This week’s episode of the official YouTube documentary series Queen The Greatest Live features new interviews with Sir Brian May and Roger Taylor.
This time the pair have explored the songs that transcended their studio roots to become entirely different beasts live.
The drummer shared: “I think some songs are written with the idea of how it might sound live, like Sheer Heart Attack for instance. I always thought that would go, that would play, if we play that fast, that will go live.”
Meanwhile, the guitarist spoke of how I Want It All was always envisioned as a live track, but there’s one Freddie Mercury song in particular that Queen believed would probably never work on stage.
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Sir Brian shared: “I think there’s various processes. Sometimes you’re in the middle of writing a song in the studio and you think, how would that be live? And it actually informs your recording process because you’ve fashioned it towards being a sort of live feeling kind of track, something like I Want It All, it’s pretty much designed to be a live track.
“Other songs not. Something like The Miracle. I don’t think that was ever envisaged to be a live song, and it never was. It was purely a creation in the studio, something which would be hard to reproduce on stage… I’m not saying it’s impossible. I’m sure you could, but it wouldn’t be directed towards the stage performances.”
Nevertheless, there were some songs that Queen realised could work live if taken with a slightly different approach, like Love Of My Life.
Sir Brian said: “We had this piano song, which would have been very difficult to do live. It’s got all these beautiful overdubs of harmonies. How would you do it live? And I remember just sitting with Freddie and going, ‘Well, we could do it acoustic and you could just sing it’.
“It happened quite quickly. I just found ways of doing it, which are actually not very close to the record, but it compressed it all into something we could perform quite easily and we could invite the audience to sing with us – which they did.”
Next week’s episode of Queen The Greatest Live focuses on We Will Rock You.
