Last year Queen put out a remastered and remixed edition of their debut album and now the final episode of an official series of interviews on the recording has released today.
In the video below with Roger Taylor, the Queen drummer shared his frustrations recording the band’s first record with Freddie Mercury, Brian May and John Deacon.
Back in 1972, the band had recorded their demo reel at De Lane Lea Studios and now had access to Trident Studios to start work on their self-titled debut album.
However, Roger’s creative vision for his drum part’s sound was somewhat lost during the rushed sessions.
And it is only now on the newly released Queen I that fans can hear what he originally envisioned.
Roger shared: “At De Lane Lea, we’d just turn up and do what we can – and quickly. At Trident, it did feel like, ‘OK, now we’re in it’, but I didn’t really get on with their ideas. They had a drum booth and it was a well-known sound: very dry and dead, which is not what I wanted. I wanted to hear the drums resonate. I didn’t want it to go ‘thud, whack’. But that’s what they wanted. There was cloth over everything, and everything was taped down.”
The Queen drummer lamented: “I didn’t even have my proper kit in there. I had to play this sh***y little kit. It was just awful. We were told: ‘This is the Trident sound’. But we didn’t want the Trident sound. We wanted our sound. I really had a bad time playing that kit, which is why, actually, if you listen to the demos – which I played on my relatively cheap kit in De Lane Lea – it’s a higher standard of drumming. It’s quite busy, but it makes sense. And it’s just better to listen to.”
Roger added: “What we’ve done now with Queen I is we’ve used all the actual recordings but made it sound more like we wanted it to sound at the time. So it’s ‘liver’, the drums are more alive and more ambient. So, for me, it’s a significant improvement ,and I know Brian feels the same.”