02-28-1977 – Circus Magazine

Part 1: The Queen Tapes
by Mick Houghton

Stargazing Guitarist Brian May Turns the Telescope on Himself and Talks About What He Sees

IT’S STRANGE, because the people who were in the Others at school then, were kind of rebels who weren’t interested in the academic side and were disapproved of by the establishment. I admired them because they got on with what they wanted to do, which was play music. [The Others was Brian May’s first rock group; they made a single in 1964, ‘Oh Yeah’]

I was very much the academic then, partly through inclination and partly through upbringing, so, while I played in various groups, none of them ever got anywhere because we never actually played any real gigs or took it that seriously. I was envious of those people at the time for making the break, yet now they’ve all gone back to respectable jobs or studying – computers, dentistry, one of them was working for EMI – whereas I did it the other way round after completing my studies.

In a way, their experience, although they were really messed around by their managers, made me want to commit myself more because it was a world I wanted and knew I had to deny myself at the time. It was two or three years after that before Smile, my first serious group, got going, but by then I was equally involved academically and felt it was a waste of time not to see it through, having come that far (in astronomy – on the movements of interplanetary dust). As you know, even now, my PhD is virtually complete, but there’s no way I can finish that, given the pressures and commitments of Queen. The fruits of that endeavor have come out, though. The papers have been published and are available to the scientific world, so it isn’t wasted. The only reason to complete it would be to get a piece of paper saying that I’m a Doctor. That’s not very crucial, is it? Whereas with Queen, I’m still in the position where I’ve got to pursue it to its conclusion, if there is a conclusion.

It’s hard to see what that could be. There’s the concrete terms like measuring it by success but those aren’t the reference points to choose. I guess there will come a point when I feel we, or I, or both aren’t progressing. Then I’ll have to think seriously about what I’m doing. It’s like my progress as a guitar player has slowed down considerably in terms of actual technique, but where I’m advancing is in the ideas and general feel for what I’m doing. And then there’s the sense of an audience which grows up on you, which is something you never bargain for at first when you are just playing for yourself from some internal drive. Once you discover people are actually listening, it becomes a completely different world. Playing to people becomes worthwhile in its own sense, so the fact that my music still gives other people pleasure has become a major factor in my continuing.

I suppose it seems like there’s a rule that Freddie (Mercury) and I divide up most of the albums in terms of writing and give John (Deacon) and Roger (Taylor) one song each, the way Beatles’ albums seemed to be planned, as some suggest. John is probably the slowest writer, he’s newer to it, but at the same time he’s written a hit in America, which I haven’t and that’s great. Roger has more material than the group’s done but it’s just a question of choosing material to give albums the right balance. There are no hard and fast rules.

The creative balance has shifted to become more of a group thing. With the enormous time that we spend in the studio it’s inevitable that a lot of the time all the group aren’t there together, so the contributions that we make have become more complementary. I think this is a very important time for the group, where it would be easy for us to go off and do each’s separate thing but our strength, and of any group, is that we realize how to use each other in a complementary fashion. That’s the most important thing we have.

It’s a very delicate balance, though, very precarious like a marriage, because knowing people that well you could be destructive as well as constructive. I’m very conscious that the balance could be easily upset even by something from the outside which threatens the band internally. That’s why it worries me if the media concentrates on me or Freddie to the exclusion of the others.

John and Roger are so crucial to everything we do, they are not only a rhythm section. Nothing is farther from the truth. It’s like John is the quiet one, all the press releases and so on always say that, and it’s true, but in many areas he’s the leader more and more these days. I visualize that the balance will change further internally as time goes by…adjust to individual changes. It probably comes across to our hard core followers, but the danger is with our mass audience who, say, only buy the singles, and don’t understand the group. I’d like everyone to be aware of the group as a whole.

Queen were very late developers. Like, I was contemporary with the people in the Others, that we were talking about, who had a recording contract in 1964. We started late in the big world of music. We were not let loose on the public until a lot later. We were playing pretty interesting material in the late Sixties. I could play you tapes of Smile which have the same general structures to what we’re doing now. There was no way to take it any further at the time. It was hard to get an in without fully committing yourself. I’ll say one thing for punk rock at the moment: it is creating a way that groups can get a start, which in itself is very healthy. I think maybe people are being pushed into the limelight too soon, and there’s a tendency to concentrate on image to the exclusion of the musical area.

We never had that trouble because we were just totally ignored for so long, and then, completely slagged off and slated by everyone. In a way that was a very good start for us. There’s no kind of abuse that wasn’t thrown at us. It was only around the time of Sheer Heart Attack that it began to change, but we still got slagged off a fair bit even then. I’m always affected by criticism. I think most artists are even if they say they’re not. It doesn’t matter how far you get, if somebody says you’re a load of shit it hurts. But that was just press response, because for the rest it was building up very steadily. Queen II sold really well over a longish period and coincided with us breaking ground concert-wise.

It’s hard to think what could give us the same sort of buzz as that initial recognition by people who would come to see us regularly around the time of our first album, when they had no reason to come to gigs other than something “special” they saw or got from the band. Recently, Hyde Park was a high…the occasion rather than the gig. You know, the tradition of Hyde Park. I went to see the first one with the Floyd and Jethro Tull – great atmosphere and the feeling that it was free. We felt it would be nice to revive that but it was fraught with heartbreak in a way ’cause there were so many problems. Trying to get the place for the evening was so hard, trying to get it at all was hard enough. We had to make compromises which we don’t like and it got very political. The whole day ran to schedule but for a half hour, which was remarkable considering the hassles at every stage, but that half hour meant we couldn’t do the encore. It sounds trivial I know, but that’s the part of the show where we feel most at home. We’ve got the approval and can really enjoy ourselves and to be denied that, having worked up to such a pitch, was very hard to take. I was very depressed. The encore isn’t just a set piece, it’s a bonus thing for us as well as the audience. It doesn’t matter how tense the gig has been – the sense of release is always welcome.

I hate to think of music as a competition, but that element is there and only a limited number of people can draw big audiences, so I suppose music is competitive in that sense. Whenever I meet a group on the road, though, I don’t feel that. You just usually want to get close to one another. Competition can be good in some ways. As you know, we’re taking Thin Lizzy as a support, and Lizzy as a support band is a real challenge. Obviously they will want to blow us off the stage, and that can be a very healthy thing. You feed off the energy of others and I know that if they go down a storm we’re gonna go on feeling that much higher. It makes for good concerts. We’ve had it the other way round, we gave Mott the Hoople a hard time on our first tours here and in America.

Then, there’s the “we’re the biggest” kind of rivalry between groups, which is largely a media thing, but it does mean more ’cause it’s easy to get a buzz out of success. You need new things to get excited about, so we’re doing New York’s Madison Square this tour. It’s a thrill and a challenge, but after that I suppose we’ll want to do something bigger and better. We’re aware of the dangers, because obviously you can lose something along the way if you start doing really big places where you can’t really project. To say something for us I think we’ve done it gradually. We haven’t tried to run before we could walk. The last tour we could have done bigger places, but we chose to play smaller places for a few nights instead, with one or two large venues only, to get the feel of it. Now we feel we can really cope with a tour like the current one. Everything will be that much better. We’ll be that much better – larger than life.