Cassettes & Chocolate Milk

I get territorial when I start thinking about Queen I. It's my album, and while it is so often overlooked by critics and fans alike, I tend to go back to it and hide out in its songs. The mood is so softly sepia to me, with lashings of impoverished glamour. It's Freddie's satins and furs, pillows and feathers, grapes and other ephemera in his Holland Park flat. It's the black and white photos of Freddie thrashing about on stage at Imperial College. There's this heady precociousness that I can get on board with: the vast contrasts moment-to-moment in Great King Rat, the hazy vision of friendship in The Night Comes Down, the adolescent rage of Son and Daughter. It all exists in a familiar place in my heart.

The Queen 1 boxset is enormous, and to traipse through it is to be overcome with awe with archives that didn't seem to exist before. Handwritten sketches of the Queen crest and its elements, delicately drawn by Freddie. There's lyric sheets for songs like Hangman or Mad the Swine, their existence seems to be positively folkloric. Then there's Roger's diary entries, Brian's handwritten tour notes, written on the back of a Queen poster, and then there's the photos that have been hidden for decades: Freddie singing All the Young Dudes on stage with Mott the Hoople, or else staring you down - poised as if he's about to impale you with a sword.

It's vast, complex and intricate, with everchanging meanings, in my heart, at least. The demos are filled with conversation and clattering, accusations that someone is out of tune or out of time. Freddie counting out loud. Things not coming in when you expect them to. Then there's the placeholder lyrics, poignant lines reduced to bits that need filling in later. It's like they're an ordinary band, but they're so far away from any ordinary band that's ever existed. I remember one random radio interview with Freddie in the mid-80s, where he talked about how he'd never like to release demos, because he'd never want to release anything imperfect.

Queen fans have always known Queen I was recorded under bad circumstances, in snatched pockets of night at Trident Studios in Soho. The narrative has been drummed into us: "the drums were all wrong! The Sheffield brothers were shonky charlatans!" The Queen 1 boxset reframes the first album entirely, ushering"the debut album that we always dreamed of bringing to you". The remastered mixes are markedly different: the drums are more expansive, the guitars more pronounced, Freddie's vocals seem other-wordly at times. Are these entirely different takes? Each listen brings about another startling nuance, and there are more pieces to uncover still.

I appreciate the discomfort in confronting the archive, particularly when a project didn't pan out the way you wanted it to. The artist insists repeatedly, "it's imperfect, it's imperfect, this isn't how I wanted it to be!" As a fan, I'd insist that there's beauty in the sketch, in the attempt, in the ambition. I'd insist that Queen I exists in a perfect original state, but if I can get beyond myself, it's more interesting to look at the evolving meaning of the mixes: what was wrong before, what has been pulled out of the archives, and why was this mix deemed to be so perfect?

Cassettes & Chocolate Milk: Electro Podcast #77
Stealing Sheep - Jokin' Me
Ariel Pink - Lipstick
Kauf - The Closest
Nation of Language - What Does the Normal Man Feel?
WhoMadeWho - Keep Me in My Plan (Modernaire Remix)
Amason - Marry Me Just For Fun
PNAU - Telegraph to the Afterlife
Neon Indian - Annie
Purple Disco Machine & Sophie and the Giants - Hypnotized
Graceorsomething - Short King Advocate (feat. Wyatt Delp)

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