Brian May on “the worst decision” Queen ever made
Between 1970 and ’71, Queen formed from the ashes of Smile, a formative band that included Brian May and Roger Taylor. With the unique vocals and showmanship of Freddie Mercury and John Deacon’s instrumental and songwriting talent, the band was complete and took very little time to break through. With the arrival of the 1973 self-titled album, May packed away his astrophysics textbooks and set his sights on glam-rock stardom.
During their initial glam-adjacent chapter, Queen competed with the likes of David Bowie and T. Rex to bring a punchy, androgynous edge to rock ‘n’ roll. The band’s following two albums, Queen II and Sheer Heart Attack, remain two of their most beloved releases, thanks to hits like ‘Seven Seas of Rhye’ and ‘Killer Queen’. However, success on a global scale truly arrived with the release of A Night at the Opera in 1975.
As May recalled in Queen: Complete Works, the album was a pivotal moment for the band. “We had made hit records, but we hadn’t had any of the money back, and if A Night at the Opera hadn’t been a huge success, I think we would have just disappeared under the ocean someplace. So we were making this album knowing it was live or die,” he said.
This “live or die” spirit is reflected in the elaborate masterpiece that ultimately defined the album, the lead single ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. Several other highlights, including Deacon’s songwriting contribution ‘You’re My Best Friend’ and Mercury’s emphatic opener, ‘Death on Two Legs (Dedicated to…)’, flanked this six-minute triumph.
The opening track’s mysterious “Dedicate to…” refers to Queen’s former Trident Studios manager Norman Sheffield. In the run-up to A Night at the Opera, the band severed ties with Noman following a bitter disagreement regarding royalties. In the Days of our Lives documentary, Taylor recalled Sheffield telling him not to hit his drums too hard because they couldn’t afford new sticks. Yet, he noted that you’d “see them [management team] running around in stretch limos and think, ‘Hang on, there’s something not right here!'”
‘Death on Two Legs’ stood as a final farewell to their management at Trident Studios. The opening lines say it all: “You suck my blood like a leech / You break the law and you breach / Screw my brain ’til it hurts / You’ve taken all my money / And you want more”. Allegedly, Mercury hesitated to record the uncharacteristically bitter song, but May encouraged him to follow it through.
Fortunately, Queen soon found a more diplomatic manager, John Reid, who had a hard time steering the band through an ongoing financial tangle. The band had signed an imprudent publishing agreement with Trident, who sold their music to a record company, thus limiting royalties. “In hindsight, it was the worst decision we ever made,” May reflected on the agreement many years later.
A poor judgment call as such can be difficult to recover from, but with A Night at the Opera hitting the shelves at around the same time, Queen had very little to fear.
