The one Queen song Brian May thought was written as a joke: “I’m deadly serious”
Queen are a band not given the credit they are due. While they have enough record sales to build themselves an appropriate palace. The group is often belittled for being a pop outfit rather than a rock staple.
But to ignore the volatile nature of their songwriting is to lose the very concept of Queen in the first place. They are a theatrical group breaking out through the medium of rock music. They’re high camp and high fun, and if you don’t want to get on board, then you weren’t invited anyway.
A Night at the Opera was the breakthrough album that Queen needed to ascend to the top of the rock world. Featuring an eclectic mix of genres and a string of classic songs like ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ and ‘You’re My Best Friend’, the album was a massive hit. It allowed Queen to be taken seriously among rock’s elite, but one song couldn’t even be taken seriously within the band: Roger Taylor’s ‘I’m In Love With My Car’.
Played completely straight on the album, ‘I’m In Love With My Car’ was inspired by one of the band’s roadies and his infatuation with his Triumph TR4. Taylor recorded all of the instruments on the song’s demo, but when he presented a rough version to guitarist Brian May, Taylor didn’t exactly get the response that he was expecting.
“I made a sort of very rough demo of it, and I remember turning around to Brian and said, ‘What do you think of that?’” Taylor recalled in the Classic Albums episode focused on A Night at the Opera. But what did he expect? Making a song about a car is always a dangerous game, and Taylor was playing it with one of the straightest men in the world in Brian May.
May was perplexed: “He looked at me and said, ‘You are joking, aren’t you? You’re joking.’ And I said, ‘No, Brian! I’m deadly serious! It’s about a car, and somebody who’s in love with it.”
For his part, May remembers being more amused that Taylor tried to pass the inspiration for the song onto someone else. “He’ll tell you it was written about someone else,” May explained in the same episode, “but we know the truth, don’t we, Rog? Roger was always into fast things: fast cars, etcetera, etcetera. It’s very tuneful, but of course, the vocal is the thing. The vocal is the song. That’s a very memorable piece of writing.”
‘I’m In Love With My Car’ was so beloved by Taylor that he lobbied for the track to be the B-side to ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. The rest of the band agreed, and every time the single sold a physical copy, Taylor would get the same amount of money that Freddie Mercury did for writing ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’.
In that way, ‘I’m In Love With My Car’ made Taylor a very rich man, and Taylor continued to perform the song up until 1981. Taylor later revived the song in Taylor Hawkins’ honour at the tribute concerts for the former Foo Fighters drummer.
Check out a live performance of ‘I’m In Love With My Car’ from 1981 down below.
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