“Frustration”: The Queen album Brian May regretted
A sparkling electric energy always poured from Queen, and over roughly two decades of their tenure, they rarely ever set a foot wrong. Of course, all of this could be attributed not only to their raw talent but also the unshakable foundations they set as a band from their earliest days of inception, which, despite the later dramas of arguments and occasional artistic differences, could never tear the four-piece apart.
Given how seismic their career became to the fabric of the entirety of rock music, it seems almost antithetical to think that their most primitive tastes of the high life actually got off to quite the rocky start. Imbued with a sense of dread and desperation, there was one album that, in hindsight, guitarist Brian May perhaps lived to regret from this period – for the simple reason that the band knew what they wanted but couldn’t get it.
Reflecting on their debut eponymous effort, May said in an interview for Guitar World in 2023: “Our major frustration was the sound of that first album, which we were never happy with.” Between the blazing breakout heights of the likes of ‘Keep Yourself Alive’ and ‘Liar’, this annoyance may not be discernible to the untrained ear, but the truth of the matter was that the recording process was plagued with technical issues that were simply not up to the band’s emerging regal standards.
May continued: “We were thrown into the studio and into a system which regarded itself as state of the art. Trident Studios were very emergent as a force in the world. And they thought they had it down.” Emphasis is clearly on the words “they thought” here because as much as Trident Studios may be hailed as the beginning of Queen’s journey, it seems some of those plaudits may be slightly misdirected.
“The Trident sound was very dead,” May said. “It was the opposite of what we were aiming for.”
As such, even though the album didn’t fully yet demonstrate the band in all their rapturous glory, it still held glimmers of the pomp and flair of what was to come. Recorded between 1971 and 1973 at both Trident and De Lane Lea Music Centre in London, it’s fair to say it was a bit of a ramshackle effort. Nevertheless, anyone who heard it could recognise the excitement of a rock behemoth in its infancy.
Having taken the best part of three years to finally lift off the ground, you’d be a fool to think those setbacks would scare the band off from doing any more – instead, they became dead set on making everything they did afterwards even bigger and better than the last.
Following their debut the following year with the aptly named sophomore effort Queen II, the band were well and truly finding their footing with iconic album covers, artistic explorations, and definitive blazing sound to boot – even if they hadn’t quite been able to leave the lacklustre Trident Studios behind just yet. Retrospectively, it may not have been their finest technical hour, but without their shaky start, they wouldn’t have gone on to form the jewels in the rock and roll crown.
