Sir Brian May and Roger Taylor recently released a remastered and expanded version of the band’s first album Queen I, which debuted over 50 years ago.
And now, in new interviews, which you can watch below, the two rock legends look back on the “very tough times” with Freddie Mercury and John Deacon, long before becoming the world’s bestselling band after The Beatles.
It was Spring 1972 and their debut album recording sessions were proving quite erratic.
Roger shared: “It was tough in the beginning. Yeah, but then we did eventually coalesce in the studio, and we were really working off peak studio hours, really when the studio was free, because our management owned the studio, which was Trident Studios, which was regarded as the sort of studio of the moment in the 70s.
“But we were there, we’d arrive at three in the morning and, and then go on for all the hours that we could grab.”
Sir Brian shared: “It was very tough because we never knew when we were going to get back in there. Tapes got jumbled up and kind of lost, and there was a discontinuity. Sometimes we had to have a different engineer who didn’t realize what we’d done before. It was really a kind of mess. It was a hotchpotch, difficult to hold it together. They were tough times.”
“I think by the time we got into the studio, we were quite well formed. We really had to rehearsed ourselves to death in spite of the fact we’re all doing sort of other jobs and student things. We devoted a lot of time to it, a lot of care. We were well rehearsed. We were sort of even over rehearsed, possibly. And we were used to working together. And I think we hit the ground pretty much running.”
As shared by the narrator in the video: “Eventually the album was completed and on July 13 1973, while Queen prepared for a gig at St Mary’s College in Basingstoke, the Queen album was released. With many journalists confused as to who Queen were and what they were about, the release was met by a muted response, or as Roger describes it…”
The drummer said bluntly: “A Tsunami of nothing. Yeah. Well, I suppose it was a bit dispiriting, but I think we were concentrating then on being a live act. To give the management credit, and a guy that they had hired called Jack Nelson, an American, to be our sort of day to day proper manager. He made us go down. We had the theatre at the end of the pier, in Herne Bay of all places, in the middle of the winter, which was a desolate, desolate place to be for a week or two, I think, we were just solidly rehearsing our, live act.”
Sir Brian reflected: “Tell you what helped. We looked at some of the reviews for the Led Zeppelin albums that had been out at that time, some of which were appallingly bad. And we thought, well, if they can run these people down, we shouldn’t be too worried about being run down ourselves. Being a band is a great help. I think if I’d been a solo artist, I think I’d have laid on the floor and cried. It was bad, but we had the four of us and it’s like, ‘Screw these guys, we know what we’re doing’. That saved us.
“The other thing that saved us was, suddenly, I think, from the Imperial College show onwards, we were aware that we had an audience. Once we had that first album out, we had an audience who understood us and were really behind us. There’s suddenly momentum coming in from outside. And that’s incredibly helpful. That really gives you the energy you need. So we had internal energy and we had external energy coming to us from what became the Queen fans, which is incredible.”
Queen I is out now.
