Queen emerged in the early Seventies a style of music that was a hybrid combination of Zeppelinesque heavv rock overlaid with glam-rock trappings, lavish vocal harmonies and strong, memorable melodies. They developed throughout the Seventies, assimilating different styles and widening an already broad-based appeal, to become a major forcé in all world markets. The constantly negative reaction of music critics has been sharply at odds with Queen’s overwhelming popularity with the fans.
Queen’s origins lie in a band called Smile started in the late Sixties by guitarist Brian May (born 19 July 1947), drummer Roger Meddows-Taylor (born 26 July 1949), and bassist/vocalist Tim Staffel, all three of whom were students at London’s Imperial College. Although they took their studies seriously, they also managed to get a single, ’Earth’, released in the US on the Mercury label in 1969. Release in Britain was shelved after it had flopped in America, and Staffel left, effectively terminating the group. However, a friend of Staffel, whose name was Fred Bulsara but who preferred to be known as Freddie Mercury (born 5 September 1946), had frequently attended their gigs and, according to Brian May, had never been slow to offer suggestions: ‘Why are you wasting your time doing this?’. Mercury would exclaim. 'You should do more original material. You should be more demonstrative in the way that you put the music across. If I was your singer that’s what I’d be doing.’ Following Staffel’s departure and Smile’s demise, Mercury joined forces with Taylor and May.
The name Queen was Mercury’s idea and in many ways it suited their proposed image. Mercury’s camp, extrovert persona and ambiguous sexual appeal gave the group a glamorous, attention-grabbing look that complemented its elaborately arranged but thunderously powerful music. The three rehearsed and worked on material for several months before recruiting bassist John Deacon (born 19 August 1951), a student at Chelsea College. The line-up was complete by February 1971, but the band opted not to go slogging round the pub and club Circuit. Apart from the occasional Imperial College gig, they preferred to concentrate their energies on writing and rigorously rehearsing an ambitious and considered collection of songs.
Eschewing live work, they aimed im- mediately for a recording contract, and to this end recorded some demos at De Lane Lea Studios in the early months of 1972. With the help of studio engineers Roy Thomas Baker and John Anthony, they secured a contract with the Trident Production company to record an album which Trident would then attempt to place with a major record company. Trident appointed Jack Nelson to manage the band’s affairs, and, with Baker and Anthony producing, they recorded their first álbum, Queen at mínimum cost in Trident Studio 'down time’ - at odd hours when the costly 24- track studio wasn’t booked by any other artists. Despite this penny-pinching approach - a marked contrast to their later recording budgets - the resulting album conveyed enough of Queen’s power and glory to secure the band a contract with EMI Records.
The company proceeded to launch the group with a thoroughly disorganised campaign that all but scuppered the álbum and its single, 'Keep Yourself Alive’. The record’s release was delayed by seven months, and when it finally came out in July 1973, the media was swamped with promotional copies, handouts and paraphernalia that, from an unknown band having played only a handful of small gigs, instantly suggested hype. The seeds of an enduringly poor relationship with the press were sown. Neither the album nor the single charted, but the band made televisión appearances and began to build up a grass-roots following by playing support to Mott the Hoople on their nationwide tour during November-December 1973.
The second album Queen II, released in March 1974 and coinciding with their first headlining British tour, reached the Top Ten, as did the single taken from it, 'Seven Seas Of Rhye’; Queen were on their way. Although Queen II established Mercury, who composed the entire 'black’ side, and May, who (with one contribution from Taylor) penned the ‘white’ side, as the main writers of the band, Taylor and Deacon subsequently came to take a more active Creative role; Deacon, in particular, composed 'Another One Bites The Dust’, one of the band’s greatest worldwide successes. Although Mercury has been responsible for the majority of the group’s biggest hits, it has been to Queen’s abiding advantage that they have four actively contributing songwriters, all with varying styles and areas of particular expertise.
In May 1974, the band embarked on their first tour of America, once again as opening act to Mott the Hoople. However they had to cut this short when Brian May contracted hepatitis; a few weeks later the guitarist was also diagnosed as suffering from a serious ulcer. He was not fit to tour again until the autumn, and the band spent the intervening months writing and recording a third álbum - Sheer Heart Attack. Released at the end of 1974, this album, with its wealth of diverse material and abundance of fresh ideas, took the wind out of the sails of even the band’s most adamant detractors. The single 'Killer Queen’, an embarrassment of lyrical and harmonic riches, yet easily hummable for all that, was a worldwide hit, reaching Number 2 in Britain and winning the Ivor Novello Award as Best Song of 1975.
The same year the band recorded their most ambitious project, A Night At The Opera. At the time, it was reputed to be the most expensive album ever made. Costing £35,000, it took four months to produce and was recorded in seven different studios. 'We wanted to experiment with sound,’ Mercury explained. 'Sometimes we used three studios simultaneously. We have no such thing as a recording budget any more - we’re lavish to the bone.’ Although subsequent albums cost even more and took longer - The Game (1980) cost approximately £100,000, and took 11 months - it was A Night At The Opera and the preceding single release from the album, 'Bohemian Rhapsody’, that brought Queen International success.
'Bohemian Rhapsody’ was an extra- ordinary tour de forcé. A great slab of baroque grandeur with a ballad-like be- ginning, mock-operatic middle section and a sub-Black Sabbath heavy-metal climax, the song’s epic qualities further advanced a tradition begun by Richard Harris’s 'Macarthur Park’, and subsequently con- tinued by John Miles’ 'Music’ and Ultra- vox’s 'Vienna’. 'Bohemian Rhapsody’ stayed at Number 1 in Britain for nine weeks; A Night At The Opera quickly achieved similar success. With both single and album firmly lodged at the top of the charts, Queen appeared at the Hammersmith Odeon on Christmas Eve 1975 for a special show televised live on BBC2. Such was their popularity in the UK at the start of 1976 that at one point all four of their albums were simultaneously in the Top Thirty, including Queen, which had not previously charted - a gratifying vindicaron of everything they had worked towards.
Prior to the release of A Night At The Opera, the band had terminated their association with manager Jack Nelson. It was not an amicable split, as a song by Mercury dedicated to him - 'Death On Two Legs’ - showed: 'Was the fin on your back part of the deal… . shark!’. At around the same time the band also left the Trident organisation, signing direct to EMI and Elektra (their US record company) and taking on as manager John Reid, previously responsible for managing Elton John. They also parted company with Roy Thomas Baker, with whom they had produced all the albums so far, and produced their next album, A Day At The Races (1976), themselves.
During the early part of 1976, still buoyant from the success of A Night At The Opera and 'Bohemian Rhapsody’, Queen toured and consolidated their success in America, Japan and Australia. Their live shows, in keeping with the ornate splendour of their music, have never been anything less than a total spectacle. With each new tour they try to outdo the audio and visual impact of the previous one, and they have continually added to the dry ice, lighting and thunderflash effects which have always been their stock in trade. Their 1977 tour, coinciding with the Silver Jubilee celebra- tions, prompted them to incorporate a two- and-a-half ton 'crown’ into their stage set- a massive lighting rig that rose from the stage amid flashing lights and smoke, descending at the end of the show to the sound of the National Anthem. The 1978 American tour incorporated what was believed to be the biggest lighting rig in rock history, while for their 1981 South American tour they took 75 tons of equip- ment including over 63,000 watts of lights.
The group depends heavily on Mercury’s stage presence. Deacon and Taylor concéntrate on maintaining a tidy rhythm section while May, although thrust into the lime- light by virtue of his outstanding and lengthy solo guitar excursions, is by nature a retiring sort of person and unspectacular as a visual performer. But Mercury more than makes up for the rest of them with his constant strutting and preening, his costume changes, and wildly outgoing character. 'I always knew I was a star,’ he once said, 'and now the rest of the world seems to agree with me.’ Blessed with a pure, accurate voice that rings out above the surging instrumental backdrop, Mercury has built himself up to be an exuberant and outrageous frontman and he cuts a striking figure, roaming the stage set’s multi-level catwalks.By the time that Britain was gripped by the arrival of punk in 1977, Queen had come to embody everything that the new wave groups despised. They were polished musicians, international celebrities, in every respect pillars of the rock establishment. With renewed vigour the press again took to denouncing the band. While Queen, in common with most mega-bands of that era, responded primarily by simply not talking to the press, it is noticeable that 1977’s ‘News Of The World’ album had a considerably rougher feel than their previous releases. 'With the previous albums we always used to work on the backing tracks till they were a million per cent perfect,’ commented May, 'but for this album we wanted to get that spontaneity back in.’ The threat of the 'punk revolution’ to Queen’s popularity was soon shown to be vain; they enjoyed continued worldwide success with the albums Jazz (1978), a double live package Queen Live Killers (1979), and The Game (1980).
The two most successful singles from this period, both of which illustrate Queen’s confidence in tackling widely different musical styles, were 'Crazy Little Thing Called Love’, a fifties-style rocka- billy number, and 'Another One Bites The Dust’, a chunk of heavy-duty, Eighties disco-funk. 1980 also saw Queen taking a first step into the world of film-making, composing and performing the soundtrack for Flash Gordon, another bold departure from their previous output which was mostly synthesiser-dominated mood music.
In 1981 Queen became the first band to undertake a serious full-scale tour in South America, a continent that had previously been subject only to piecemeal intrusions by Peter Frampton and Earth, Wind and Fire. The band took their whole massive set-up for a series of stadium concerts in Brazil and Argentina, opening up a huge, untapped market.
The group’s consistent ability to assimi- late current trends into their musical repertoire has been an important factor in their survival. 1981’s move towards a more sophisticated dance-floor fusión on the Hot Space album, and the Number 1 single 'Under Pressure’, a collaboration with David Bowie, showed Queen retaining a strong foothold in the rock world in the Eighties.
HISTORY OF ROCK ARTICLE BY DAVID SINCLAIR, 1985
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