The Story Of Queen I The Album Cover Reveals On The Greatest
(Hollywood Records) Queen The Greatest Special Latest series of The Greatest celebrates newly released Queen I boxset. With the remixed, remastered and expanded version of Queen's classic 1973 debut album now available, The Greatest goes behind the scenes with Brian May and Roger Taylor to explore the creation of this landmark album.
The band has released the latest episode, "The Story Of Queen I The Album Cover". Not only pushing the musical envelope, Queen also tested their visual ingenuity with the DIY sleeve art for 1973's self-titled debut album. Now, in this exclusive video interview for the new episode of Queen The Greatest, Brian May looks back at the challenges of creating a head-turning cover in a time before Photoshop.
Nothing came easy on Queen's self-titled debut album. From wrangling studio time to challenging their label over the mix, the band battled all the way to the release of Queen in July 1973. It's only now, a half-century later, that the lineup can finally take unreserved pride in the music on the newly remixed, remastered and extended Queen I boxset. Likewise, as Brian May reveals in the new episode of Queen The Greatest, creating the album's original artwork in '73 was a DIY challenge that pushed their ingenuity to the limit - and it's never looked better than in the refreshed Queen I package.
Regularly voted the most iconic rock singer of them all, Freddie Mercury would be immortalised in a thousand images over the course of his career. Back in 1973, however, Brian cast his then-unknown singer as the star of Queen's first sleeve. "I had this premonition that Freddie was special and he was going to be our icon. So, I thought it would be nice just to have Freddie as a symbol, like the figurehead on a Viking ship. I found this picture of him onstage, which Doug Puddifoot had taken standing in a spotlight, and I liked the way the spotlight looked because it looked like a comet in the sky.
"In an age before Photoshop," explains Brian, "he had no option but to physically slice the Freddie figure from Puddifoot's original photograph with a scalpel. And that was basically the cover and everyone liked it. Freddie had designed this lovely special font for Queen. So, we said, 'okay, we'll go with that.'"
Even more ambitious was the reverse sleeve, which saw the guitarist and singer cut 'n' paste a collage of candid snaps showing the bandmembers at work and play. "We had this idea that we could portray our lives at the time on the back of the record, with some Easter eggs and symbolic imaging. Of course, you see, I have this thing about penguins - which we later echoed in the 'I'm Going Slightly Mad video.'"
For Queen scholars, the album's credits - recreated in full on the new boxset - were also noteworthy, with the frontman billed as Freddie Mercury for the first time and bassist John Deacon reversing his name for added gravitas. "'Deacon John' is down to (producer) John Anthony," recalls Brian. "He wanted things to be grand and memorable, and he thought having a pseudonym was a good idea. Freddie was already Freddie Mercury rather than Freddie Bulsara or Farrokh Bulsara. But when the tracks were first played on the John Peel Show, that hadn't got through. So, John Peel, who was a big disc jockey at the time, read out a previous blurb: 'Well, here we have a record by Queen, a new group, and it's Brian May and Freddie Bulsara and Deacon John'. So he'd read out what was on some previous blurb, but at that point Freddie had already decided he was Freddie Mercury, messenger of the gods."
Fifty years is a lifetime in design technology, and as Brian reminds us, the new Queen I boxset offers the best possible rendering of this famous artwork. "When we were recreating this for the new boxset, we went back to the original files, digitised them and recreated this whole back cover. Also, the front sleeve: I had great fun doing that because I went back to the original negative. Found Freddie, found the spotlight, aligned it all in the same way, and recreated it and it's slightly higher quality with a slightly different texture. I thought, we've recreated the whole album sound-wise, so let's recreate it visually as well..."
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