Roger Taylor has detailed his frustration about the drum sound on Queen's first album, which the band finally fixed when revisiting the recordings for last year's 50th anniversary Queen I box set.
Prior to being signed, Queen recorded a demo at De Lane Lea Studios in Wembley, North London, in late 1971. The songs included Keep Yourself Alive, Liar, Jesus, Great King Rat and The Night Comes Down, all of which the band rerecorded when they relocated to Trident Studios in Soho to work on their debut album the following year. The studio had successfully played host to the likes of David Bowie, Elton John and Lou Reed, but Taylor wasn't happy with the setup.
“At De Lane Lea, we’d just turn up and do what we can – and quickly," says Taylor, in the latest episode of their ongoing video series Queen The Greatest. "At Trident, it did feel like, ‘OK, now we're in it’, but I didn’t really get on with their ideas. They had a drum booth and it was a well-known sound: very dry and dead, which is not what I wanted.
"I wanted to hear the drums resonate. I didn't want it to go ‘thud, whack’. But that's what they wanted. There was cloth over everything, and everything was taped down.”
“I didn't even have my proper kit in there. I had to play this shitty little kit. It was just awful. We were told: ‘This is the Trident sound’. But we didn't want the Trident sound. We wanted our sound. I really had a bad time playing that kit, which is why, actually, if you listen to the demos – which I played on my relatively cheap kit in De Lane Lea – it's a higher standard of drumming. It’s quite busy, but it makes sense. And it's just better to listen to."
For the Queen I set, the band were able to use current technology to tweak the drum sound to bring it in line with what they'd always intended, and Queen The Greatest Special: The Drum Sound (Episode 6) goes into more detail, sharing three samples of Taylor's isolated drum tracks from side two opener Liar – the De Lane Lea and Trident versions, as well the remixed 2024 sound.
“What we've done now with Queen I is we’ve used all the actual recordings but made it sound more like we wanted it to sound at the time," says Taylor. "So it’s 'liver', the drums are more alive and more ambient. So, for me, it's a significant improvement, and I know Brian [May] feels the same."
Queen I is available from the Queen store.
