set our direction more than anything else.
“Queen II was a point where all the adventurous ideas came out. There are seeds in Queen II of almost everything we’ve done since, but it was so compressed that all of it didn’t come out unless you’d listened very closely.”
If Queen II offered adventure, excitement and a definitive Queen sound, then Sheer Heart Attack is, in retrospect, the calm after the storm, an album which presented nothing startlingly new from the band, save a bunch of excellent, slickly produced songs. Again, Freddie Mercury and Brian May dominated the songwriting, but the contributions of Roger Taylor (“Tenement Funster” -Taylor averages one rocker per album) and, for the first time, John Deacon (the soothing and poppy “Misfire”) widened the writing scope a little.
Mercury’s songs veered from the smartness of “Killer Queen” and “Flick Of The Wrist” to the poignancy of slower numbers like “Lily Of The Valley” and “In The Lap Of The Gods”. May’s contributions to the album, however, were more defined, for apart from one track, “Dear Friends”, his songs were mainly straight ahead rockers, like “Brighton Rock”, “Now I’m Here” and the slightly lesser-paced “She Makes Me (Stormtrooper In Stilettos) ”.
Sheer Heart Attack has been the only album on which May has stuck so closely to the hard rockers. He usually shows other sides of his character by writing well-structured, often complicated pieces.
May: “I do feel an affinity for the hard-rock bands who are not ashamed to do hard rock all night and do it incredibly well, bands like Status Quo. I think that if I wasn’t doing what I’m doing now, that’s…[ ]
…[ ] what I’d be doing, and I’d gain a lot of satisfaction out of it. It’s one of the hardest things in the world to be a really good rock band. To write really good rock songs is much harder than writing little things that all fit together well, so I suppose that’s what is in my mind when I do those.
“I never like to see us get too far away from rock. I hope we’re never too sophisticated, if that’s the word, and that we’ll always be able to just get out there and do some rock’n’roll. I think that would be a loss, really, because it is not to be sneered at in any way, and to do that kind of thing is, as I say, as demanding as doing any of the complex things we do.”
So Sheer Heart Attack was the straightest rock album Queen have yet recorded, strong but safe. Although it failed to present an experimental band, which the second album did, and although it worked within a much tighter framework, it was the album which virtually broke Queen as a major band worldwide.
May: “I regard Sheer Heart Attack as the most polished album, the most finished product, in the sense that we were playing better and the songs are all quite separate and treated in their own ways. It was done more for contrast than for continuity.
The songs contrast but, at the same time, we weren’t going out on any great limbs. Everything was a logical development from Queen II, although people didn’t realise it at the time, but I think they do now.”
May’s right. Sheer Heart Attack was a neatly packaged, concise rock work, unlike last year’s release, A Night At The Opera, which displayed the spirit of adventure that marked Queen II.
Queen were well established when the time came to record their fourth album and they decided that they’d spend whatever period was necessary on finishing the new album. They obviously went into the studios determined that the end product would portray a band much more diverse musically than any previous album, which it did.
There were typical Queen rockers in “Death On Two Legs” and “Sweet Lady” and typical Queen symphonies in the brilliant “Prophet’s Song” and “Bohemian Rhapsody”. Songs like those are expected from Queen. Not expected were the vaudevillian “Lazing On A Sunday Afternoon”, folky "39”, jazzy “Good Company” and middle-of-the-road love song, “Love Of My Life”. It was Queen putting themselves out on a limb again, saying, “Look, we’re not just a rock band, we’re something deeper than that. Here’s the proof.”
Pretentious though it might seem to say it, A Night At The Opera pulled them away from comparisons with heavy-metal giants Led Zeppelin, and pushed them nearer to The Beatles. By becoming more diverse and writing a wider range of material, Queen had made themselves more accessible to a wider public.
A Night At The Opera, in my opinion, still had a few loose ends that weren’t completely tied up, but the next album will probably see the full fruition of the ideas. For all intents and purposes, the album was to Queen what Sgt Pepper was to The Beatles. It’s opened so many unexplored areas that have to be followed - at the risk of losing original fans.
May: "Night At The Opera is really the conundrum, because I don’t really think of it as a very commercial album. But it was the one which broke all the records. It’s not nearly as easy-listening an album as Sheer Heart Attack. There’s a lot of very uncomfortable things about it.
“We were deciding to branch out again. It was a conscious decision. Thinking that Sheer Heart Attack had been successful but safe, if you know what I mean, with A Night At The Opera we wanted to be adventurous again, but at the same time, use the expertise which we’d learned in doing Sheer Heart Attack, and in doing all the millions of gigs in between. I’m pleased with it on the whole. It’s got some very accessible things and also some very inaccessible things.”
Queen’s fascination for, and addiction to, recording studios, however, has taken its toll on the stage act. When they had finished recording A Night At The Opera, the band had two days to rehearse a stage act that would be taken around the world. The result has been that the stage act, good though it is, hasn’t compared with recorded performances, which isn’t surprising when nowhere near the same thought is put into making it original. The signs are that that approach will change this year.
May: “It has been quite a problem. What we’ve decided on for these few gigs at the moment is to do a halfway thing, with a few new songs thrown in. It’s right for what we’re doing, because they’re unusual gigs and a lot of people will see us who’ve never seen us before. It’s right to present the complete history of what we have been. For the next tour- the one after these gigs-that’ll be the one where we start restructuring.
“In the case of the last tour, there was almost no rehearsal, because we went ahead and planned all the tour and worked ourselves to death to try and get the album finished, and there were only two days between finishing the album and going on tour.
“But for the next tour, we’ll rehearse. We’re not going to make the same mistake again. Maybe we could have pulled out something special if we’d had more time to rehearse, so this time we’re going to finish the album, make sure we have the right time for rehearsal and then go on tour.”
QUEEN HAVE MAINTAINED that record performance and stage performance should be treated as totally separate entities, and that when they do one thing on record, there should be no obligation to repeat the feat in front of a live audience. Their stage act comes in the form of a compromise which works well.
The band adapt their songs as best they can for live work and, to bridge the gap between the perfect sound on record, they create an atmosphere around their set that involves their audience totally; so suddenly it doesn’t matter to punters any more whether or not they play songs as on record.
⬅PREVIOUS: PART 1 https://melisa-may-taylor72.tumblr.com/post/695293335040032768/the-history-of-rock-1976-part-1-and-as-their
germansingergirl
vaporwave
stormborns
yousharknotpass
ellievsbear
