Queen

Queen grew out of Smile, the group Brian May and Roger Taylor had with Tim Staffell. Staffell introduced his college friend Freddie Mercury, who joined once Staffell had left, and John Deacon completed the line-up on bass in 1971. Of the demos the band made at De Lane Lea Studios that December, "Keep Yourself Alive", "Great King Rat", "Jesus" and "Liar" were reworked for the album. Signed to Trident's Neptune Productions, Queen recorded at Trident Studios with Roy Thomas Baker and John Anthony, allowed in only when no one else was using the rooms; "The Night Comes Down" is the De Lane Lea recording. May's "Keep Yourself Alive" changed shape once Mercury worked on the lyric, with May and Taylor now singing the bridge. "Doing All Right" dates from the Smile days, written by May and Staffell, and May plays its piano. Mercury introduced his imaginary kingdom of Rhye in "My Fairy King" and added Hammond organ to "Liar", a song he wrote in 1970, and the record closes with "Seven Seas of Rhye...", an instrumental of little more than a minute. Tired of hearing May's multi-tracked guitars mistaken for synthesizers, the band noted on the sleeve that nobody played one, a line that stayed on their records until The Game in 1980. The cover grew from Douglas Puddifoot's photograph of Mercury under a single spotlight at an early concert. Released by EMI after many other labels had turned it down, the album came out in Britain on 13 July 1973, and that evening Queen played the first date of a short tour in Basingstoke. Elektra issued it in America that September, and it reached No. 83 on the Billboard album chart. In Britain it entered the chart only in March 1974, after Queen II had taken off, and peaked at No. 24 in February 1976; it went gold in both countries. A few weeks after the release May said most of the songs were about three years old and the band had already moved beyond them. In Japan it came out on 25 March 1974 and reached No. 52 there. In 2024 it returned as the remixed Queen I, with "Mad the Swine", left off the original LP, restored as the fourth track.