Queen: Studio Collection

Product Information

Presented here for the first time ever: When Love Breaks Up, You Know You Belong To Me, I Guess We’re Falling Out, Dog With a Bone, Water, and Face It Alone. Are the Studio Collection remasters better than the original pressings? The answer is a resounding yes. Though the original pressings are some of the best-sounding vinyl I own, they do suffer from a certain harshness and exhibit a higher noise floor due to the nature of them being heavily mass-produced and therefore of lower quality. And of course this is the first time Innuendo and Made in Heaven have been pressed to vinyl in their entirety, and to me being 2 of the best Queen albums the set is worth it for them alone. One further ingredient in the mix was David Richards, who had worked with Queen since his billing as assistant engineer on Live Killers. After further credits on A Kind of Magic and Live Magic, Richards stepped up to co-produce The Miracle, praised by May for his “whizz kid” technical prowess.

Flash Gordon - Originally released in December 1980. Recorded at The Town House, The Music Centre, Wembley and Advision Studios, except R10, recorded at Utopia Studios. Additional orchestral arrangements recorded at Anvil Studios. Die cut lyric/picture inner sleeve, published by Queen Music Ltd./EMI Music/Wide Music Ltd. - Yellow vinyl. The material for the sleeves is pretty sturdy and feels nice in your hands, in some cases better than the original UK releases.Queen on Vinyl: This is how listeners first heard the now legendary Queen in the 1970’s when vinyl was the predominant format for recorded music. This September Queen will hit the crest of an already massive wave – a world-wide renaissance of vinyl and record players – with the ultimate set of vinyl LPs, the complete collection of Queen studio albums, re-mastered to the highest standards of quality in both audio and artwork.

Queen always had a special fondness for vinyl, the medium in which they first began to create, around 1970. As a matter of principle, every Queen studio album was offered at the time of original release on vinyl, even well into the era when CD’s had taken over as the medium of choice for most of the public. However, the final two albums, ‘Innuendo’ and ‘Made In Heaven’ were actually formatted primarily with the CD in mind, with a longer running time, so the contents had to be edited down to fit them on to the two sides of a vinyl album. Now, specially for this edition, for the first time, these two albums have been cut at full length as double vinyl LP’s - four sides each – making up a vinyl set that is complete in every way.The set contains Queen’s 15 studio albums, spread across 18 180-gram coloured discs. The colours are in keeping with the theme of each album, some of which bear similarities to the colours of some of the early european pressings. The reproduction artwork, for the most part, remains faithful to the original UK album releases with 1 or 2 minor revisions as noted below. The records themselves are encased in high quality poly-lined inner sleeves. This show of unity was elegantly conveyed by band art director Richard Gray’s cover for The Miracle, which depicts Queen’s four faces merged into one. “The cover art represents the unity of the group at the time: a seamless merging of four people becoming one,” May has said. “We were also dealing with Freddie’s deteriorating health and pulling together to support him.”

Living up to its name, The Platinum Collection was recently certified by the UK music industry organisation the BPI as having gone 8 x Platinum, representing sales of 2.4 million achieved since its June 2011 re-release as part of Queen’s 40th anniversary celebrations. Said Roger: “D ecisions are made on artistic merit, so ‘Everybody wrote everything’ is the line, rather than ego or anything else getting in the way. We seem to work together better now than we did before. We’re fairly up-and-down characters. We have different tastes in many ways. We used to have lots of arguments in the studio, but this time we decided to share all the songwriting, which I think was very democratic and a good idea.” Featuring an introductions to each album, quotes from the band, and rare photographs and memorabilia from the Queen ArchiveThe cut was performed by Miles Showell at Abbey Road using the half-speed process using a Neumann VMS80 lathe boasting cutter-head amplifiers fitted with custom designed RIAA filters. There’s a more detailed chat with Showell, elsewhere in Part 2. Built around an improvised studio jam, their infectious David Bowie collaboration Under Pressure became a global chart-topping smash. The retro-futurist epic Radio Gaga and the humorously romantic I Want To Break Free stand as testaments to their early mastery of synthesizers, while the muscular ripcord riffs of Hammer To Fall and octave-vaulting grand-piano acrobatics of It’s a Hard Life are vintage Queen both sonically and lyrically.

George Michael + Queen – Somebody To Love (Live, The Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert For AIDS Awareness, Wembley, April 1992) The hugely prolific sessions for The Miracle began in December 1987 and stretched out to March 1989. It was to be one of the most consequential periods in Queen’s history. Fifteen months previously, on August 9, 1986, Queen’s mighty Europe Magic Tour had ended on a high, before an estimated audience of more than 160,000 at Knebworth Park in Britain. As the band left the stage that night – toasting the flagship show of their biggest tour to date – they could hardly have foreseen that Knebworth marked a line in the sand. This would be Queen’s final live show with Freddie and the first in a chain of pivotal moments that would lead towards a lengthy separation for the band.Heard for the first time in Queen history, the spoken outtakes from The Miracle Sessions invite fans onto the studio floor to experience the band’s unvarnished dynamic, more natural and revealing than any ‘official’ press interview. These unguarded exchanges – by turns mischievous, encouraging, witty, even affectionately waspish – capture the band as they truly were during The Miracle’s late bloom, buzzing with renewed enthusiasm at their return to the studio, and driven by a rare chemistry that still threw up sparks. Includes ’The Miracle Sessions’, containing over an hour of unreleased studio recordings including six previously unheard songs – plus intimate fly-on-the-wall audio of the band at work (and play) in the studio In terms of percussion, the original had a bloated, boomy lower end. Now, the percussion had a focused and tighter presentation that removed the swollen lower frequency aspect but did provide a series of clean strikes. Moving to A Day at the Races and playing the 1999 release from the 1998 remaster of Somebody To Love, I was beginning to see a trend because the new master benefitted again from that open and airy suite of upper mids and treble that gave the overall presentation a rich, deep, spacious aspect that allowed the vocal to sound simple and pure while cymbal strikes had a welcoming fragility. Percussion, from Roger Taylor roamed around the wider and more fulsome soundstage while the bass from John Deacon was sharper and rounder. I would say at least 4-5 of these discs were unbearably noisy. The worst offenders were A Night at the Opera and News of the World, but they came out mostly quiet after a good clean. You have to keep in mind that this was re-pressed at Optimal which is now having problems keeping up with demand and is pressed on coloured vinyl. Featuring a plethora of fascinating insights into a hugely pivotal moment in Queen’s storied history, this is The Miracle fans have been waiting for.