by Georg Purvis
SHEER HEART ATTACK
EMI EMC 3061 0C 062 96025, November 1974 [2]
Elektra 7E-1026, November 1974 [12]
EMI CDP 7 46206 2, December 1986
Hollywood HR-61036-2, March 1991
Parlophone CDPCSD 129, 1994
Island Remasters 276 441 1, March 2011 [82]
‘Brighton Rock’ (5’10), ‘Killer Queen’ (3’01), ‘Tenement Funster’ (2’47), ‘Flick Of The Wrist’ (3’17), ‘Lily Of The Valley’ (1’44), ‘Now I’m Here’ (4’14), ‘In The Lap Of The Gods’ (3’22), ‘Stone Cold Crazy’ (2’16), ‘Dear Friends’ (1’08), ‘Misfire’ (1’50), ‘Bring Back That Leroy Brown’ (2’15), ‘She Makes Me (Stormtrooper In Stilettoes)’ (4’09), ‘In The Lap Of The Gods...Revisited’ (3’45)
Bonus tracks on 1991 Hollywood Records reissue: ‘Stone Cold Crazy’ (remix by Michael Wagener) (2’16)
Bonus tracks on 2011 Universal Records deluxe reissue: ‘Now I’m Here’ (live version, Hammersmith Odeon, December 1975) (4’27), ‘Flick Of The Wrist’ (BBC version, October 1974) (3’26), ‘Tenement Funster’ (BBC version, October 1974) (2’59), ‘Bring Back That Leroy Brown’ (a cappella mix) (2’18), ‘In The Lap Of The Gods...Revisited’ (live version, Wembley Stadium, July 1986) (2’35)
Bonus videos, 2011 iTunes-only editions: ‘Killer Queen’ (Top Of The Pops version 2, 1974), ‘Stone Cold Crazy’ (live version, Rainbow Theatre, November 1974), ‘Now I’m Here’ (live version, Montreal Forum, November 1981)
Musicians: John Deacon (bass guitar, upright bass on ‘Bring Back That Leroy Brown’, acoustic guitar, almost all guitars on ‘Misfire’), Brian May (guitars, vocals, lead vocals on ‘She Makes Me (Stormtrooper In Stilettoes)’, piano on ‘Now I’m Here’ and ‘Dear Friends’, banjolele on ‘Bring Back That Leroy Brown’, guitar orchestrations), Freddie Mercury (vocals, piano, jangle piano on ‘Killer Queen’ and ‘Bring Back That Leroy Brown’, organ on ‘Now I’m Here’, vocal extravaganzas), Roger Taylor (drums, vocals, lead vocals on ‘Tenement Funster’, percussion, screams)
Recorded: July–September 1974 at Trident and AIR Studios, London; Wessex Studios, Highbury; Rockfield, Monmouth
Producers: Queen and Roy Thomas Baker
In late January 1974, the band received vaccinations for their upcoming trip to Australia; unfortunately, Brian’s needle hadn’t been cleaned and he contracted an infection which developed into gangrene. (For a time, it was thought his arm would need to be amputated.) Unwisely, he continued working and the experience weakened his immune system. While on the road supporting Mott the Hoople in May, he contracted hepatitis, forcing Queen to cancel their remaining dates (they were replaced by Kansas) and fly home. Inoculations were hastily administered and Brian fell into a deep depression: the band had finally made their major breakthrough, and he was struck down with a serious illness that brought all activity to a standstill.
Well, not all activity. Freddie, Roger and John used Brian’s recovery time wisely: while their ailing guitarist lay in a hospital bed, the trio started working on new songs for an unplanned second album of the year. Brian, too, started working on songs, and even felt well enough after nearly two months of rest to join his bandmates in the studio to work with them. Fate was to strike yet again, however, and, unfortunately, Brian was on the receiving end once more. This time, he collapsed at the studios with a duodenal ulcer and was quickly re-admitted to hospital. There were times when he felt well enough to visit the studios and a bed was made up so that he could lie down if he felt ill. (Most of the time, he did.) Reports of sessions regularly being interrupted by the guitarist running off to the bathroom to vomit weren’t far from the truth.
It was the determination of the others that kept the band going during this rough patch. Despite having to cancel a planned tour in September, the band remained a household name, with ‘Seven Seas Of Rhye’ still keeping them fresh in the public’s minds. The band remained optimistic, even with their dismayed guitarist worrying that the others would try to replace him; the thought hadn’t even occurred to them. It was also during this time that the then-hot Island artists Sparks approached Brian, cockily stating that Queen were yesterday’s news and asking if he would join their band. Brian politely declined; despite his illness, he was still loyal to the group, convinced that they were bound for bigger and better things.
John had finally started to gain faith in the band, especially after the trashing they received on their first two releases. “I’ve got more confidence in the group now than ever before,” he said. “I was possibly the one person in the group who could look at it from the outside because I was the fourth person [to join] ... I knew there was something there but I wasn’t so convinced of it – until possibly this album.” He later told Record Mirror in 1975, “I reckon I’ll always be involved in music and recording from now on. Anyway, I like the world I’m in these days: the other day we met Paul McCartney and that was great. He even said hello to Roger and said he was doing fine. McCartney has been Brian’s hero since his teen days.”
The band immersed themselves in studio work in the early summer of 1974, recording as much material as possible. Initial sessions started at Rockfield Studios in Monmouthshire, with backing tracks for ‘Happy Little Fuck’, ‘You’re Young And You’re Crazy’, ‘Banana Blues’, ‘In The Lap Of The Gods Part 2’ (those four working titles of ‘Brighton Rock’, ‘Tenement Funster’, ‘Misfire’, and ‘In The Lap Of The Gods...Revisited’, respectively), ‘Flick Of The Wrist’ and ‘Stone Cold Crazy’ laid down on 28 July. Time was divided between the Coach and Quadrangle studios, and by the end of the month, backing tracks for ten of the thirteen songs had been recorded. The band then moved on to Wessex Studios in August for two weeks to overdub vocals and percussion, while Brian, on the rebound from his illness, booked time at Associated Independent Recording (AIR) Studios in Westminster, and recorded the basic tracks of ‘Dear Friends’ and ‘She Makes Me (Stormtrooper In Stilettoes)’. In September, with the sessions winding down, the band returned to Trident Studios to mix the tracks, and Brian submitted ‘Now I’m Here’, his final song for the sessions, which was recorded at this time; that track was later mixed at Sound and Recording Mobiles (SARM) Studios late in October, before the thirteen-track album was sent off to the Mastering Lab in Los Angeles.
It was a learning experience, not only for the band but also for Roy Thomas Baker, who became known as the Fifth Queenie. Seemingly by magic, he was able to piece together fragments of songs when only a basic rhythm track (generally consisting of piano, drums and bass, without guitar) had been recorded. Brian would then add his parts when he felt well enough to do so. Out of necessity there were substitutes for Brian when he was unable to record: John stepped into the role of rhythm guitarist in Brian’s absence, and while his parts were later wiped and recorded by Brian, John’s meticulous guitar work graced his first-ever composition, ‘Misfire’.
Sheer Heart Attack saw Queen experimenting with studio trickery and instrumentation, more so than on their first two albums: the musician credits are a veritable laundry list of instruments. The double bass made its first appearance on ‘Bring Back That Leroy Brown’, albeit for only a few short seconds (it would later be used to greater effect on ‘’39’), while the jangle piano, which sounds like a honky-tonk piano, was also used on ‘Leroy Brown’. The band switched and matched instruments throughout recording, perhaps with the notion that if it was all to end after this album, at least they were going to have a good time recording it.
However, not everyone was having a good time. Brian was still in misery as he lay in his hospital bed, pondering his future with the group and contributing only four songs. (John and Roger each wrote one and Freddie wrote six: although all four received credit for ‘Stone Cold Crazy’, it was originally written solely by the vocalist.) Each of Brian’s four contributions has a different underlying meaning, stemming from his then-fragile state of mind. ‘She Makes Me (Stormtrooper In Stilettoes)’ can be interpreted as Brian’s
desire to return to the metaphoric womb of Queen, while ‘Now I’m Here’ is a desperate assertion that he will indeed soon return. The title alone of ‘Dear Friends’ may well address the other three in the band, while the song itself might broach the possibility of him leaving the group. Of course, this is all hypothetical, but Brian’s frail emotions soon turned to elation when he was well enough to return to the studios.
“I was able also to see the group from the outside, almost, and I was very excited by what I saw,” Brian told BBC’s Radio One in 1983. “We’d done a few things before I’d got ill, but when I came out they’d done a lot more things including a couple of backing tracks of songs that I hadn’t heard from Freddie and I was really excited; ‘Flick Of The Wrist’ was one. It gave me a lot of inspiration to get back in there and do what I wanted to do. I did sort of get them to change a few things which I didn’t feel were right and I also asked for a couple of things to be changed, which they said, ‘No, you’re wrong,’ and they were probably right. It was good I wasn’t negative at all; I just went back in there with a lot of energy and enthusiasm and did my bits and the whole thing got finished off quite quickly then. I also managed to do some writing, I think ‘Now I’m Here’ was done after that period which came out quite easily. I’d been wrestling with it before and never got anywhere but, after the illness, it just seemed to come out and it went down very easily in the studio ... We weren’t going for hits, because we always thought of ourselves as an album group, but we did think that perhaps we’d dished up a bit too much for people to swallow on Queen II.”
Sheer Heart Attack flows far better than the previous album: Roger’s dark and brooding ‘Tenement Funster’ segues into Freddie’s vicious ‘Flick Of The Wrist’, which in turn flows into the delicate ‘Lily Of The Valley’. These three songs form the central core, the nucleus, of the first side. The songwriting as a whole is stronger and more focused than previously, with Freddie tightening his lyrical subject matter and condensing his thoughts into more digestible frameworks. The longest songs on the album – ‘Brighton Rock’, ‘Now I’m Here’ and ‘She Makes Me (Stormtrooper In Stilettoes)’, all three by Brian – all run over four minutes, while the other ten songs average just over two and a half minutes in length, with all efforts to produce an epic à la ‘Liar’, ‘Father To Son’ or ‘The March Of The Black Queen’ having, apparently, been abandoned ... for the time being, at any rate.
The uncontested highlight is Freddie’s moving ‘In The Lap Of The Gods...Revisited’, which not only closes the album but also became the set closer in the live setting for three years. There were many potential singles on the album, yet only ‘Killer Queen’ was seriously considered; it was due to the success of that single that the band eventually relented and issued a second single, ‘Now I’m Here’, a surprising choice considering the other, more obviously chart-friendly songs. “Not a collection of singles, dear, although we might draw another one off later for a single,” Freddie told NME in November 1974. “I’m not absolutely sure about that, though. No, not all the numbers last for ages. There were just so many songs we wanted to do, and it’s a change to have shorter numbers. It’s so varied that we were able to go to extremes. I only had about two weeks to write my songs, so we’ve been working fucking hard.”
The musical diversity is well in evidence and there are no songs that sound similar to any other; the band were more interested in expanding their experience and indulging their tastes (which may have been why critics called it self-indulgent) than conforming to the Led Zeppelin-esque image they had acquired. Indeed, it would have been easy to have recorded an album of rockers and ballads, but it’s the quirky margins of the album that give Sheer Heart Attack its charm. Songs like ‘Bring Back That Leroy Brown’, ‘Misfire’, ‘In The Lap Of The Gods’ and even ‘She Makes Me (Stormtrooper In Stilettoes)’ cannot be considered rock ‘n’ roll; even ‘Killer Queen’ is difficult to categorize. It’s too light to be considered rock, and Queen were certainly not a bubblegum pop band (it was kept off the top spot, significantly, by David Essex’s ‘I’m Gonna Make You A Star’). So what is it? It’s a fun and disposable, yet complex and tuneful, slice of glam rock that only the likes of David Bowie and Marc Bolan had perfected.
At this point in their career, the band already had an eye firmly cast on what was considered popular in the singles chart, yet they weren’t willing to sacrifice their artistic integrity and experimental natures to produce an album of generic, soul-less rock. The ideas were coming in rapid succession, and Roy Thomas Baker was the only man considered ideal to mould those concepts into fully-fledged songs while making them palatable as well. Despite the lack of togetherness during the sessions, Baker still managed to produce a crystal-clear and cohesive sound; his production is powerful on all thirteen songs and the quality has improved significantly since the muddled sound on Queen II. However, as Baker was quick to note, people still found room to criticize: “People didn’t like it at the time because they thought it was a bit over the top, which it was. It had every conceivable production idea that was available to us.”
It comes as no surprise that there are no unreleased songs from the sessions. There exists an incomplete demo recording of the title track, written by Roger and originally intended for use on the album; instead, he worked on ‘Tenement Funster’ (originally titled ‘Young And Crazy’ and then ‘Teen Dreams’) and kept the other song for another album. It would be drastically reworked for the 1977 album News Of The World and achieve notoriety as Queen’s answer to punk. Had it been finished for this album, it wouldn’t have had quite the same effect, but it did provide the band with an appropriate album title.
The dearth of additional material was evident in 1991, when Hollywood Records reissued the album, and only a contemporary remix of ‘Stone Cold Crazy’ was released. (A far more exciting remix of that same song by Trent Reznor remained unreleased, apart from escaping on a promo disc called Freakshow.) The 2011 deluxe edition contained three useless additions (BBC run-throughs of ‘Tenement Funster’ and ‘Flick Of The Wrist’, and the July 1986 Wembley Stadium rendition of ‘In The Lap Of The Gods...Revisited’) and two gems (a live recording of ‘Now I’m Here’ from the 1975 Christmas Eve Hammersmith Odeon concert, and an a cappella mix of ‘Bring Back That Leroy Brown’).
“God, the agony we went through to have those pictures taken,” Freddie exclaimed to NME in 1974 of the photo sessions for the album cover. “Can you imagine trying to convince the others to cover themselves in Vaseline and then have a hose of water turned on them? The end result is four members of the band looking decidedly unregal, tanned and healthy, and as drenched as if they’ve been sweating for a week ... Everyone was expecting some sort of cover. A Queen III cover, really, but this is completely new. It’s not that we’re changing altogether – it’s just a phase we are going through. We’re still as poncy as ever. We’re still the dandies we started out to be. We’re just showing people we’re not merely a load of poofs, that we are capable of other things.”
Mick Rock’s cover – certainly not as iconic as Queen II – shows the four band members lounging in close proximity to one another. Freddie is gazing off into the distance, seemingly transfixed by what lies ahead; Brian looks bemused, as if unable to take it all in; John rolls his eyes and smirks; Roger just looks stoned. Perhaps in an effort to share some of the spotlight with Freddie, Roger expressed displeasure with the way his hair looked and asked that hair extensions be provided. This is evident on outtakes of the cover shot, several of which also feature the band unable to keep straight faces. The final album cover, although decidedly rock ‘n’ roll, gives no real indication of the music within: the band have (temporarily) stepped out of their prog-rock exterior to deliver a photo that is very un-Queen-like and unpretentious. The back cover uses the same photograph, except that it’s smashed or cut into shards; the visual equivalent of a sheer heart attack.
The album was released in November 1974 after the runaway success of ‘K
iller Queen’ the month before. The week before Sheer Heart Attack appeared in the UK, the band made their return to the British touring circuit, their first live shows since Brian’s health problems in May. The set list was restructured to accommodate the new album, prompting their audiences to rush out and buy it. The album rocketed to No. 2 in their home country, while the band made their first appearance in the US Top Twenty when the album peaked at No. 12, thanks, no doubt, to an extensive countrywide campaign in January 1975.
Reviews for the album were fairly complimentary, though there were the occasional ones in which jaded critics started to show their disdain for the band. In Rolling Stone, it was asserted that “Queen – on the record and on the jacket, too – makes no concessions to moderation ... If there’s no meaning (there isn’t), if nothing follows (it doesn’t), if you can’t dance to it (it would seem that you can’t), Sheer Heart Attack is still, like its two predecessors, a handsomely glossy construction.” ‘Killer Queen’ and ‘Bring Back That Leroy Brown’ were singled out as “surprisingly light showcases for Queen’s wit and vocal dexterity, calculated – like everything this band has ever done – to turn heads in surprise and wonder.” The review concluded with, “If it’s hard to love, it’s hard not to admire: this band is skilled, after all, and it dares.”
NME proclaimed, “A feast. No duffers, and four songs that will just run and run: ‘Killer Queen’, ‘Flick Of The Wrist’, ‘Now I’m Here’ and ‘In The Lap Of The Gods...Revisited’. Even the track I don’t like, ‘Brighton Rock’, includes May’s Echoplex solo, still a vibrant, thrilling experience whether you hear it live or on record.” A review that ran in the Associated Press in America declared, “This is a testament not only to Queen’s immense talent, but to their versatility as well. Queen will be playing Madison Square Garden as headliners by the time their fourth album comes along.” Not quite: the band wouldn’t appear at that landmark venue until 5 February 1977, well after the release of A Day At The Races.
