Queen’s multi-part web series The Greatest is back with a new episode in honor of the band’s 1973 self-titled debut, which was recently remixed, remastered, and expanded.
Episode 3 of The Greatest focuses on “The Night Comes Down,” which has appears for the first time as a single on the new Queen 1 boxset. 51 years after the enigmatic song’s release, Brian May reveals the story behind the deeply personal lyrics and showcases the “bastardized” acoustic guitar he used to make the song. “It’s a very cheap guitar I guess, it’s not like a Martin or a Gibson or whatever,” May says, “But it has its own sound and it’s very much a part of that, the first Queen album, it’s all over it.”
The song’s nostalgic and melancholic lyrics reflected May’s emotional state in the early ’70s. “When I look back at it, I was very young to be writing that stuff, but I did get depressed in those days. It was always about relationships,” says May. “And I had moments when I thought, ‘I’m in a great place, I can make music. I’m with great friends. I’m at college doing stuff that I love doing. Everything’s great.’ And then somehow, everything would fall apart, and then it’s like the night came down in my head. So that’s what the song was about. It’s not a jolly song.”
May discusses how the instrumentation of “The Night Comes Down” was “a sort of protest” against the notion that acoustic and electric guitars could not mix on one song: “So I wanted to sort of prove to myself that you could make the acoustic guitar, the front instrument and the electric guitars could be actually behind. So the electric guitars, when they go ‘ne ne ne’, they’re like a sort of string quartet behind the acoustic guitar, and they’re not too loud because you have got the right volume in your mix.”
As covered in the first two episodes of The Greatest, Queen’s vision for their debut clashed with those of Trident Studios. “The Night Comes Down” was the only survivor from the De Lane Lea sessions. “I was dead set against trying to re-record The Night Comes Down,” explains Brian, “because I was aware it was a moment, and it sounded exactly like I wanted it to sound. And Roy Baker was very sympathetic. He said, ‘Look, I understand, and maybe we’ll just remix it.’”
The new Queen I boxset presents “The Night Comes Down” as the band originally intended. “I was sitting there thinking: ‘At least the original isn’t being destroyed here. At least this is an alternative,” says May. Maybe one day we can go back and look at the original’. And now, we’ve done it.”
