'A Day At The Races' (1976)

'A Day at the Races' is an overlooked masterpiece. It is the perfect realisation of all the styles Queen had explored on previous albums, perfectly performed and perfectly produced. It was that obsession with perfection that drew the ire of the critics. 

'A Night at the Opera' was such a triumph that Queen were in the difficult position of having to decide what to do next. Any deviation risked being criticised as a fall from grace. And yet 'Night' was so remarkable, so unique, that it would have been impossible to reproduce. There could also be no chance of repeating the shock value of releasing something so irreducibly exceptional. 'A Night at the Opera' was inimitable, an impossible act to follow. But Queen made the attempt anyway, this time in a more self-conscious manner. A better way of seeing these albums when set back to back is to see "Day" as fully working out all of the creative potentials created by "Night," not a repeat but a continuation and a consummation. The result was a polished album of superbly crafted songs which had balance and symmetry. If it was impossible to pull the magic rabbit out of the hat more than once, it was possible to lay hold of that rabbit given that it was still jumping and hone the magic for one more, final, statement. 

The band's intentions with respect to continuity were made plain by taking the title of another Marx Brothers' movie for the album's title, 'A Day At The Races.' The album is routinely dismissed as an attempt to repeat the sounds and successes of the previous album - as if such a thing could be so easily done! Music critics repeat themselves to a far greater extent than do musicians, lacking creativity in themselves. Even if the criticisms were true, that would still indicate an ambition and an execution that was far in excess of most other bands. Words like repetition lose their critical value in relation to a band that possessed a vision and imagination far in excess of the pop norm. All style and no substance is the essence of the critics' charges, 'all soft centres and no hard nuts' (as Peter Hogan's completely mistitled 'complete guide' to the music of Queen puts it). I remember the band being in the shadow of 'A Night at the Opera' and 'Bohemian Rhapsody,' with critics - predictably - claiming that the band were copying themselves, even parodying themselves, with the next album and singles. This is lazy, saying the easiest and most obvious things - the kind of things you could have predicted the critics saying even before the album had even been recorded. And that view gets reinforced by lazy repetition. There is an inevitability to such criticism. The same critics who never saw the triumph that was 'A Night at the Opera' coming now used that triumph to denigrate a follow-up of the same standard and stature. How terrible of Queen to have repeated, even perfected, the work of genius that the critics missed first time round! Critics are too daft to even laugh at. The critics set Queen up against the impossible standard they themselves had set and took barely concealed pleasure in doing the band down. 

There was another aspect to the criticism, equally shallow and superficial. In becoming so big and successful, Queen were now considered pop royalty, the establishment to be overthrown. Punk rock was on the horizon. I lived through punk and never remotely bought into its pretensions to be the voice of alienated youth. Coming from an old and declining industrial town, with pit closures on the horizon, leaving school to mass unemployment, I didn't need lessons on alienated youth, least of all from middle class art school types and pop 'journalists' fantasising about street-cred and revolution. More than anything, though, the music was pitiful, inept, thin, reedy, weedy, unambitious, unimaginative, boring. Punk was rubbish with a safety pin: ugly, talentless, reductive, unambitious, narrowing, lazy. Beaten. The justification was that anyone can do it. They probably could. That doesn't make it any good. I did like The Stranglers, though. And the bits that were good for a laugh. 

Dealing with critics and their fantasies is tedious and detracts attention away from the music. There's really no point to be proven against people who wrote articles like 'Is this man a prat?' These people are prats and know it; their trick is to get people talking about themselves and their concerns. So it is best to just ignore them as being of no relevance whatsoever. More fool anyone who listens to them.

'A Day At The Races' is a great album. Had this album preceded 'A Night at the Opera' it would have had the same impact and would have been heralded as an artistic triumph and masterpiece. The objection might be raised that there's no 'Bohemian Rhapsody' on the album, but that's neither fair criticism nor even quite true. First of all, 'Bohemian Rhapsody' is so unique that it would have been impossible to replicate it and unwise to try. Who has ever even come close to that track in the entire history of pop music? Had Queen attempted 'Bohemian Rhapsody' Mark II they would have been criticised for repetition. All the same, there is a grand and ambitious track on 'A Day at the Races' - the incredible 'Somebody to Love' with its vocally demanding combination of gospel and opera. If I had to choose the best ever Queen song, then there's a very good chance that I would choose 'Somebody to Love.' Freddie Mercury himself openly stated his view that 'Somebody to Love' is a 'better song' than 'Bohemian Rhapsody.' He's the author of both, so who is anyone to disagree? 

We can go through the rest of the album in the same way, making a track-by-track comparison between "Night" and "Day." The rock on 'A Day at the Races' easily stands comparison with the rock on 'A Night at the Opera,' with the likes of 'Tie Your Mother Down' making a livelier opener than 'Death on Two Legs' and 'White Man' being a more perfectly realized - and condensed - hard rock number than 'The Prophet's Song.' Both 'Good Old Fashioned Lover Boy' and 'the Millionaire Waltz' turn the whimsy of 'Lazing on a Sunday Afternoon' and 'Seaside Rendezvous' into pop perfection. 'You Take My Breath Away' serves as 'Love of my Life' and so on. (To those still inclined to dismiss this album as a mere copy of 'A Night at the Opera,' just listen to Freddie Mercury's vocal harmonies introducing 'You Take My Breath Away.') 

'A Day at the Races' has perfect balance and symmetry, each song being of a consistently high standard. Ten tracks, five a side, appeals to my sense of order. 'A Night at the Opera' is a little more uneven in comparison. I always looked upon 'Night' and 'Day' as two volumes of the same record, they fit together seamlessly. 'Day' is the completion of 'Night.' This was the pinnacle of the 'early' Queen and the birth of 'classic' Queen, the band that combined imagination, flair and musical intelligence with production values. It was the culmination and the end, and a glorious end for all that.

A Day at the Races (1976)

"Tie Your Mother Down"

Boisterous, brash, and barnstorming, this is a brilliant opening track and gets the album off to a rollicking, riotous start. It made for a great opening number in concert too. Whenever spirits are flagging, this one is guaranteed to get you up and running again. Then there is the title, shouted out boldly and repeatedly. Freddie Mercury was once asked "why 'tie your mother down'?" The Queen frontman replied: "Well this one in fact is a track written by Brian (May) actually, I dunno why. Maybe he was in one of his vicious moods." None the wiser. I remember reading that Brian May had a great riff and a working title, and Freddie encouraged him to keep it. This song is guaranteed to get any crowd bouncing on its feet.

"You Take My Breath Away"

This is a beautifully understated, quiet, reflective piano ballad. Freddie had a very fine touch on the piano, and could be incredibly restrained with his vocals. One of the very finest Queen ballads, and there were many. Again, it is not merely the variety of songs on a Queen album that impressed, but their sheer quality. Whatever the style, Queen delivered a perfect case. The a capello vocal with which the track opens is quite breathtaking.

"Long Away"

This is an overlooked classic. I heard Brian May in interview talk of the arguments that often took place in the band over single selection, with Brian saying he thought that 'Long Away' could have made a great single release. I'm not sure the great public would have accommodated the switch from Freddie to Brian on vocal so well as to have made for a big hit. But it's a fine track, such a good gently sung, medium-paced rocker. As it is, it is a great album track in the best sense of the word, with hidden qualities that reveal themselves with each play. It sounds a little Beatlesque, and hence something of a throwback.

"The Millionaire Waltz"

Pure Freddie, pure genius. If I had to simplify, I'd say that Brian May and Roger Taylor rocked hard, Freddie Mercury had the quirkiness and imagination, and John Deacon had the pop and soul sensibility. That's a huge simplification, of course, seeing as all members had musical intelligence and Freddie had a number of great rockers to his name. 

How can one describe 'The Millionaire Waltz'? You can't really, you just have to put it on and enjoy it. To say something like Gilbert and Sullivan with hard rock repels more than it appeals. It shouldn't work, and it doesn't for nearly all those who attempt it; but Queen make it work. As the scarves held by fans in the concerts of 1984/5 stated, "Queen Works." It takes some strange, incredible imagination to conceive of something like this, it takes an even greater flair and confidence to pull it off. Quirky, camp, and light-hearted, the track takes flight on the back of heavyweight musicality. This was 'Bohemian Rhapsody II.' A gem. The guitar solo alone is worth the price of admission. 

"You and I"

This is quite a light and breezy pop song, easily overlooked among the heavyweights on 'A Day at the Races.' It has all the qualities of a classic pop song, it's direct, catchy, and mood lifting. Written by John Deacon, it is easy to see this as a follow-up to 'You're My Best Friend.' It is easy, too, to imagine this song as a single release. It's a real gem. Deacon had a great pop sensibility.

"Somebody to Love"

If I was pushed hard to name the greatest ever Queen song, I would still try to evade being pinned down and break the bands music down into different categories and try to select the best in each - rockers, ballads, electric, acoustic, soul/disco, blues, oddities etc. But if I still had to select just one ... it might well be 'Somebody to Love.'  'Somebody to Love' is a truly great song, big, infectious, with immensely powerful vocal harmonies that build relentlessly to a giant crescendo. The song incorporates those great hooks from opera within a great soul sensibility. It is clearly influenced by Freddie's love of Aretha Franklin and just oozes gospel. And the operatics of The Student Prince. I think because of Queen's popularity and because of their determination to entertain, thrill, and please a crowd, there is a tendency to miss just how musically intelligent and demanding many of their songs are. As Geoff Tate of Queensryche said, this is 'a really hard song to sing.' Whilst Queen made thrilling hard rock and great pop, 'there was so much else to them.' It was that 'much else' that distinguished them.

"White Man"

A crunching hard rocker based on a 'Red Indian' beat, beefing up a very artistic and polished album. This is a more concise follow-up to 'The Prophet's Song,' containing a damning prophecy of sorts. The track was proof that Queen could still rock hard. This song packs a hard punch.

"Good Old-Fashioned Lover Boy"

As camp and quirky as hell, and utterly irresistible. In the tradition of 'Killer Queen,' this was a huge favourite back in the seventies. It was the lead song on an EP release and performed - and performed well - in concert. It also made it onto Queen's 'Greatest Hits' album, the biggest selling UK album ever. So the song once had a high profile. The sound was considered quintessentially Queen (as repeated on Eddie Howell's Man from Manhatten from 1975, a track which Freddie Mercury produced and on which Fred sang and Brian May played). For some reason the song seemed to fade from view some time in the 1980s. The song is the perfect realisation of that 1920s/30s vaudevillian side of the band, apparent on 'Bring Back that Leroy Brown,' 'Lazing on a Sunday Afternoon,' and 'Seaside Rendezvous.' This is the kind of song which determined the appeal of the band for me in the 1970s. Alongside the hard rock was this quirky, imaginative and very different sound.

"Drowse"

After the high passionate intensity of 'I'm in Love with my Car' on 'A Night at the Opera,' Roger Taylor drops a few gears down for 'Drowse.' As the title suggests, this is something of a somnolent, even something melancholic, take on the challenges of teenage life in suburbia. The song is a rumination on the boredom of confinement before breaking out, should those who were slumbering ever muster the energy. It is a distinctly Roger Taylor song, with a distinctive sound on a Queen album, adding to the diversity. The song deals with the conflicted emotions of being stuck somewhere between young and old, a care-free if boring and meaningless middle class adolescence and a worrisome middle age. You can spend so long reminiscing about the good times of a lost past whilst being fearful of the responsibilities of an approaching middle age that all the dreams you had when young go unfulfilled. The only ambition left to you is to become the 'a boy next door,' an average person who makes conventional decisions in a mundane, humdrum, everyday life, reconciled to a life of lamentation over the person one aspired to be. In an interview with Saturday Scene from 1976, Roger stated about the track:

'I seem to have a bit of a rock n' roll tag, but I have my quiet moments as well. This is one of them, a slightly more relaxed thing than usual. It's rather American, as it turned out, but you'd never know until you finished.'

That's an interesting comment from the guy associated with 'modern times rock'n'roll.' It tends to get overlooked how often it is Brian May who goes headlong into the loudest, bluntest heavy rock on a Queen album, and sometimes the crudest, too, lusting after women with a ferocity known to all teenage boys. There's little idealisation of teenage fantasy in Taylor's vision here, expressing perfectly the oddly enervating tension between raging emotions and boredom in that age. There is nostalgia in the melancholy but also an awareness that the feeling is based on a delusion that traps you in a past that never was. The song condenses the somnolent tedium of a teenage life caught between an irretrievable past and a beckoning future. The music perfectly complements the lyrics, the slow, low guitar meandering back and forth to convey a morass of sadness. It works in teenage years, it works for later years in life too. You have to be very young or very disappointed to truly appreciate this song, especially when Taylor's voice, already full of regret and resignation, fades away, rambling like a drunk singing to himself and his beer in the night. We are left with one too many wasted sunsets. The effect is weirdly compelling:

It ain't easy at all.

Thinkin' it right, doin' it wrong

It's easier from an armchair.

Waves of alternatives wash at my sleepiness.

Have my eggs poached for breakfast I guess.

'Nothing really matters to me ...' And nothing really changes much. Lyrically and musically, the song wavers between thoughts of a lost past, vague desires to change it, and the distractions offered by the mundane happenings of a boring present. Such is life as we drift on trying to pretend it all matters and then fade away. The song sounds lightweight, a makeweight which fills out the album, and it is true that it is routinely overlooked. But it is a perfect case of whatever kind of thing it is.

"Teo Torriatte (Let Us Cling Together)"

A tender but ultimately big ballad building to a great crescendo. It ends in a great Queen sing-a-long, made for the big stadiums. Queen made no bones about it, they were crowd pleasers aiming to be big, big, big. Brian May was inspired to write this song by the enthusiastic response to the band in Japan. 

"Woe"

This track is rumoured to exist from the 'A Night At The Opera' or 'A Day At The Races' sessions. Other than that, nothing is known.