Queen are celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of their traditional 1975 album, A Evening At The Opera, with a five-part installment of their video sequence “The Greatest.” After specializing in the creation of “Bohemian Rhapsody,” the second episode explores the band’s earlier recording experiences enabled them to go all-out.
“Queen The Greatest Special – Episode 2: The Path To A Night At The Opera (Part 1)” is out now and episodes proceed weekly by means of November. A restricted version fiftieth anniversary reissue of A Evening On the Opera is coming quickly on crystal-clear vinyl.
Within the episode, Queen’s Roger Taylor and Brian Might recall how every album afforded them extra artistic freedom within the studio, particularly specializing in the expertise of recording Queen II.
“Really, I think Queen II was the first time we were allowed a certain amount of freedom in the studio, whereas with the first album we weren’t,” says Taylor, “so basically it sounds better and more like the way we wanted it to sound. I don’t think it’s perfect by a long way, but we were building our confidence in the studio. It had a lot more light and shade.”
Might particularly factors to the ambition of 1974’s Queen II. “I’ve always been a big advocate of that album because I think it was a giant step. We’re going from a band that is hardly allowed in the studio – except a few hours in dead time – to a band that actually has studio time,” he says. “We can indulge ourselves. We can experiment, and we make a giant leap with painting pictures on the canvas of the tapes on Queen II. I love that album.”
Taylor recollects how the band pursued extra typical manufacturing on their third album, 1974’s Sheer Coronary heart Assault. “In general, that was a hard-hitting, more simplified album. And, in my opinion, that was to its credit. The songs were good, they weren’t too long, weren’t over-elaborate. It was more stuff we could actually play live without getting too much into studio trickery.”
However Queen’s pure tendency in direction of the bold and grandiose set their course for A Evening At The Opera. “We’ve done Sheer Heart Attack, it’s done quite well. But really, our heart is in chiselling out these unusual places,” Might says. “In those days, it was fun, because it’s like getting a new car and seeing what you can do with it. It’s the four of us – with Mike Stone, the engineer and Roy Baker, our producer – and we’re all learning how to use the studio. Pushing things ever-further.”
“For any song we took on, no matter who amongst the four of us had brought it in, it was an exhilarating process,” remembers Might “challenging, sometimes difficult, sometimes argumentative – but really rewarding, because what you got in the end was something so shiny, rounded, adventurous and dangerous. It became Queen stuff – and Queen stuff was a million times greater than anything that any one of the four of us could come up with on their own…”
Order Bohemian Rhapsody right here and A Evening on the Opera right here.
