“No radio station is going to play this”: The Queen song Roger Taylor never believed in
There was never a question of replacing any member of Queen during their tenure. Contrary to what their name implied, they always seemed like a musical democracy whenever they entered the studio, and even when they perform now without Freddie Mercury, they are always polite enough to acknowledge that it’s an entirely different project rather than any permanent replacement. However, despite everyone having their own say in what should end up on a record, Roger Taylor was open when he thought that some pieces of their discography didn’t necessarily work.
Because even in a democracy, people don’t always get what they want. Since everyone wants to make what they think will appeal to a lot of people, it was strange to describe what anyone was listening to on Queen’s first projects, which seemed to combine everything from Led Zeppelin hard rock to show tunes to fanciful prog rock sections with some of the greatest harmonies of all time behind them.
That sounds fantastic nowadays, but in an era that was defining what it was going to be after the Summer of Love, it was certainly strange to listen to the equivalent of musical opera once ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ made it big. Once they ended up crossing that threshold, though, it became clear that their following was about more than the mindless rock crowd that wanted to raise their first in the air.
Throughout A Day at The Races, it was clear they could do a lot of things like gospel harmonies on ‘Somebody to Love’, but they were no strangers to overshooting it either. Hot Space may have come out right on the heels of the dancey ‘Another One Bites the Dust’, but aside from ‘Under Pressure’ at the very end, it was clear that most of the rock and roll flavour had been sucked out of their sound.
And for Taylor, that was all that mattered. He always had a bluesier tone to his voice whenever he sang, and many of his classic songs were about him trying to have that same kind of register that was normally reserved for early Rod Stewart. However, for someone who relies on songs with a great backbeat, Brian May remembered having a major fight with Taylor over including ‘We Will Rock You’ on News of the World.
According to the guitar maestro, the drummer felt that there was no way that a borderline acappella song had any chance of getting on the radio, saying, “I remember Roger had severe misgivings about it. And he certainly didn’t want to put it at the beginning of the album. He said, ‘No radio station is ever going to play this! It doesn’t sound like a rock song.’ But I fought that corner. And generally I didn’t win those arguments, but this time I won. So that was the beginning of the album.”
Taylor may have had a small point since there’s no real musical accompaniment throughout 70% of the song, but that’s half the reason why it works. The whole purpose was to get a song that any audience could get behind, and as long as someone could keep a steady beat for more than a few minutes, anyone could have been able to clap right along as Mercury sang those bluesy vocals.
Even though there was a lot of criticism surrounding Queen’s overblown production in their early days, this was the perfect exercise in minimalism. There were a ton of overdubs on many of their records, but they didn’t even need to play half of their instruments in their early days to get people bouncing in an arena.
