Queen I

Queen I is the band's 1973 debut, Queen, remixed and restored by Justin Shirley-Smith, Joshua J Macrae and Kris Fredriksson, and the first Queen album ever to be given a new stereo mix. In the CD's sleeve notes Brian May calls it not a remaster but a complete 2024 rebuild of the debut, renamed Queen I with the benefit of hindsight. The performances are those of 1973, but every instrument was revisited to give the record the live, ambient sound the band had wanted. The original was recorded at Trident Studios in Soho over about four months from May 1972, mostly in the studio's night-time "downtime", with Trident's in-house producers John Anthony and Roy Thomas Baker; Roger Taylor has said the drums never sounded the way he wanted. "Mad the Swine" was left off the original LP after a disagreement between the band and one of the producers, and here it returns as the fourth track, between "Great King Rat" and "My Fairy King", as the band intended in 1972. "The Night Comes Down" alone uses a performance from the demos made at De Lane Lea Studios between November 1971 and January 1972: rather than re-record it at Trident, the band smuggled the multitrack tape in a box relabelled "Trident" and mixed it for the album. The 6CD and 1LP Collector's Edition holds 63 tracks, 43 of them new mixes: the De Lane Lea demos, unreleased takes in album order, backing tracks without lead vocals, four BBC sessions starting with the February 1973 session for John Peel's Radio 1 show, and live recordings centred on the March 1974 Rainbow Theatre show in London, plus "Hangman", an early stage staple never recorded in a studio, from San Diego in March 1976, and "Jesus" and "I'm A Man" from Imperial College in August 1970, the earliest Queen recordings in existence. Released on 25 October 2024, Queen I reached No. 10 in the UK, above the original's No. 24. In Japan Universal Music issued the Collector's Edition, limited to 1,500 sets (UICY-80529), and the single-CD edition (UICY-16255) the same day, and the two-disc Deluxe Edition (UICY-80530/1) on 13 November.