Credit: Raph Pour-Hashemi
Tue 11 August 2026 18:30, UK
When Brian May first stepped into the studio with Queen, he had a very clear vision of the kind of guitarist that he wanted to be.
There were plenty of great artists making waves throughout the rock scene at the time, and so with their sounds lingering around in his head, when May first went into the studio, he did so with the intention of channelling them. That meant attempting to lay down the kind of music that you would hear from the likes of Buddy Holly, Jimi Hendrix, Pete Townshend and Jeff Beck.
However, while he might have had a clear idea about how he wanted to sound, May wound up being pretty disappointed with the way the first Queen record came out. The circumstances surrounding the recording were all wrong, and it led to the creation of a style of music that was leaps and bounds away from what the band actually intended to do.
“Our major frustration was the sound of that first album, which we were never happy with,” said May, “We were thrown into the studio and into a system which regarded itself as state of the art. Trident Studios were very emergent as a force in the world. And they thought they had it down.”
The Queen guitarist continued, “But the Trident sound was very dead. It was the opposite of what we were aiming for. So Roger’s drums would be in a little cubicle, and all the drums would have tape on them. They’d all be dead and down. I remember saying to Roy Thomas Baker, ‘This isn’t really the sound we want, Roy’, and he said, ‘Don’t worry, we can fix it all in the mix’. Which, of course, is not the best way, is it? And I think we all knew: it ain’t going to happen!”
The issues surrounding their first album put pressure on those that followed. Granted, Queen went on to have a load of hits, but there were still debates about how a record should be put together, what the order of songs should be, and whether or not they might be pushing things too far creatively. It’s pretty well documented how unsure label executives were about the now classic ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, but it turns out the band had similar reservations when it came to the creation of ‘We Will Rock You’.
While the former track was too complicated, May was worried that ‘We Will Rock You’ was far too simple, as the stomp and clap approach isn’t what a lot of people had come to expect from a band like Queen, and so May worried that he might have been selling the entire group short. However, the moment he heard Freddie Mercury dominating the vocals, he knew that the band were onto something special.
Further reading: From The Vault
May knew the song was going to be huge, but he still needed to convince his band members, and while he wanted to open the album with it, Roger Taylor wasn’t keen. The simplistic approach could work, sure, but was it how you wanted to introduce people to a new album? Taylor knew that if they didn’t hook listeners right away, people would likely zone out, similar to what happened on their debut. Eventually, May managed to convince Taylor, which he was grateful for, as he wound up describing the track as a “bolt out of heaven”.
“I fought that corner. And generally, I didn’t win those arguments, but this time I won. So that was the beginning of the album,” said May, “It probably sounds all very obvious now, because everybody gets the audience to clap and sing along, but that’s not the way rock ’n’ roll was in those days. And I think it was a great bolt out of heaven. Looking back, it’s a no-brainer, but at the time, it was a radical departure.”
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