The 1973 song Brian May said was the beginning of Queen’s career: “We can make our own rules”
When the 1970s rolled around, it felt like the rule book for music had been completely thrown out of the window.
The Beatles had redefined what studio musicianship truly meant, and in the wake of their break-up, a swathe of new acts ready to capitalise on that emerged – there was, of course, Led Zeppelin, who broke new ground in stadium rock, not to mention Pink Floyd, who explored the cosmic worlds of psychedelic rock.
But there was also Queen, who, between them, fashioned a niche for rock opera. In Freddie Mercury, they had a frontman who could transcend performance, turn it into something operatic, dramatic and theatric at the very same time, and so needed a sound fitting of his skills. Simple rock and roll wouldn’t cut it, but rock opera and the expanse of its narratives absolutely could.
They hit their stride in 1975, with their magnum opus A Night At The Opera crystallising their ambition into one succinct record. But before that, even on their debut album, they were showcasing their experimentalism in more subtle ways and deliberately rebelling against songwriting conventions that the industry said were unchangeable.
“On ‘The Night Comes Down’, [from the band’s debut], we’re doing something which people told us we couldn’t do,” Brian May revealed. “People in those days used to say, ‘You can’t mix electric guitar with acoustic guitar.’ Nowadays, that sounds pretty funny, but it was a belief that people around studios had, you know? They would say the electric guitar is too loud for the acoustic, and I went, ‘Come on!’ It’s just a question of balancing in the mix.”
Of course, at that point, the acoustic and electric guitar had of course been mixed. Jimmy Page was pioneering the pairing with Led Zeppelin and emphatically proved it to be a winning formula on ‘Stairway To Heaven’. But May is right in claiming that there was still a cultural pushback from those two slow to join in and embrace the innovation that was taking place, and while it may not have been as well known as ‘Stairway To Heaven’, the Queen track was integral in making that happen.
“So,” May went on, “with ‘The Night Comes Down’, it’s based on acoustic guitar, my beautiful old acoustic. But the guitar harmonies are all electric. And that was a beginning, sort of like a demonstration: ‘Yes, we can do this, we can make our own rules!’”
The track was less important for an industry-wide change than it was for Queen themselves. The success in their experimentation on that debut record set out a stall through which they could follow on the records to come.
Without May’s subtle foray into arrangement testing, he may not have discovered the dramatic rock-opera sound that made Queen such a force to be reckoned with. The playfulness they showed to instrumentation on those later tracks was integral to the foundations of this expansive new sound that most crucially gave their enigmatic frontman permission to play and push the boundaries.
