Brian May revealed the story behind Queen’s ‘The Night Comes Down’ in a recent episode of ‘Queen the Greatest,’ a video series celebrating the new remastered and expanded box set of their self-titled debut.
Following the track’s 7-inch vinyl release last month, May said, “The funny thing is it’s also a bit of a sort of protest song in a way because we were told in these little excursions we’d had into studios – ‘You can’t mix acoustic guitar with electric guitar.’ And we’d go ‘Well why?’ ‘Well, because the electric guitar is too loud’. I’d go, ‘Don’t be ridiculous. You can make it as loud as you want in the mix.’ But there was this sort of myth around ‘Oh, it’s not going to work.’”
He continued, “So, I wanted to sort of prove to myself that you could make the acoustic guitar the front instrument, and the electric guitars could be actually behind. So, the electric guitars, when they go ‘ne ne ne,’ they’re like a sort of string quartet behind the acoustic guitar, and they’re not too loud because you have got the right volume in your mix.”
Queen’s first album saw release on July 13, 1973, through EMI Records in the U.K. and Elektra Records in the U.S. The recording sessions for the ten-track set took place at Trident Studios and De Lane Lea Music Centre in London.
The band re-worked the record for a new box set to bring back the sound they intended for the original. “I’m not saying the original version was bad – it just wasn’t what we dreamed of,” May explained. “Freddie [Mercury] and John [Deacon], too, were always conscious of this thing in our past which seemed like it couldn’t be fixed.”
‘Queen I Collector’s Edition’ arrived on October 25, 2024. Justin Justin Shirley-Smith, Joshua J Macrae, and Kris Fredriksson engineered it.