“Works with the song”: The Queen song Brian May wanted to be as sloppy as possible
When people talk about viewing rock stars as larger-than-life creatures who could never be them and they never could be, right up there with Kiss and David Bowie must be Queen. Sure, they may not have the crazy characters the way that the Space Ace and Ziggy Stardust do, but everything else is absolutely a work of escapism. Eye-catching costumes? Check. Fantastical storytelling? Check. Flashy stage tricks that make Freddie Mercury look like he has actual superpowers? Check.
This level of heightened reality wasn’t just in their presentation, it was in the music too. Queen were never a band comfortable with half-arsing it in the studio. There could not be a note out of place, and not just because their intricate vocal harmonies would fall apart if that happened. It extended to every single instrument. The drum sound had to be just so. John Deacon’s bass had to be precise. Brian May, built his guitar from scratch with his dad so he’d have a guitar sound like no other, so you know he meant business.
All this meant that Queen’s studio time was a herculean undertaking. In today’s day and age, that’s fairly par for the course, where albums are regularly honed to absolute perfection over the course of years. Queen on the other hand, were active in the early 1970s. A few short years previously it had been standard practice to release multiple studio albums a year, and it was still considered the standard to have an album every year whilst also touring your socks off any chance you got.
All this to say when Queen took five months of studio time to make 1976’s A Day At The Races, that was pretty unheard of at the time. Something they took no small amount of pride in. After all, they were trying to sound like no one else around. Considering barely anyone has really sounded like them since, they succeeded. However, they weren’t being meticulous for the sake of being meticulous. The care they took was absolutely necessary to make their laser-focused, intensely intricate music.
Were Queen always like this?
So, what happened when they had a song they wanted to cut a little loose with? Fortunately, we’d find out the year after A Day At The Races dropped with their next album, News Of The World. The arrival of punk had made Queen’s brand of mannered, prog-infused pop-metal intensely cringe. So, for their next record, they decided to make a stripped-down, spontaneous album. One that reminded everyone that at their core, Queen were a hard rock band the equal of anyone around.
It also helped that their label had mandated they begin a mammoth American tour in November 1977, leaving the band 10 weeks to finish their record. For Fred and Co, this might as well have been a long weekend, but they were pros by this point. Not to mention, the songwriting this time around was so much simpler that they probably could have done it in a fortnight if they’d really needed to. This is, after all, the album featuring the likes of ‘We Will Rock You’, ‘We Are The Champions’, and especially the Brian May lead blues strut ‘Sleeping on the Sidewalk’.
In an interview with BBC Radio One, May detailed the creative process behind the second of his two lead vocal appearances on the record. He said the song “has that kind of sloppy feel that I think works with the song, which we never would have dreamed with the previous albums. We’d go to great lengths, but for this album, we wanted to get that spontaneity back in. Although I messed around with the take a lot and chopped it and rearranged it, it was basically the first take, which we used.”
The Queen that spent three weeks of 12 to 15-hour studio days making ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ probably would have fainted at the idea. However, as previously mentioned, Queen weren’t slaving away in the studio for the sake of it. They were artists in the truest sense of the word who did precisely what the song needed. Whether that took a month or a day of studio time, it’s one of the many things that made them the legends they are today.
