Inside the Magic of the Second Queen Album

Why Queen II was where the band’s sound began coming into greater focus

March 10, 2024March 10, 2024 Gillian G. Gaar 1 Comment 1974, 50th anniversary, Brian May, Elektra Records, Freddie Mercury, John Deacon, Ogre Battle, Queen, Queen II, Roger Taylor, Roy Thomas Baker, Seven Seas of Rhye

Photographer Mick Rock had found the perfect inspiration for his latest assignment; shooting the cover of Queen’s second album (simply entitled Queen II).

It was a photograph of Marlene Dietrich from the 1932 film Shanghai Express, in luminous black and white, her chin in her hands, a cigarette with a smoldering inch of ash drooping from her right hand. Surrounded by a black background, her head appears to be floating in mid-air. Rock felt that the picture had the same air of glamour that Queen wanted to convey.

“I saw the connection immediately,” he told Freddie Mercury biographer Lesley-Ann Jones. “It was one of those visceral, intuitive things. Very strong. Very clear. Glamorous, mysterious, and classic. I would transpose it into a four-headed monster. They had to go for it.” Freddie instantly grasped what Rock wanted to do. “I shall be Marlene,” he told the photographer. “What a delicious thought!”

Queen II was the album where the band’s sound began coming into greater focus. “I think that set our direction more than anything else,” Brian May, Queen’s guitarist, told Melody Maker. “Queen II was a point where all the adventurous ideas came out.” Their debut album, Queen, released in 1973, had established the band as a presence in the British music scene. But the album only reaching #32 on the charts had been a disappointment; the accompanying single, “Keep Yourself Alive,” had failed to chart at all. That only made the band more determined. “They had a sense of their own destiny,” Rock told Mojo. And they were excited about the prospect of stretching the boundaries of what could be done in a recording studio. “If there are any ideas that you’ve had that you can’t use with boring, human type bands,” Mercury told their co-producer, Roy Thomas Baker, “we’ll try them out on this.” Baker later called Queen II “the ‘kitchen sink’ of every known Queen effect.”

And so the band went for broke. With a grandeur befitting their name, the album’s sides were not the parochial side one and side two, but “Side White” and “Side Black.” The former is mostly of May’s numbers. The opening instrumental, “Procession,” serves as something of an overture, its classical overtones melding the old and new in a similar fashion to Wendy Carlos’ interpretation of Henry Purcell’s “Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary,” which was played on synthesizer (and used in the opening sequence of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange). “Procession” was made up of layer after layer of May’s guitar work, harmonizing into infinity. “Brian was already on to something different, in terms of trying to orchestrate his guitars in a different way to how most people would approach it,” Baker later told Sound on Sound. “We never thought of Brian’s guitar as a raunchy instrument, like most guitarists do; it was an orchestral instrument.”

Typically, May’s songs are steeped in sadness, nowhere more so than on the lovelorn “White Queen (As It Began),” about a failed affair. The moody “Father to Son” hints at generational conflict (“Funny you don’t hear a single word I say”), the emotional turmoil reflected in May’s raging guitar solo. “Some Day One Day” is the only song that features May’s lead vocal. With the light touch of an acoustic folk number, and it’s also his only song that has any sense of hope; the couple in the song may currently be enmeshed in a “cloud of dark and fear,” but escape is still possible — one day.

The band’s drummer, Roger Taylor, brings Side White to a close with the taut “Loser in the End.” As the band’s resident rock ‘n’ roll animal (check out his “Modern Times Rock and Roll” on Queen), “Loser” is a plea for tolerance, addressed to all parents; let your offspring run a little wild when they’re young, or risk losing them forever. It’s the most straight-ahead rock song on the album, benefitting from Taylor’s raw, scraped vocal style, and capped by May’s searing guitar solo at the end.

Side Black is all Freddie, and it’s where he really lets his imagination run riot; it’s a tour de force of creativity. All the stops are pulled out from the beginning, as the swirling winds of the first track, “Ogre Battle,” rise and eventually explode into a whirling dervish of backwards sounds (including the first appearance of the gong that will later be heard in “Bohemian Rhapsody”). It’s a pummeling track, giddily racing from one climax to the next (with some nice cat-like screams from Taylor thrown in the middle). We then segue from fearsome ogres to the “quaere fellows” of “The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke,” based on Richard Dadd’s painting of the same name (Mercury insisted on taking the band and producer Baker to see it hanging at London’s Tate Gallery). The song, like the painting, is populated by kings and queens, gnomes and satyrs; it’s a fractured fairytale set to the tinkling sound of Mercury’s harpsichord.

VIDEO: Queen “Ogre Battle”

There’s a brief pause for “Nevermore,” the kind of piano ballad about heartache that Mercury excelled at, and then you’re launched into another extravagant set piece, “The March of the Black Queen.” It’s a phantasmagorical delight, with Mercury in swaggering form as “lord of all darkness,” May firing off salvos on his guitar, the song careening into an acapella vocal section to show off the group’s stellar vocal harmonies, then returning into full on rock mode. Then comes another segue, into one of Mercury’s most joyous songs, “Funny How Love Is.” It’s a vocally rich feast, with the band’s instrumental prowess taking a back seat to the group’s harmonies. Mercury’s lyrics are also delivered with a wink; while there’s some philosophizing (“Funny how love is the end of lies when the truth begins”), there are also lines that are rather more prosaic (“Funny how love is coming home in time for tea”).

After teasing the listener with a brief instrumental excerpt of “Seven Seas of Rhye” at the end of Queen, a full-length version concludes up the album, casting Mercury as another avenging lord of all darkness, though ending on an unexpectedly cheery note with a chorus from the English music hall number “I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside.”

In all, the album, particularly Side Black, is a great leap forward from the simpler arrangements on the band’s debut, and an indication about how quickly they learned to push studio technologies to their limits. There would be more of this to come.

The White/Black scheme of the record extended to the cover, which featured a black outer sleeve and a dazzling white for the inner gatefold. While most of the band had wanted the outer cover to be white, Freddie and the photographer held out for black, and they got their way in the end, “Which, as it turned out, was an amazingly fortunate decision,” Rock observed. Not only is it arguably Queen’s best album cover, the image would also be the starting point of their landmark “Bohemian Rhapsody” video.

VIDEO: Queen “Seven Seas of Rhye”

The album delivered the band’s first solid UK hit, peaking at #5, with the accompanying single, “Seven Seas of Rhye,” reaching #10 (U.S. success was still a year away). They promoted the single with an appearance on Top of the Pops, when David Bowie had to pull out of the show at the last minute. On the night the program aired, the band all gathered outside an electronics shops in London’s Kensington neighborhood to watch their performance on a TV set in the window, as no one yet owned a television.

That was destined to change. Queen had always attracted their naysayers; UK music weekly Record Mirror wrote of Queen II, “The band with the worst name have capped that dubious achievement by bringing out the worst album for some time.”

But New Musical Express writer Julie Webb was better at detecting the winds of change and more presciently noted, “Queen are big business and though you may hate them, they’re gonna confound you by being huge.”

After three long years, Queen was finally on their way to the big time.