Free Queen: The Complete Works by Georg Purvis Page A

‘I Can Hear Music’ and ‘Goin’ Back’ with Freddie, tracks released in mid-1973 under the pseudonym Larry Lurex.
    Elsewhere on the album, the band strayed close to overproduction, but considering the times and the songs that were being submitted for recording, arrangements that may have been labelled then as contrived and self-indulgent are now considered classic. The best-produced song is undoubtedly ‘The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke’, inspired by Hendrix with the panning of sounds from side to side; it takes repeated listens to experience all that is going on, and is best investigated using headphones. The drum sound had improved considerably, with Roger achieving a thunderous attack on his own composition, ‘The Loser In The End’. On other songs, the instruments aren’t very clear and can sometimes be difficult to differentiate, but it all adds to the mood and atmosphere of the album. While Queen would sound clearer and more accomplished on subsequent albums, they would never sound better.
    “For some strange reason we seemed to get a rather different feel on the album,” Brian observed to BBC’s Radio One in 1983, “because of the way we were forced to record it, and even allowing for the problems we had none of us were really displeased with the result ... Led Zeppelin and The Who are probably in there somewhere because they were among our favourite groups, but what we are trying to do differently from either of those groups was this sort of layered sound. The Who had the open-chord guitar sound, and there’s a bit of that in ‘Father To Son’, but our sound is more based on the overdriven guitar sound, which is used for the main bulk of the song, but I also wanted to build up textures behind the main melody lines.”
    The band all individually later admitted that they were like children let loose in the candy store, using the studio as an instrument and getting bogged down by production touches. John told the specialty magazine release Queen File in 1974, “ Queen II , like the other albums, is good because of the time we spent on the production. On Queen II we did all the guitar overdubs, the acoustics, bells, lots of piano; in other words, everything! We go to all the mixes, we don’t just leave it to the producer. Even after the mixing we spent two weeks at Trident whilst the album was being cut.” Freddie told Sounds in 1976, “I did discipline myself ... Take vocals, because they’re my forte – especially harmonies and those kind of things. On Queen II [we went] berserk.” Brian told Sounds in 1984, “When Queen II came out it didn’t connect with everyone. A lot of people thought we’d forsaken rock music. They said, ‘Why don’t you play things like “Liar” and “Keep Yourself Alive”?’, which were on the first album. All we could say was, ‘Give it another listen, it’s there, but it’s all layered, it’s a new approach.’ Nowadays people say, ‘Why don’t you play like Queen II ?’ A lot of our close fans think that, and I still like that album a lot. It’s not perfect, it has the imperfections of youth and the excesses of youth, but I think that was our biggest single step ever ... [It] did OK but we felt it had been misunderstood by a lot of people ... We were slated for that album by the critics; the critics unanimously hated it, wrote it off as worse than rubbish.”
    The album cover became an instant icon in the glam rock circle, and also launched Queen’s foray into music videos the following year. “It was just one of those flashes of inspiration that happens sometimes,” explained photographer Mick Rock, who had shown Freddie a photograph of Marlene Dietrich. “There was a feeling that [echoing the Dietrich pose] might be pretentious. To Freddie, that word was meaningless – ‘but is it fabulous?’ was all that mattered. Those were the days of androgyny, and Freddie was prepared to push it quite a way.” Added Freddie, “It doesn’t have any