Brian May and Roger Taylor revealed a huge change last night in London while debuting an expanded and remixed edition of Queen’s self-titled debut: They’ve digitally retouched every single drum hit from the original sessions.
The group was initially tracked at London’s legendary Trident Studios under the guidance of eccentric producer Roy Thomas Baker. Queen was still so unproven, however, that they were relegated to recording during studio downtime.
“We were signed to the owners of the studio so that is why we got that [time],” Taylor said. “I remember there was Lou Reed and David [Bowie] producing Transformer. He’d just finished Hunky Dory and Ziggy. This was the place to be. The Beatles did ‘All You Need Is Love’ there. It really was the place to be – Harry Nilsson, etc. So we thought it was great – we’re in Trident!”
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As a result, no one felt empowered to complain about the in-house drums. “I remember Roger getting angry because he was in such an unfamiliar situation,” May said. “Instead of playing in a room with his kit, which he knows inside out, suddenly he is in a tiny little room with a foreign drum kit – which was tiny and transparent, as I remember.”
May described the drums as “plastic, all covered in tape – literally covered in all this tape. They’d taken most of the skin off the bass drum and it’s got a cushion inside. He’s trying to play this thing and he hates it!”
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They moved forward anyway, releasing Queen in July 1973. “I think you would have seen us very much immersed in it and we felt privileged to be there at all,” May said, “and we were enjoying each other’s company, and we were enjoying working with each other and developing new ideas.”
The LP rose to the U.K. Top 25 and eventually went gold in America – but May and Taylor were never completely satisfied with the result. They’ve now meticulously polished up Taylor’s drum sound and restored the original track listing, inserting “Mad the Swine” between “Great King Rat” and “My Fairy King” as they’d once hoped to do.
“It’s exactly how we wanted it,” May enthused. “We waited 52 years to get to this point, to make it the way it should have been in the first place. We always hated the fact that Roger wasn’t playing his own kit. It didn’t sound like Rodge.”
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