On coming up with a solo before having a song: Actually, that happen with the "Brighton Rock" thing, yeah. We used to do the song "Son and Daughter" onstage, and the solo section in the middle of that became what was in "Brighton Rock". After "Brighton Rock" was recorded [on Sheer Heart Attack], that solo evolved a lot more. One facet of it was the way it is on the live album, but it's dropped it because I felt I got stale. I don't like to do excatly the same thing two nights running. That should be a time when you can do something different. Now we don't do "Brighton Rock" anymore, so it's gone full circle. In the beginning, the solo was there and the song was around it. And now the song's gone and the solos' there.
Particularly the solo bit in the middle, which I’d been doing on the ‘Mott The Hoople’ tour and sort of gradually expanded and has got more and more ever since. Although, I keep trying to throw it out it keeps creeping back in. That involves the repeat device actually using it in time, which I don’t think, had been done before up to that time. It’s a very nice device to work with because you can build up harmonies or cross rhythms and it’s not a multiple repeat like Hendrix used or even The Shadows used, which is fairly indiscriminate, sort of makes a nice noise. But this is a single repeat, which comes back, and sometimes I’ll add a second one too. So you can actually plan or else experiment and do a sort of “Phew” type effect. So that was at it’s very beginnings on ‘Brighton Rock’, and became more developed after that.
A mammoth track with weird vocals.
[The solo] started off as an experiment, and I'd been doing that sort of solo in another number which is Son and Daughter, long before we put it on the album, but in a sense, with things like that - which are essentially a live thing - you just put a kind of taste on the album. Strangely enough, we didn't think we could do the main part of the song on stage, ‘cause it's got quite a lot on it in the album, a lot of overdubs and stuff, but strangely enough, it's just one of those things if you try hard enough it comes, and the excitement sort of makes up for the things which aren't there.
It was a fairly hard one for me, ‘cause it was a very fast, fairly intricate backing track. We were gonna put it on the second album and then we found we had enough material for the second album so ended up on Sheer Heart Attack, the third album. I quite like it now.
There's always a lot of songs that we all write which we don't stick on the album, ‘cause we don't feel that they fit it in or we don't feel that they've reached the right point in their development or something. So what normally happens is we have about, usually, three or four or five more songs than we need for the album and we choose the things which balance on the album, so it's just worked out that way really. On the next album we may well not write anything. Brighton Rock was possibly going to be on Queen II but it couldn't get on the album, ‘cause it didn't fit anywhere, really, and it went on Sheer Heart Attack. Stone Cold Crazy was gonna go on the first album, [then] on the second album, and ended up on the third album.
The middle section of Brighton Rock came about from fiddling around with the Echoplex on the Mott the Hoople tour. I used to do that solo in Son and Daughter. Since we had already recorded that song, it became part of Brighton Rock, which had evolved from the same style of playing anyway.
Originally, I discovered, some time sitting around in Rockfield, that if you put an Echoplex in your system and turn off all the regeneration, you can just get one delay out of it. Echoplexes are very crude devices with a piece of tape that goes round and I started playing around and found that you could play along with the repeat that came back and it would be a very controllable situation. These days we use digital delays because it's easier, but I don't think they actually sound as good, but Echoplexes are so unreliable when we're out… You can do several different things with it; it's the whole canon effect that Bach pursued so brilliantly. Then I thought, what if you could get two, so then you could get the three-part harmony thing, which was always my dream. There's something about three guitars in harmony that has always stirred my loins and I just wanted to be able to it.
We were signed to Jack Holzman's Elektra label in the USA at that time (along with the Eagles, Jackson Browne, and Linda Ronstadt), and they had given us a bunch of sound effects albums - Which Jack Holtzman had apparently personally produced!!! I had noticed the fairground scene and pinched it wholesale for the beginning of the track !!! Of course, even if anyone from the record company had noticed (which I don't think they did ! - Jack was already long gone) - they wouldn't have stopped us because it was their own product.