We wanted to do something which was melodic and harmonic, powerful in the texture of the voices, and I had this thing about guitar harmonies, which I wanted to do, and underneath all of that was the kind of raw, fairly dirty rock sound, and we wanted to combine all of those things, and we felt that no one ever had.
I suppose that was our first proper hit in this country. I never understood a word of it, and I don't think Freddie did either, but it was just sort of gestures really, but it was, it was a fine song.
Apart from Killer Queen, which was obviously catchy, I don't think of our singles as being immediately commercial. For instance, when Seven Seas of Rhye was a hit, I was very suprised. It was only intended really to draw attention to the album I thought that Keep Yourself Alive was a much more commercial song.
I had an idea of what I wanted to do with the number, I had the basic tune worked out, but by the time we were ready to come out with the first album the song just hadn't come to fruition. So then we thought we might end the album with the instrumental and pick it up again at the beginning of Queen II. But there again, the concept just didn't work. It made no sense in the context of the album to have Seven Seas of Rhye at the beginning.
My lyrics are basically for peoples interpretations really. I've forgotten what they were all about. It's really factitious, I know it's like bowing out or the easy way out, but that's what it is. It's just a figment of your imagination. It all depends on what kind of song really. At that time I was learning about a lot of things like song structure and, as far as lyrics go, they're very difficult as far as I'm concerned. I find them quite a task and my strongest point is actually melody content. I concentrate on that first; melody, then the song structure, then the lyrics come after actually.
I think Freddie had half-written the song and we thought it was a nice tail out to the first album, with the idea of starting the second album with the finished song. We'd lead in nicely. In fact, we ended the second album with this song and it had changed a little by then and we'd released it as a single because we thought it was fairly strong.
That was a song which nearly went on the first album - in fact, there is a little taste of it at the end of the first album. We said, “we're gonna make something which they're gonna have to play,” and we went out and did it on tour and the single went into the charts without anybody playing it on the radio and they eventually did have to play it, and we felt it was fairly immediate anyway and wanted everything in there - everything but the kitchen sink is on that track. [The lyric] was Freddie's dream at the time, really. At the time he was interested in sort of folklore. I don't really know what it's about, to be honest. That was one of the very few tracks which Freddie's written which were actually basically guitar-oriented, because he was playing it on the guitar at that time, which he doesn't really do anymore. I remember him sort of playing it and saying, “Look, this is how it should be.” That was just the time that he started to take his piano-playing seriously and didn't wanna write songs on the guitar anymore.
The whole world happens in the first twenty seconds, and you've almost heard the whole song in that time. Great big swooping things, then the vocal launches straight in… maybe that had something to do with it, and it was a good, catchy record, but we were hot at the time, and that obviously helped. The first version was just a little trailer, because the song wasn't actually finished then - the shape of things which might come, although it was very plain on the first album, with no vocals or orchestration.
I suppose that was our first proper hit in this country. I never understood a word of it, and I don't think Freddie did either, but it was just sort of gestures really, but it was, it was a fine song.
Its roots go back a long way because there's a little fragment of it on the very first album, the first Queen album, Freddie had this idea in his head but it wasn't really developed so we just put down what we had at the end of that album. And then we thought it would be a good basis for the single, and again, it was very collaborative - we all threw things in. But you know, throw all the harmonies, all the guitar harmonies, all the bombast, all the smoke bombs, it's all in Seven Seas of Rhye. A bit of humour at the end referring to an ancient English seaside song, with the fabulous Roy Baker playing stylophone.
It's a universal truth that more groups break up because of songwriting arguments than anything else in the world because the songs are your babies. I've probably never spoken about this before ever, but I remember the Seven Seas of Rhye thing was Freddie's idea - he had this slightly little riff idea on the piano, and I think all the middle-eight is stuff that I did, so we definitely worked on it together. But when it came to the album coming out Freddie went, “I wrote that,” and we all went, “OK.” It didn't seem like that big a deal but Freddie said, “You know, I wrote the words and it was my idea, so it is my song.” The sort of unwritten law was the person who brought the song in would get the credit for writing that song and the money for writing that song. Much, much later in Queen history, we recognised this fact.
We knew what we wanted, it was just a question of getting it. On the second single, Seven Seas Of Rhye, everything deliberately happens in the first 10 seconds – guitars, harmonies, vocals – and it worked. Radio picked up on it. But we went into the rest of Queen II thinking we should throw the kitchen sink at it. We were trying to push everything to its limit, like Freddie's song, The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke, which could only have been a studio creation.