Queen unveiled their reissued and expanded debut album before a live audience in central London last night, with Roger Taylor and Brian May explaining how the project was nothing less than a mission to rebuild the album from the ground up – to the extent that every single one of Taylor’s drum hits on the original recording was digitally augmented for the release.
While none of the performances of the 1973 original have been changed, the band transferred its 16-track analogue tape recording to digital, turning it over to audio engineering specialists to enhance the sound.
All aspects of the album's mix have had a spit and polish. May was not altogether happy with the electric guitar sound but he says the differences between the original guitars and the 2024 rebuilt and renamed version – it is now titled Queen I – are “subtle.” The guitars we hear on Queen I are more up-front and present.
Everything has been mixed to sound more immediate, as though you are in the room with the instruments.
If the guitars needed some TLC, Taylor’s drum sound was a different matter. That demanded a more radical intervention. He tracked his parts on the studio’s drum kit and it was a horrible experience.
“I remember Roger getting angry because he was in such an unfamiliar situation,” said May. “He has been drumming for years, and he’s pretty good as a drummer, he can do a thing or two! Instead of playing in a room with his kit, which he knows inside out, suddenly he is in a tiny little room with a foreign drum kit, which was tiny and transparent as I remember.
“It was plastic, all covered in tape, literally covered in all this tape. They’d taken most of the skin off the bass drum and it’s got a cushion inside. He’s trying to play this thing and he hates it! You can feel it. Right? It was hard for you?”
“Yeah, there was no resonance or anything,” replied Taylor. “Not what you want.”
It wasn’t what any of the band wanted. But they were young. This was their debut. Roy Thomas Baker was in the control room and he was a hard task master. And all things considered, the band were just happy to be there, recording in the off-peak hours while the blue-chip stars recorded during the day.
“We were signed to the owners of the studio so that is why we got that [time] I remember there was Lou Reed and David [Bowie] producing Transformer,” said Taylor. “He’d just finished Hunky Dory and Ziggy. This was the place to be. The Beatles did All You Need Is Love there. It really was the place to be, Harry Nilsson, et cetera. So we thought it was great. We’re in Trident! But we were the ones on the downtime and we walked out when the cleaners came in.”
“We were excited to be in there at all,” added May. “I think you would have seen us very much immersed in it and we felt privileged to be there at all, and we were enjoying each other’s company, and we were enjoying working with each other and developing new ideas. We had written a lot before we went in. We had some songs that we had been rehearsing. But a lot of things took shape in the studio, like My Fairy King, which was an extraordinary piece of work.”
May describes Queen I as “the director’s cut” and it has been a long time coming. This has been something they have wanted to do for years.
“It’s exactly how we wanted it,” said May. “We waited 52 years to get to this point, to make it the way it should have been in the first place. We always hated the fact that Roger wasn’t playing his own kit. It didn’t sound like Rodge.”
Queen also took the opportunity to restore the tracklisting to how they wanted it. Mad The Swine was left off the 1973 release but is back here, sequenced between Great King Rat and My Fairy King. It sounds incredible. All of it does.
Queen I is available now on all formats, including a Super Deluxe six CD and vinyl box-set which contains a cornucopia of unreleased material, including live tracks and demos, plus behind-the-scenes audio recordings of the band in conversation – and disagreement – with each other. It’s the sound of rock history being made, a coltish but prodigiously talented band learning what it took to make a record.
