Brian May revealed how Queen dealt with the negative reviews directed at their first album in the second part of their docuseries ‘Queen The Greatest Special: The Story of Queen 1.’
He shared, “We looked at some of the reviews for the Led Zeppelin albums that had been out at that time, some of which were appallingly bad. And we thought, well, if they can run these people down, we shouldn’t be too worried about being run down ourselves.”
“Being a band is a great help. I think if I’d been a solo artist, I think I’d have lain on the floor and cried. It was bad, but we had the four of us and it’s like, ‘screw these guys, we know what we’re doing.’ That saved us.”
Queen’s self-titled debut came out on July 13, 1973, through EMI Records in the U.K. and Elektra Records in the U.S. May wrote four of the album’s ten tracks, which were recorded at Trident Studios and De Lane Lea Music Centre in London.
The band reissued the record as a remixed, remastered, and expanded box set titled ‘Queen I Collector’s Edition’ on October 25, 2024. The guitarist said they aimed the new version ‘to sound the way the band always wanted it to.’
“I’m not saying the original version was bad – it just wasn’t what we dreamed of,” he explained to MOJO. “Freddie [Mercury] and John [Deacon], too, were always conscious of this thing in our past which seemed like it couldn’t be fixed.”
Recording engineers Justin Shirley-Smith, Joshua J Macrae, and Kris Fredriksson worked on the re-release.