(Credits: Raph Pour-Hashemi)
Thu 5 February 2026 14:30, UK
It’s hard to think of any Queen song without looking at every member of the band.
Even though not all of the songs were written by everyone, there wasn’t a single tune that would have sounded right without Freddie Mercury’s layers of vocal harmonies or even John Deacon adding the perfect bassline to tracks like ‘Another One Bites the Dust’. But even when they were firing on all cylinders, Brian May felt that there were countless songs that could have been a lot better than they ended up.
But that’s really the nature of being in a band. Every musician is going to have their babies that they don’t want to part with every single time they walk into the studio, and even though May has classics like ‘We Will Rock You’ under his belt, there are always going to be tracks like ‘39’ that would work great in the right context but never reached the same iconic status as tunes like ‘You’re My Best Friend’ and ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’.
Then again, May’s songs may have been a lot harder for the public to latch onto. Compared to the pop-flavoured tunes that Mercury was used to writing, May was the rock and roll spirit of the band half the time he played, and even when they had perfect pop songs under their belt, hearing him wail away on guitar helped give every one of their tunes the edge that they needed to be played on stations and be appreciated by the rockers in the audience.
There was the massive lick at the end of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ and even the little bits of shredding in the middle of ‘Somebody to Love’, but ‘Tie Your Mother Down’ is everything that a rock and roll riff should be. The whole thing practically sounds like something that could have come off of an Aerosmith record, but even with that basic skeleton, the title was always going to be a sticking point for him.
The music was fine, but May had to be convinced by Mercury that the title was something that could have used, saying, “[I] got back with the band and I remember this as clear as day as well – I said to Freddie, ‘Look, I’ve got this really great riff; what do you think?’ ‘That’s really, really cool’. And I said, ‘I don’t have any words; all I have is that ‘tie your mother down,’ which obviously we can’t use.’ He went, ‘Yeah you can!’”
Sure, that kind of phrase sounds a little juvenile, but that may as well work in the song’s favour. May had already talked about making a guitar-driven answer to Mercury’s ‘Death on Two Legs’, and if that song was all about their manager was being a jackass behind the scenes, this was the kind of anthem that every kid wanted to play when their parents were complaining about their music being played too loud.
And it’s not like Queen had to be held to a high standard in the lyrical department every single time they went into the studio. There are some truly heartbreaking songs on some of their records, but no one was listening to a song like ‘Bicycle Race’ or ‘Fat Bottomed Girls’ later down the line and complaining that they weren’t offering the same sage wisdom that Dylan had been doing.
They were all out there to have some fun whenever they played, and even if ‘Tie Your Mother Down’ is a bit of a goofy title, it was always going to work as long as the music kicked ass. Not everything had to be so serious all the time, and if they could get away with a song with an operatic section and call-outs to Bizmillah and Galileo, there was more than enough room for some good old-fashioned rock and roll.
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