Cream songs, ‘N.S.U.’ and ‘Sweet Wine’. And all this time and
even before this I had a group called 1984 and I was using my
guitar.
Q How did Queen evolve from Smile?
Smile split up and got very disillusioned because although we
put a record out, it didn’t do anything and it seemed like we were
going nowhere. We directed our efforts towards writing and Queen
started to come together at that time. We already knew Freddie
because he was a friend of Tim’s [Smile’s bassist] and he’d been to
some of our shows and Freddie was very keen. Actually I shared a
flat with Roger and Freddie would come to stay sometimes and we
talked and talked and Hendrix had come along and changed all
our lives.
We spent about a year rehearsing, a lot of time together, and
the single thing that helped was a friend of mine knew somebody
who was going to be an engineer at the new De Lane Lea studio
and they said, ‘If you want to come along and make some noise
so we can do our acoustic tests, we’ll make some demos for you.’
So, we made four demos with Louie Austin who was one of the
engineers there. We had some friends who took them around to
record companies and most of them weren’t interested; EMI were
fairly interested but wouldn’t commit totally at that point. Trident
were interested, who weren’t actually a record company, they were
a production company, and for some reason we decided that was
a good idea. Make the album and then go back to the record
company. Trident is a long story and it went very, very sour in the
end.
We took another eighteen months before we actually had the
album finished and it was terrible, agony. We took it around to the
record companies again and this time most people were interested.
EMI were the keenest and we got a message from them saying,
‘Don’t sign with anyone until you talk to us.’