The only guest guitarist to appear on a Queen album
When a band like Queen ventured into the studio, there was no real need to have another person on guitar duties. While every band member was more than capable behind their instrument, Brian May’s ability to sculpt symphonies out of his guitar was unmatched by anyone else in his field, complete with triple-tracked harmonies layered across multiple channels. However, as the group embarked on one of their final albums, one guest guitarist helped create a song that could rival ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’.
If life had gone the way medical professionals had predicted, the album Innuendo probably wouldn’t have existed. Throughout the recording process, Freddie Mercury was slowly starting to wither away due to his struggles with AIDs and would often be seen sitting throughout most of the production.
While the album is more known now for the showstopper ‘The Show Must Go On’, the title track kicks everything into high gear across a six-minute epic. Taking the building blocks of different songs, ‘Innuendo’ goes through different movements just like ‘Rhapsody’, almost like listening to different songs within one track.
To connect both pieces of the song, though, Queen enlisted help from the progressive rock world working a few doors away. With the band Yes recording in the next studio, the band asked if guitarist Steve Howe would add a guitar accompaniment to the final track, delivering a clinic in flamenco playing on acoustic guitar.
Even for an industry veteran like Howe, working on a Queen track would be no small task. Throughout the song, Howe would have to improvise over various chord progressions without knowing where he would land half the time.
When talking to Prog Magazine about his involvement, Howe would later say that he was flying blind for most of the track. He explained: “I started noodling around on the guitar, and it was pretty tough. After a couple of hours, I thought: ‘I’ve bitten off more than I can chew here’. I had to learn a bit of the structure, work out what the chordal roots were, where you had to fall if you did a mad run in the distance; you have to know where you’re going.”
Once the band got the basic track down, they started to assemble different pieces around it, with drummer Roger Taylor writing the lyrics after being inspired by Led Zeppelin’s epics. Though the band remained proud of what they put into the final product, it wasn’t long before Mercury started to succumb to his illness.
With no tour to support the new record, the band was quiet for most of the early 1990s until Mercury revealed the details of his medical condition, passing away the following day. Although the album Made in Heaven would be the final statement from the group, ‘Innuendo’ feels more like the final goodbye from the four-man collective who turned Queen into a global force. Even with a new musician adding in some guitar, this is a sound of a band on their last legs delivering at their best one last time.
