Queen's Brian May Reveals Inspiration For 'The Night Comes Down'

11-08-2024

(Hollywood) Following the recent 7" single release of "The Night Comes Down" from the new Queen I boxset, Brian May now reveals for the first time the inspiration behind the deeply personal lyrics - and unearths his original acoustic guitar to demonstrate how he achieved the song's unique sound.

"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." -Brian May

Released last month on 7" vinyl as a prelude to the Queen I boxset, "The Night Comes Down" is still pricking up ears half-a-century after its creation. Now, in the latest episode of Queen The Greatest - a new video series celebrating the freshly remastered and expanded debut album of 1973 - Brian May looks back on the cult ballad that caught the young lineup's revolutionary spirit.

With an otherworldly instrumental intro like nothing else in '70s rock, a soul-baring lyric (and its sense of mystery only amplified by the fact it was never performed live by the band), "The Night Comes Down" is perhaps the most enigmatic song in Queen's five-decade catalogue.

Fifty-one years later, this exclusive video interview sees Brian explore the roots of this haunting early highlight - and showcase the one-of-a-kind acoustic guitar that gave it life.

"'The Night Comes Down' evolved in my head, and in my own bedsit and the flats of the people I knew at the time," explains Brian. "I would have this old acoustic guitar, which I still have, and I restrung it with wire strings. It was originally a gut guitar and, the bridge wasn't high enough to make them vibrate cleanly. But I turned this into an advantage because I liked the buzzy sound. I'd put pins and needles in the bridge, which I'd carved out myself and stuck on the top. I bastardised this guitar. But it made this sound like a sitar but warmer. And I learnt to play lead on an acoustic, which wasn't, in those days, done very much.

You know, it's a very cheap guitar I guess, it's not like a Martin or a Gibson or whatever, but it has its own sound and it's very much a part of that, the first Queen album, it's all over it."

Solitary by nature and struggling with the rites of young adulthood, "The Night Comes Down" is also a poignant snapshot of Brian's emotional state in the early-'70s. "The song, actually, was about those moments when you're not jolly. When you feel like you've lost it. 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. 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 it's about. It's not a jolly song.

"The funny thing is, it's also a bit of a sort of protest song in a way, because we were told in these little excursions we'd had into studios - 'You can't mix acoustic guitar with electric guitar'. And we'd go 'well why?' 'Well, because the electric guitar is too loud'. I'd go 'don't be ridiculous. You can make it as loud as you want in the mix.' But there was this sort of myth around 'oh, it's not going to work.' 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."

Tracking their demo at De Lane Lea Studios, the addition of Brian's orchestral electric licks - played on the more familiar Red Special - and Freddie Mercury's swooping falsetto, alongside the sensitive push and pull of bassist John Deacon and drummer Roger Taylor, made "The Night Comes Down" a bewitching listen.

"I'd sung the song to him and Freddie, as always, would make it his own and take it to the next level," remembers Brian. "Roger in those days was quite busy. He would do a lot of fills, but it fits so perfectly with the way we're playing. And John gives it his own kind of style and it blends with the acoustic really nicely. It's got this really gluey, kind of heavy sound. I was really pleased that it sounded so different from everything else that was out there."

In spring '72, the Queen lineup graduated to Trident Studios for album sessions proper. But with the signature 'Trident sound' clashing with their own vision for the album, the lineup resorted to subterfuge, smuggling their preferred demo tape in a 'Trident'-labelled box. As such, "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.'"

It's only now - with the release of the remixed and remastered Queen I boxset - that "The Night Comes Down" is aired as the band originally intended. "Roy, bless him, put a lot of work into the song," recalls Brian. "But his brief as dictated by his bosses was to make it sound like it came out of Trident. I was sitting there thinking: 'At least the original isn't being destroyed here. At least this is an alternative. Maybe one day we can go back and look at the original'. And now, we've done it."