Queen II

A month after the debut came out, Queen were back at Trident to start the second album, provisionally titled Over the Top and before that Dearie Me, neither of which EMI liked. This time the band could use the studio in normal hours and take the time to try out new textures and sounds. Robin Geoffrey Cable, Roy Thomas Baker and Queen produced it, with Mike Stone engineering. The album was mixed and ready by September 1973, but EMI held it back so soon after the debut, and the energy crisis, with Britain's three-day week and a vinyl shortage, delayed manufacture by months. The two sides were called Side White and Side Black. Side White holds Brian May's four songs and Roger Taylor's "The Loser in the End"; Side Black is all Freddie Mercury's, and John Deacon had yet to write for the band. May wrote "Father to Son" with his own father in mind, "White Queen (As It Began)" dates from 1968, and "Some Day One Day" is his first lead vocal. On the black side, Mercury's "Ogre Battle", written on guitar, leads to "The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke", inspired by Richard Dadd's painting of the same name, with Baker on castanets, and May calls "The March of the Black Queen" a forerunner of "Bohemian Rhapsody". The closing "Seven Seas of Rhye" completes the fragment that ended the debut. Mick Rock shot the cover, working from a photograph of Marlene Dietrich that Mercury had seen; about two years later the band recreated the image in the "Bohemian Rhapsody" video. On 21 February 1974 Queen made their first Top of the Pops appearance, standing in for David Bowie, with "Seven Seas of Rhye", which reached No. 10. The album followed on 8 March 1974 as a UK tour got under way, climbed to No. 5 and earned a gold disc in Britain; in America it reached No. 49. May later called it the biggest leap the band ever made. In Japan it was released in June 1974. In 2026 a new mix by Justin Shirley-Smith, Joshua J Macrae and Kris Fredriksson, with May and Taylor as executive producers, came out in a Collector's Edition, and the album re-entered the UK chart at No. 14.