[processing the rhythm strums] That was real tape phasing. This was in the days when you took the tape off the synch head, put it though a couple of other tape delays, and then brought it back with the play head. There is no processing whatsover on the solo in that tune, as far as I remember. I used John Deacons's small amplifier and the Vox AC-30 to do those little three-part chorus thing behind, as well as the fingerboard pickup on the guitar. There is a bit more tape phasing on the end of that track.
In the early days there was a lot… well, the first album was a way of getting things out of our system. There were so many ideas we wanted to do. At that time we were a working band and we'd done a lot of stage shows, we just wanted to put down the kind of songs that people associated with our live shows, so Keep Yourself Alive was a very good way of telling people what Queen was about in those days.
It'd been around for quite a while as well. Keep Yourself Alive had a sort of hard-rock backing with harmony overlay which we'd always wanted to do - we felt nobody'd done that before. It had recognisable guitar harmonies…
The first recording of it ever was in De Lane Lea when we did it ourselves and I've still got that recording and I think it's very good and has something which the single never had. But they pressurised us very strongly to redo all the tracks and we redid Keep Yourself Alive with Roy and it was pretty awful, actually. I thought it was terrible and I was very unhappy about it and I thought the De Lane Lea one was better and I eventually managed to persuade Roy that it was better as well. So, we went back in and did it again in a way that was a bit more true to the original. But there is no way that you can ever really repeat something. I have this great belief that the magic of the moment can never be recaptured and, although we ended up with something that was technically in the playing and perhaps even in the recording a bit better than the De Lane Lea thing. I still think that the De Lane Lea one had that certain sort of magic, so I was never really happy. As it turned out no one else was ever really happy either and we kept remixing it. We thought that it's the mix that's wrong, we kept remixing and there must have been, at least, seven or eight different mixes by different groups of people. Eventually we went in and did a mix with Mike Stone, our engineer, and that's the one that we were in the end happiest with. That's the one we put out. But, to my mind Keep Yourself Alive was never really satisfactory. Never had that magic that it should have had.
I often get asked how I came to layer all those guitar parts on the Keep Yourself Alive solo. The answer is that, like Pinocchio's nose, it just grew and grew and grew. Here's the full story: Before Queen had a record contract, we did a demo of Keep Yourself Alive (in fact, it's still my favourite version of the song). This was the first time I had an opportunity to play a three-part harmony solo, so I did it with relish. I employed my favourite pickup combination (the one I use about 85 per cent of the time) - the bridge pickup in conjunction with the centre one, in phase - to get that rich, saturated distortion. And even though the solo was largely instinctive (not written out beforehand), it worked out well. The solo sounded so good that I thought I'd simply play it again when we got to do the final, real version of the song. Well, you know how when you try to reproduce something, it's never quite the same? That's exactly what happened when it was time to do our first album. I was agonizing throughout the recording, constantly thinking I wasn't getting the solo right. I was never quite satisfied with it. And then I realized that the solo should have something different in it, by definition of the song being a newer version. That led me to think that maybe I should take the original solo even a stage further and start adding more harmonies, but with a twist. On a lark, I slowed the tape down to half speed, and proceeded to layer more parts - little snatches - throughout the solo (and elsewhere in the song). When those parts were played back at normal speed, they added a top-end sparkle and provided a nice counterpoint to the main three-part solo. There's nothing quite like analogue tape manipulation. The beauty of that old analogue recording gear was that you could do so much with it. Besides slowing the tape down, you could turn the tape over (which was also something we did a lot) and do backwards guitar parts. You could lean on the tape machine and get a “wowing” sound - a specific type or phasing. Of course, with the digital stuff that's out now (which I have been using for a while), you can't do that - you have to specifically dial in the effect you want. It's fast, clean and efficient, but I miss the flexibility and the “you never know what to expect” quality that analog gear provided.
[to have overlapping lines] was an idea I had for Keep Yourself Alive .... to creat [sic] a bit of extra urgency - though maybe I was compensating for the fact that I often write songs that are impossible to sing !! There is actually no room to take a breath when you sing this song ! I remember resisting the thought (from someone close to us) that the successive lines of vocal should be ping-ponging across the stereo .... that would have ruined it for me .... all these lines had to come up in the centre like a stream of bullets. Everything ELSE pinged-ponged around them !!! That's what I wanted.
It's amazing what memories come back to you, like the moment when Freddie and I sat down with Mike Stone and got the mix of Keep Yourself Alive right. I think Roger and I should write a book before our brains completely fry!
l wasn't very sure that I was a songwriter, you know, I just sort of had this idea. Strangely enough, the lyrics of Keep Yourself Alive are meant to be a comment, they're meant to be slightly ironical. But I learnt very early on through this song that it's very difficult to be ironical in a song ‘cause people take it at face value. And, basically, people always did think that Keep Yourself Alive was just a jolly song about how great it is to be alive, but it's actually more about asking the question “is there more to life than this?” in a sense.
I think of Keep Yourself Alive as the first proper Queen song. Unfortunately, apart from a few places like Japan, it didn't get much airplay. We were told, “It takes too long to happen, boys. It's more than half a minute before you get to the first vocal.” So when we made the second album, we thought, “Right, we'll show them…”