“I remember my dad saying, ‘There’s no ambience, Brian. I don’t feel like I’m in the room with you playing next to me’”: Why Brian May and Queen were unhappy with their debut album – and how the newly revamped version fixes the “very dry” guitar parts

Queen I, the legendary band's 1973 debut, presented a band full of ambition and genre-hopping ideas, offering a sneak peek into what would become a legendary career.

Fast-forward to 2024, and Queen has now unveiled a reworked version of the album that started it all, in the form of an opulent six-CD, one-LP deluxe box set – including alternative takes, live recordings, demos, and revamped guitar parts.

“Every instrument has been re-examined from the bottom up,” Brian May tells MOJO. “The guitars were originally recorded very dry, so we’ve remedied that. I remember my dad saying, ‘There’s no ambience, Brian. I don’t feel like I’m in the room with you playing next to me.’

Queen – Keep Yourself Alive (2024 Special Edition)(Official Video) - YouTube

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“But we weren’t in a position to lay down the law, and we felt that if we stepped out of line we would lose the opportunity altogether.”

May goes on to say that while producer Roy Thomas Baker did a great job given the circumstances, he found himself in a difficult position, wedged between the “young hopefuls” and a “management company [Trident Audio Productions] who saw us as a can of beans.”

The guitarist clarifies that he isn’t saying the original version was bad; rather, “it just wasn’t what we dreamed of.” He reveals that both Freddie Mercury and John Deacon were quite unhappy with some parts and were “conscious” of an important piece of their past that “seemed like it couldn’t be fixed.”

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The reworked version doesn't take away the magic of the original, but as May stresses, it amplifies it.

“All the performances are exactly as they originally appeared in 1973, but every instrument has been revisited to produce the ‘live’ ambient sounds we would have liked to use originally,” he writes on his official website. “The result is ‘Queen’ as it would have sounded with today’s knowledge and technology – a first.”

In other Brian May news, the Queen guitarist recently endorsed The Last Dinner Party's Emily Roberts, referring to the band as “the new British Rock Royalty”.

Queen I is now available from the official Queen store.