1973 @ 50: QUEEN

There are many ways to tell the world you have arrived as a band. In the age of the LP this only ever happens in hindsight but it can still be fun to think about. Paul counting in the first Beatles album. Jimmy Page's hammering powerchords opened Led Zep 1. Queen starts with a gallop. But it's a fade in.

Keep Yourself Alive starts with a chugalugging, heavily phased palm muted chord, joined by a flashy riff, louder, closer until the band's all there and they ramp it up to a fourth above. A brief clearing of the stage. Freddie comes in with a growl both rough and melodic. It's a litany of experiences. He was told million times, the sold a million mirrors, he ate a million dinners, he loved a million women etc.  The chorus bursts into the major key with a call and response of the title. What might at first sound like a corporate hippy anthem of try and try again carries a shade more darkness in the suggestion of the great opposition that the whole cosmos might as well be pushing back with. It's a fun and fast rock song with show off playing (Brian May modestly but firmly demonstrating his guitar arranging skills and tone shaping in the solo and Roger Taylor getting a micro solo on the drums) but also a statement of defiance. They're singing to the listener from their own experience (and a little hubris: their trial and error is nothing on Bowie's). 

Doing Alright is a legacy of the pre-Queen band Smile. Mercury takes the vocal to a liminal space between head voice and falsetto before the rest of the vocal members and multitracking come in with glorious harmonies. The mood and rhythm break with a diversion into a kind of sunny Latin shuffle which escalates into a crunching electric riff and metal version of the whimsy. Back in first verse land it's all light melancholy and sweets. Big riff breaks in again for a solo on top before a clean finish on the chorus. At one point this might well have been a song Brian May sang in the shower but by the time it got to the second track of Queen's debut disc it is presented as a showcase of harmonies, sudden turns and virtuoso guitar playing.

Having begun with something single-worthy, then the school concert intro to the band, they move on to a number that would only ever be an album track. Great King Rat starts with a crunchy minor key riff that opens up with a reverby acoustic and distant lead vocal. The creation of space and light in the arrangement and production is impressive when you consider that the modal tonality and motion of the lyric could have most easily be squeezed down into a kind of sea shanty. Here it is widescreen cinema. The subject of the song might be a gangster or just some wideboy Mr Sin who lived hard and played deadly. The chorus includes a corruption of the Old King Cole rhyme, giving it more intrigue and atmosphere. And then the middle section (too long and distinct to be a middle eight) which crashes and changes to a major mode as Freddy sings like a herald with lines from GKR's life about being a bad guy to get ahead (pretty much the opposite sentiment to the opening track). This ends with a trailing wordless vocal and patted acoustic guitar moment before we crash back into the last verse, guitar solo (ending in a burst of studio applause) and final chorus that ends with a fade out on a tom tom roll.

My Fairy King closes the first side with the kind of showcasing we've already heard in Doing Alright but bigger and wider. Rhythm changes, new melodic material , instrumental workouts, more of Brian May's wind quintet guitar tone, some impressive piano performance and lots and lots and lots of harmonies. It's easy to dismiss a track like this as showing off but it's worth recalling a few things about the time, also. 1973 might well be associated with glam rock but it is also a time when the prog bands were gigantic enough to have their live gear moved in road trains with the name of each member emblazoned on the the roof of the semitrailers. To stand out in this environment and avoid any possible charge of cashing in on camp or glam you needed to show that you could not only arrange like a 19th century composer but play every note perfectly AND provide a kind of mythos for any characterisation you included in the lyrics. If this had ever been a simple singalong it quickly got the Queen treatment. The great apotheosis of this, Bohemian Rhapsody, would not appear for a few albums and years on and by its time was prepared and recorded by a band with some rapidly acquired discipline. Until then, the world got things like this which, as calculated as it had been, sound mostly like a mess, as though Andrew Lloyd Weber threw an uncooperative rock opera out the window and went back to the drawing board. Beautiful vocals and fine playing but also very astutely placed at the end of a side of vinyl.

Side two begins with Liar. which begins with a drum pattern that the song proper when it begins ignores for a more Who-like powerchord workout made for the kind of venues where the band wanted to headline. A little calm then Freddy comes in with lines from a confession which are answered by the choir calling "liar!" The point at which Freddie wails, "nobody believes me!" and it's a small milestone. All good singers have one thing in common; they make every vocal about themselves. You might be the most proficient, have the most unassailable falsetto, be able to shatter wine glasses with your highest chest voice note, but if you can't make something, whether written for you or you found under a caravan, sound like you, then you don't get to join the greats. Sometimes this is self-fulfilling like Leonard Cohen or Bob Dylan who only ever could sound like themselves and only every sang their own lines. Mostly it's the preserve of the tiny few. When Freddie complains that nobody belieeeeves him (I'm hearing it in his scansion as I type) it comes straight from him. By the time we get to the Oh Sinnerman call and response he finally sounds like the Freddie Mercury we would know and love, not just a skilled vocalist. Perhaps it also had to do with the enhanced tightness of the arrangement on this song which never strays too far from its own path in stark contrast to the previous track. It's as though they started on side one as a good band learning their trade and became Queen on side two.

The Night Comes Down begins with a gorgeous acoustic guitar workout. After a quick flourish from the Brian May orchestra, the vocals start with a refreshing acoustic vamp. Freddie's vocal takes us through a nostalgic trek before the choir enters with the chorus, plain but delicious. Plain, does what it says on the tin but it's a good tin. Brian May song and lovely for all that. It ends with a dazzling Brian multi-geetar serenade.

And bumps right into a thing that would be a feature of every Queen album until Jazz, the Roger Taylor rocker. John Deacon, on bass, was the only one who didn't sing lead vocals. Brian May did but not for a while. That left Freddie Mercury whose command of his voice had no equals on the face of the earth. So Roger went the other way and tried for a mix of Ozzie Osbourne and Robert Plant. Modern Times Rock and Roll charges like a mad bull for less than two minutes and doesn't waste a nanosecond. the breathless charge of it presaged the kind of full throttle of early punk. I bet no early punk acknowledged this, though.

The other thing that Brian May did was big metal songs. Son and Daughter is one of those, combining a big sinewy riff, crunching verse chords and a big bright chorus. The narrator complains about societal roles and the futility of pushing back against it. Why the chorus about wanting someone to be a woman? Maybe, after all that struggle he wanted love and sex to be simple. Absolutely no idea. Probably just sounded good sung. The guitar workout at the end is especially refulgent, casting more aural light than any so far on the record.

Jesus establishes a slamming two chord figure over which Freddie sings a fairly straight account of the fame of Christ. It's impassioned, serious and thoroughly hooky. Freddie wasn't remotely Christian but I tend to think he knew his audiences were acquainted with the bible story and probably admired the legend of the prophet, his power and adoration as a kind of bronze age rock star. This song features the kind of double speed instrumental section known and loved by numberless garage rockers but, considering the skill of the guitar playing, it's painstaking tonal setup and leaning toward atmosphere rather than chops it resembles most closely the Jeff Beck period Yardbirds. It's a stunning act of rock guitarism which yet gives way to a straight reading of the final verse and chorus which ends acapella until the fade.

The final track is an instrumental preview of the early single The Seven Seas of Rhye (fully realised on the following album) and is a softened anti climax after Jesus but pleasant for all that.

I didn't know this album until after I had my first Queen album A Night at the Opera. I'd heard Bohemian Rhapsody in the school holidays between '75 and '76. First week back at school, after hearing everyone else had heard it, too, a casually occurent wish was fulfilled when the video was on Countdown. It was as good as I remembered it. A few weeks later I bought my US pressing from Ken Herfords Import Records around the corner and luxuriated.

 And then, as every teenaged kid does, I had to get the rest of them. From memory, it was II then this one, then Sheer Heart Attack by which time the sequel to Opera, A Day at the Races, had come out. So, while I didn't hear them all at once it was in a squashed time period and they all pretty much blended ... except for this one. As the inadvertent effect was of a band sounding as though they worked toward and finally achieved their own sound in the space of one album, it felt like a first effort, the scene in the movie (of any rock biopic) where someone knocks something over, comes up with a phrase of future import, stumbles on a riff or whatnot and the rest is hysteria. 

But it was more like the opposite; the band had moved from this self-imposed image to the next, taking on players and singers (like Freddie) until at this point in their career they recorded these songs and struck upon their personality and sound. One of the things that is very notable. here, is that, for all the feeling around on the first side, there is a consistency that does form and a tone, character and weight that will take them to choose their strengths and present in sharper focus with each new effort. This is what happened with Queen. It wasn't the soaring development of a Beatles but for the first decade at least, no flab or filler either (ok, the John Deacon songs but a few of those were massive hits). And there was enough in the tank for the band that got to worldwide number one with a novelty single and only got stronger from that point. While they're clearly serious about their work in this first record it will always, after what followed, sound like workshopping rather than worldbeating. That said, find any rock band that wouldn't be proud enough of this to feel that they could just stop here.

The Young Person's Guide to Grownedupness: Queen's A Night at the Opera

Why do I always remember it being winter? There was so much in the radio downstairs that poured out over the Christmas holidays and the month leading up to school that thickened the air with new sound that I would just sit in front of the big stereo in the rumpus room and breathe it in. Mostly I'd draw. Stills from imagined period dramas, Louis the Sun King or the trenches of Flanders. But it would have been constantly humid, shrill with mosquitoes and the belching rhythm of cane toads. It would have been boiling hot all day long.

Maybe it's that I used to listen a lot at night and the memory of the light suggests cooler temperatures (Townsville doesn't really have a winter, just a lessening of summer). Maybe it's the idea that sophistication is something that happens far from places like North Queensland where the winter seems permanent and its imposition of intellectual rigour compulsory. Around me, regardless of the arch artsiness of my elder siblings and their cronies, my parents' social circle, the flat tropical stasis hissed on, compressing the least wish of the slightest fancy to take wing.

There were no new inventions when I was thirteen. There was a tv show called The Inventors but that was all ratchets and advanced can openers. The real, ethereal spirit of the new and conquering idea was gone and we were doomed to lives on endless treadmills. Even the new music was old, the cardboard of its covers scuffed and the grooves within neglected.

I waged war on this and could because we had a sizeable stock of 78 records with old jazz and classical fare that I unearthed and played. I looked into aural canyons of huge symphonies and delighted in the final raspberry-like hiss of the hihat at the end of a ragtime song. I even used Dad's old reel to reel mono to create a radio play about gangsters set in the 20s, using these treasures and my magic with accents (the character called Gus was referred to as Gush).

A year after that I was familiar with Abbey Road and the Moody Blues' Days of Future Passed and began to expect that level of purpose in the songs I heard on the radio. If they didn't have that then they had to provide something in its place like a riff, melody or big chorus. I would listen to just enough lyrics to imagine stories in the songs of artistes whose primary function as artistes was to make a living out of their Iloveyouloveshelovesheloves lamingtons of sound. I didn't understand this at the time and considered a song on the radio to be a statement of something that the singer had discovered and needed to communicate to everyone else.

That doesn't really describe the average mid seventies pop song at all well. I found this out over months that felt like years. But there were enough anomalies to suggest that there was some signal in the noise. I remember hearing the deep male voice choir of one of the songs off Rick Wakeman's KIng Arthur album. They sounded like the dark ages but gave way to the gooey notes of a synthesiser and someone shouting a challenge to someone else. High drama but as I never heard it again (to this day, in fact) I had to let it pass. The song Slip Kid by the Who had some real drama in it about a new English civil war (I think). These were among a small selection of pickings in the weeds of the field, a few growths plump with drama. Music, even pop music, could be more than moonjunelovedove. It could be serious. And then I heard it.

What caught me was the acapella harmonies. These weren't like the ye olde voices in the Rick Wakeman track. They were airy and light and somehow a lot bigger, like a barbershop quartet in a bright white sci-fi setting. Something sad has happened. Anyway the wind blows doesn't really matter to me. The last words were repeated twice and they reached into the clouds. A slow arpeggio back and forth like a man swinging on a noose. Mama, Just killed a man ... Oh. His voice sounds like he's crying. He has to go, to leave us all behind and face he truth. Then soaring: Mamaaaaaaaaa ooooooh.... Higher still, falsetto: Carry on carry on ... and then almost mumbled as though nothing really happened.

Then we're at the trial. Strident marching piano chords. And then everything goes nuts like Gilbert and Sullivan on speed. I see a little silhouetto of a man. Scaramouche scaramouche will you do the fandango? Gilbert and Sullivan as imagined by Edward Lear. The nonsense syllables, whether they referred to anything or not sounded like scuttlebutt, pleading and judgement, Punch and Judy at the Old Bailey. There was even an impossibly high note for the finish: For me for me for meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

Then we plummet into Slade like hard rock with a big wrenching riff. All that gentleness and silliness is now stadium shouting. So you think you can stone me and spit in my eye...  Just gotta get right out of here....

Then we are lifted by a fluid melodic guitar solo that sounds like a clarinet. And then the crying voice returns to plead that nothing really matters to him and the echo of fortune behind him: anwyay the wind blows....

Huh? How many songs had I just heard then? There was a barbershop quartet, a ballad, a mock opera, a rock song and the end of a ballad. In a near once-in-a-lifetime experience the DJ actually back announced. "That was Queen with Bohemian Rhapsody. It's a warm 25 in the city tonight..."

What? Queen? Bohemian? Did they take Hungarian Rhapsody and turn it into a pop song? How much Brahms did I know anyway? What did I just hear?

They didn't play it again all summer. I virtually rewrote it from the ground up trying to remember it. I told my sister about it and she assured me that I meant Quintessence who were always being shortened to Quin. There was no such band as Queen. It was probably illegal to call yourself that anyway. Go wash out your nasty little ears and listen to the radio properly. When I got back to school in February I asked around. Had anyone else heard it? Everyone had. What did they know about the song? The band? Nothing.

That Friday the shorter edition of Countdown was on for all the back-to-schools. I watched it at Nanna's. I hoped and hoped and - It was the second clip they played. I don't remember any other clip from the show. The barbershop opening was four heads in darkness and horror movie lighting. The ballad part looked like a live act. The big block harmonies and warbling from the operatic part used video feedback like the audio echo. Everything was being thrown at the studio wall. Actually, to be honest, even though it gets celebrated as being revolutionary the video for Bohemian Rhapsody looked like the wonky effects of any Dr Who episode. But what did I care about that when the song was there in front of me. They looked like a real rock band and peformed this minor but genuine miracle before me. The show was repeated on Saturday mornings so I watched it in the rumpus room tv at home in colour. Not much difference but the sound was better. At school we bickered over who did the funny bits better.

The news of the album arrived and I was the first on my block. A UK pressing with good thick cardboard on the cover from Ken Hurford's Import Records round the corner. I'd ruined the home stereo (I'm assuming that but I think I was just there when it happened) so that it didn't play both channels so I went next door to Nanna's and lowered the needle of her wartime victrola or whatever it was on to this pristine deep dish vinyl. Nita was there, too, having also been impressed. Nanna was happy for me to do this as she had declared the video listenable and obviously the work of serious young men (we're talking about Freddie Mercury, here, but we didn't know that then).

I liked the liner notes. No synthesisers, they said. Wow! Brian played a toy koto on one track (looked it up, well koto) and Freddie was responsible for the Bechstein debauchery. "Bechstein," Nanna snorted, as though I should have known, "is a piano." I had known what debauchery was.

Anyway, we heard the Bechstein first, glistening in like a Russian Debussy before some cellos and screeching echo guitar broke in with a horror movie moment which gave way to a stern piano vamp, irritated as though piqued at having been interrupted like that. Then after a sudden block harmony Freddie comes in angrily with Death on Two Legs and it's the best Bond theme ever (well, should've been). Everything's out in the open: a hard knuckled rhythm section, big harmonies, serpentine rockstar guitar, those elastic vocals that could growl underground and suddenly soar. And the piano, all the way through. It sounded like a real one. Not like the big 'verby pianos in ballads but like the ones in piano concertos. No synthesisers? Who'd need them?

Without a breath we go from hatred and anger to the kind of goopy tinkley thing the Beatles seemed to throw in that sounded like the twenties. Freddie through a megaphone and the big choir and Brian's dixieland jazzband made out of fuzz guitar which stopped me sudden. No synthesisers!

No breathing allowed as the engine noise splutters and roars and another voice screams that he's in love with his car. It's heavy and funny.

A breath and then - Ok, first dud out of four. John Deacon's You're My Best Friend comes on like the big thing in the papier mache costume in the kid's show that everyone says they like the best out of sympathy alone. It's a big boulder headed nong of a thing that I never played in full unless I was drawing and couldn't be bothered getting up to skip. Even the solo sounded like it was taking the piss. Where were we?

A spacey acoustic guitar shug with a sci-fi choir turns into 39, a folk stomper about interplanetary travel which also involves time travel. Different voice again. Guitarist, the one who played the toy koto. Great little short story. Sounds like The Seekers. Wonder if they ever covered.

Sweet Lady comes on like a Slade grind. Freddie even sounds a bit like Noddy. Rock song. Feels like the first one on the album. Straight after another one of those diddlydiddlydee ragtime thingies. End of side one.

Icy winds blow across the groove in side two. Plinky notes blow past and fall. That'd be the toy koto. A gentle harmony in the minor with mystical mien ends with a bang of cymbal, block harmony and marches in a doomladen crunch descanted by distant feedback. Freddie is serious again, the tune from somewhere in the 1490s and a story of prophecy and apocalypse. Metal big and heavy. Like Sabbath except that it keeps putting things from a deeper knowledge of music. The first chorus ends where you expect it will but the next ends somewhere else. These people didn't just come up with the riff, play it for an hour and put a solo over it, they affined it with a much earlier European tradition and orchestrated it around the idea of the lyric. But it doesn't sound like prog it sounds like metal. No synthesisers. And Brian May's signature rhythm tone is incredible, sounding both processed and natural (I wonder if there's some clean tone mixed in).  The middle is all acapella and echoplex but again it's complex harmonies and, oddly enough, cinema. This is a song in widescreen. (When my father did perform the few seconds of soldering that repaired the home stereo I made him test it with this song. He admitted that the middle section gave him "the willies".) And then BAM! back into metal and a big angry multitracked guitar tide from Brian May who sounds by this first listen's stage like no one else in particular. Another verse and chorus and some more guitar fury and then. But still I hear and still I dare not laugh at the mad man. BAM! We ease out on the wind and a gentle sad acoustic piece which ends in the same key as the next song. Well, ends, segues.

Love of My Life sounds like a parlour song. Not much to say beyond declaring its beauty. Brian May's solo (strange to call them that when they are all so layered) now sounds like a string quartet. And harp. Good Company another dixieland but one of Brian's. All thump and uke with barbershop harmonies. Another story this time about a lifetime love gone wrong. The closest they get to Beatlesque. We go out on another Brian setpiece, this time a whole jazz band which really sounds like a jazzband.

Bohemian Rhapsody. Already described but in context the opening vocal quartet continues the vocal texture of Good Company before breaking its own ground. After it where further? Home. The fat lady has sung. We stand for the national anthem ('nother Brian May wonder).

We are silent at this point. Wow! No words. I'm exhausted. Put it on again! Now!

These were sounds that were not bestowed by an older siblilng. They hadn't existed at the beginning of the previous year. I had found these sounds. This comedy and tragedy, this campy foppish foolery and grim cataclysm, this big goofy fun, this sarcasm, this fun. This was mine and up to me to share.

There was more.

I kept hearing for a while people around my age and a little younger air how long it took before they knew Freddie was gay. That's table talk. Look, if you were a teenager in the mid 70s when Queen broke through and didn't at least suspect that Freddie Mercury was gay then the naivete that descended through geological time and resulted in you might well convey an adaptive advantage but it saddens me to even think of it. As one of a family of overliterate, management class but Whitlam voting, secular minded, high flying yet pragmatic bourgeoise one of the worst sins that I, even at thirteen, could committ was to show a lack of worldliness. So when Nita smirked to me that Freddie was gay I shrugged and said, "sure".

We weren't exceptional. Everyone I knew at school who had an opinion knew as well and there was no great crsis of conscience from knowing it on the one hand and still using "poofter" as the worst air dagger you could aim at a fellow boy (if a girl said it you'd be ready for counselling). While I couldn't articulate the difference at the time I knew the feeling of it. And while it isn't true to say that if not for Freddie we would've stayed less tolerant with all the queer jokes from Dick Emery, Dave Allen, The Two Ronnies and Benny choking the airwaves nightly forcing it down. But with Freddie there was no shame to it: I mean our shame, shame to admit it shame to associate. If Freddie was gay the big thing about it was not that we cared but that he didn't care.

If you loved Freddie (and only the earlier cro magnons among us refused to) you didn't care either. And when it came to knowing real live people in your vicinity who were also gay it didn't matter then either. Put up against the greatness of things like this album and the ease of its pulverising virtuosity, the Ronnies and the Dicks looked old and numb. We didn't wipe homophobia out by singing along to Seaside Rendezvous but we emerged from our own adolescence without it. That, in large part, was Freddie Mercury who does not deserve the sticky museum label of genius because genius is never this much fun.

Gay? Of course he was fucking gay. I didn't know he was Indian!