In a new episode of Queen: The Greatest, Queen’s Brian May and Roger Taylor are breaking down the band’s music video history, stemming all the way back to their recently reissued and restored 1973 debut LP.
In the fourth addition to the ongoing series, shared on YouTube today, the duo recall seeing the first Queen “music video” fresh off the release of the lead single off their self-titled LP, “Keep Yourself Alive.” Still struggling for radio play as a burgeoning band, the group were eager to take advantage of an opportunity for a platform on BBC.
“I remember going home from some place to my parents house and it was going to come on the TV, so we were glued to the TV, and suddenly this little train comes along,” May shares of the first time he saw “Keep Yourself Alive” play on the show The Old Grey Whistle Test, paired with animated clips of two racing trains. “We were just mesmerized.” Although the group didn’t technically star in the video, it marked their music’s first TV appearance. May and Taylor remember presenter Bob Harris’ excitement at this new group—a sign that they were really coming onto the scene.
The early exposure led the group’s then-label Trident to encourage them to make another video—featuring the group playing on a sound stage—for “Keep Yourself Alive.” However, now that May and Taylor had gotten a taste of a video they liked, they had higher standards now. “When we saw the finished result, we hated it” May recalled. “Somehow, the whole thing had become so well-lit it looked very clinical, it had no atmosphere. It looked like we were dummies on stage—it didn’t feel like rock ‘n’ roll at all.
Queen knew they had to take a stand to preserve their style. “We kicked up a bit of a fuss, being the precocious boys we were,” Brian May shares. They requested a shift in lighting and staging to take their aesthetic from pop band to rockers. The move paid off, and the video quickly became adopted by listeners as the official version. However, the band still wasn’t sure how music videos would fit into their work.
“At the time, we did think the visual thing had a part to play, but we didn’t really realize the power of a short video as a promotional tool,” Roger Taylor explains. “But when we did the ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ video later, making that video was our idea.” Although the “Bohemian Rhapsody” video was by no means the first music video, it’s widely considered the first promotional video today—a clip actively used as part of the album cycle.