Queen: An Exploded Diagram is me having big and little thoughts about every Queen song in chronological order. It ticks a box, but it’s not a box we needed. It’s fine, but it’s not really what we’re here with Queen for. Here is the band at their most stripped back, playing like a normal band, instead of the monstrous bombasts that they are. This record was intended to be stripped back to basics, after people slated Races for being all style and no substance (which isn’t necessarily entirely fair). And I’m giving it absolutely no shrift whatsoever. What we have here is an accomplished little song, with a really nice change in form, simply by being a single track, and not an over produced studiowork. His high points make me so much harder on his lows. It’s all part of the game they’re playing. And you can’t have blues without boring guitar blues with boring stories. Queen are poaching all the little bits of rock history, and you can’t have rock without blues. And most of the previous moments of dramatic incongruity on these records haven’t felt like filler, they’ve always felt like a part of the structure, even if just as a contradiction or counterpoint.īut it does make sense.

It’d be fine in most circumstances, but we’re getting close to one of my all time favourite Queen songs, and while I’ll allow Deacon to get away with a cowbell led track in a moment, a blues number just feels like filler here. That bland sort of blues that it’s hard to really get excited about.Īnd that’s where I am. Wrapping it up in a sweet little guitar song that sounds even more grandaddy than the song about being a sad old man. May definitely prefers a passive aggressive mode.

It’s nice to hear May put on a bit of a character, and is kind of amusing sat next to some of Roger’s record label exploitation tales (or even Freddie’s). It’s just a story, it’s just a song, it just doesn’t have much to shout about in it.

It is unclear if May is blowing his own trumpet here or not.Īnyway, it’s fine. The saving grace is that at least it’s about a trumpet player. It’s a standard rags to riches to rags thing. Equating being fleeced by your record label to being kicked out on the streets. Brian’s choice, compared to Freddie’s poaching of the tin pan alley or vaudeville styles. It’s essentially a tribute to a certain kind of American jangly storytelling style. Apparently apocryphally, it’s been claimed the band didn’t know that they were being recorded. As it’s a rare single take track (not quite, the vocals were added later), so this is Queen playing as a more conventional band. It’s not terrible, but it is the only track I don’t like on one of the best sides in the back catalogue.

Sleeping on the sidewalk queen