Last month, Sir Brian May and Roger Taylor announced Queen I, a remixed, remastered and expanded version of Queen’s classic 1973 debut album.
Released as a 7” single from the new boxset was The Night Comes Down, penned by the guitarist himself.
In a new video interview below, the 77-year-old rocked candidly shared the dark inspiration for the song’s lyrics.
He said: “The Night Comes Down evolved in my head, and in my own bedsit and the flats of the people I knew at the time. I would have this old acoustic guitar, which I still have, and I restrung it with wire strings. It was originally a gut guitar and, the bridge wasn’t high enough to make them vibrate cleanly.
“But I turned this into an advantage because I liked the buzzy sound. I’d put pins and needles in the bridge, which I’d carved out myself and stuck on the top. I bastardised this guitar. But it made this sound like a sitar but warmer. And I learnt to play lead on an acoustic, which wasn’t, in those days, done very much.
“You know, it’s a very cheap guitar I guess, it’s not like a Martin or a Gibson or whatever, but it has its own sound and it’s very much a part of that, the first Queen album, it’s all over it.”
The Night Comes Down ended up being a revealing entry into Sir Brian’s emotional state of mind in the early 1970s.
The Queen legend continued: “The song, actually, was about those moments when you’re not jolly. When you feel like you’ve lost it. When I look back at it, I was very young to be writing that stuff, but I did get depressed in those days. It was always about relationships, I was never any good with relationships. And I had moments when I thought, ‘I’m in a great place, I can make music. I’m with great friends. I’m at college doing stuff that I love doing. Everything’s great’. And then, somehow, everything would fall apart, and then it’s like the night came down in my head. So that’s what it’s about. It’s not a jolly song.”
He then shared how Freddie Mercury, Roger Taylor and John Deacon contributed to this early Queen song of his.
Sir Brian added: “I’d sung the song to him and Freddie, as always, would make it his own and take it to the next level, so there’s no doubt he added an enormous amount to it. Roger in those days was quite busy. He would do a lot of fills, but it fits so perfectly with the way we’re playing… and John picks up my riff and gives it his own kind of style and it blends with the acoustic really nicely. It’s got this really gluey, kind of heavy sound. I was really pleased that it sounded so different from everything else that was out there.”
