My Fairy King Having come all this way, it is really interesting to me to go back and check these out. I have never really understood the concept of the BBC studio sessions that seemed so common? Do they just rerecord songs with the BBC's facilities at their leisure? Anyhow, this songs very good to me.
Keep Yourself Alive This will always be among my favourite Queen tracks, and it is only on this thread that I found out the band had some issue with the recording. It has always sounded great to me.
Doing Alright After going through pretty much everything else they recorded, some of this early stuff really sounds very good. If nothing else, the thread has really helped me become more familiar with some of the material that was there but not prominent in my mind.
As an American I don't know of anything here that would be comparable to these BBC artifacts. I wonder if we even had access to these BBC gems at the time. One day in the future "box sets" may include Tiny Desk performances that artists are currently doing. Tiny Desk
If you can find them the 2011 reissues were also packaged in 3 boxes which included the 2CD sets. Amazon UK certainly has them - not badly priced either: https://www.amazon.co.uk/40-Limited...?keywords=queen+box+set&qid=1582125965&sr=8-4 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Queen-40th...?keywords=queen+box+set&qid=1582125965&sr=8-6 https://www.amazon.co.uk/40-Limited...B3Q69SX7XBH&psc=1&refRID=0KK8KFMYAB3Q69SX7XBH
BBC sessions were originally supposed to involve bands playing "live" in the radio studio, usually including album deep cuts, for broadcast on specialist music programmes (later on the John Peel sessions were legendary and have of course spawned dozens of releases). The Who BBC sessions are a good example where you can hear performances from the 60s right through to the mid 70s, complete with brief in-studio interviews with the band and DJ song introductions. It still happens a lot, on BBC6 radio mainly. Anyway I think the idea was to have stripped down band-only performances, but Queen's earlier BBC broadcasts are often just reworkings of the existing album multitracks, with new lead vocals or guitar solos overdubbed, rather than live "BBC sessions" in the usual sense. I always thought that was a shame but I can see the logic, that Queen saw the BBC sessions as a promotional tool and wanted to showcase the sound of their intricate multi layered recordings. They're still interesting to hear, though. I think this illustrates how (over) tightly Queen kept control of what was released under their name, and frankly that persists to these Bonus EPs, and indeed to the present day..
Special BBC session recordings were a happy consequence of the infamous 'needle time' restrictions that BBC music radio used to operate under. Probably as part of an agreement with the Musicians Union - and the studio technician's unions - the BBC were only allowed to play a certain amount of pre-recorded music on their radio channel every day. So much time was given over to live broadcasts, live in the BBC studio performances or tracks specially re-recorded 'in-house' by BBC technicians. All the legendary sessions for Peel and others fall into this third category. Although I think that the old 'needle time' restrictions have been lifted, 'live sessions' are still a fairly regular feature on BBC Radio 6 and BBC Radio 1.
See What A Fool I've Been It is nice to me to hear the guys doing a pretty solid blues, even though it is a Queenified blues. Good value.
Keep Yourself Alive session 2 Interesting that they recorded some of the same songs in the second session
Son And Daughter Nice grinding rocker. Again after having looked at this so long ago, it's interesting listening back now.
Ogre Battle I somehow always had a problem relating to Queen's earlier ... ahhhm ... dungeons and dragons/tolkienesque lyrics .... This thread has helped a lot with that, and I can enjoy these tracks much more these days .... I don't know why I had trouble with those type of lyrics from Queen ... I am a huge fan of Tolkien's books, and in a world I like to try and ignore, fantasy is a nice sideline entertainment .... I guess it took me too long to get into early Queen, and I already had an imprint in my miond about who the band were, or something.... not really sure.
Yes once they were recording albums they got the fairytale/folklore stuff out of their system quite quickly, but since they were so prolific you still get 3 albums released in eighteen months that are fairly crammed with fantasy stuff. I suppose it was the times, Genesis similarly dropped a lot of their heavy myth-based stuff around 74. Must say I initially got excited by the title "Dragon Attack" thinking Queen were going all Tolkien again. No siree
I think it is when and how I discovered Queen. I never really had a problem with Genesis' Fairytale lyrics ... for some reason Queen's Fairytale lyrics took a little getting used to.
You know... I'm suddenly wishing some band would rise to the challenge of writing a hard rock/funk album chock full of fantasy lyrics. Does such a thing exist in the wild?
I had never heard of that before. Were they also limited in how many hours these in-house recordings could be used or did the serve as a work-around?
I seem to have a vague memory of Kashmira Cooke doing an interview and speaking about the elaborate fantasies Freddie created when they were children. He would tell her these stories to help pass the time when they were on the long boat voyage to India. If I remember correctly she said she recognized many of them in his early music.
I nearly picked up the LP of 'On Air' when it came out for £50 but that seemed a bit much. I bought 'At The Beeb' when it came out in '89 which is great. I finally got 'On Air' online last year and really like it, especially the '77 Session. There were so many great sessions on the radio when I was a kid. Tommy Vance and Fluff Freeman used to put them in their shows and I filled up loads of cassettes taping them from the radio.
