To mark today’s launch of the limited-edition Queen I Dolby Atmos Audiophile Blu-ray, Sir Brian May and Roger Taylor have shared a brand new animated lyric video for one of the tracks from their remastered 1973 debut album.
The song in question is Freddie Mercury’s My Fairy King, featuring enchanted lyrics of images that are made manifest in the new official clip you can watch below.
Simon Lupton, co-founder of Seven Seas Films said: “The idea was to try and bring the fantastical creatures and images that Freddie paints in the lyrics to life. We know that Freddie was heavily influenced by art, so our thought was to imagine what if this song was about a painting Freddie had seen – or done – and his lyrics were inspired by it. So all the individual images come together into one ‘painting’. We then combined that with striking images of the band from that era.”
Sir Brian reflected: “My Fairy King was the first time we’d really seen Freddie working at his full capacity… it was the first of these sort of epics where there were lots of voice overdubs and harmonies.” As explained during an interview with the Library Of Congress, the Queen guitarist shared how the track led the way for future Queen hits like Bohemian Rhapsody: “We’d already dealt with a lot of complexity, I suppose you would call it. If you look at My Fairy King, first of all, you would hear Freddie playing some bits and you’d say, ‘Well, what’s that?’ He’d say, ‘Well, this bit goes with this bit’ and whatever. So we were used to sort of building things up in the studio.”
The video announcement shared: “Written in the heady days following Queen’s 1970 formation, My Fairy King was one of the first hints at Freddie’s boundless vision and musicality. Set in the fantasy kingdom of Rhye – an imaginary realm dreamt up by the singer and his sister Kashmira in childhood – the song invites us into a kingdom where ‘dragons fly like sparrows’ and ‘rivers are made from wine so clear’. The lyric also quotes from Robert Browning’s The Pied Piper in its depiction of a land where ‘horses [are] born with eagle wings’ and ‘honey bees have lost their stings’. Mirroring the wordplay is one of the young band’s most ambitious musical arrangements, which shapeshifts from the ethereal dreamscape intro to the hard-rocking sections as pillagers invade Rhye to ‘run like thieves and kill like knives’. Even in those early days, the lineup’s instrumental skills are on full display, from Freddie’s barrelling piano attack to Brian’s edgy harmony guitar – with Roger’s gravity-defying falsetto particularly prominent in the cascade of vocals.”