It’s quite tough to imagine a world where Queen weren’t one of the most beloved rock acts to have ever existed, but all bands, no matter how popular they end up becoming, have to start somewhere, and it’s often with a period of hard graft that sees some of your finest and most urgent material fail to get the praise it deserves. Quite often, bands struggle to make it beyond this stage and end up remaining in obscurity, but when they manage to overcome the early stumbling blocks, it usually leads to some level of notoriety.
While most people consider Queen’s breakthrough single to be ‘Killer Queen’, a track taken from their 1974 album Sheer Heart Attack that made it to the top ten in multiple countries, they’d actually already reached the top ten in the UK with another track earlier in the same year. ‘Seven Seas of Rhye’, which was taken from Queen II, is something of a fan favourite these days, but didn’t manage to gain much traction in the charts overseas.
It has to be said, reaching even these heights within a year of your debut single is nothing to be sniffed at, and while they would go on to accomplish even greater things with subsequent releases, the performance of these songs suggests that the band went through a significant period of improvement in a short space of time.
However, very few people remember their debut single, which was taken from their self-titled 1973 album. The track in question, ‘Keep Yourself Alive’, is one that the band are quite content with their audiences not having any recollection of, and its songwriter, guitarist Brian May, has gone on record to dismiss it as being one of the weakest songs the band ever released.
Reflecting on the song in a 2021 interview, May said that as an early foray into songwriting, it doesn’t live up to the high standards he held for himself. “I wasn’t very sure that I was a songwriter,” he claimed, “but I just sort of had this idea. Strange enough, the lyrics to ‘Keep Yourself Alive’ are meant to be kind of a comment. They’re meant to be slightly ironic, but I learned very early on through this song it’s very difficult to be ironic in a song because people take it at face value.”
The song was actually recorded on multiple occasions, and despite having been most pleased with the version they laid down at De Lane Lea Studios, which “had that certain sort of magic”, the band seemed to have convinced themselves that something was wrong with the mix. “We kept remixing and there must have been, at least, seven or eight different mixes by different groups of people,” May would later confess, blaming himself for the underwhelming single version, which ended up getting rejected by radio stations on five separate occasions.
After succumbing to pressure to re-record and release a sub-standard version of the song, May said that they had to settle on a version done by their own engineer, Mike Stone, which seemed to please most members of the band. However, May’s thoughts on the track still haven’t improved much in the years since. “To my mind, ‘Keep Yourself Alive’ was never really satisfactory,” he claimed. “It never had that magic that it should have had.”
