Roy Thomas Baker, Famous For His Work With The Art Of Noise And Trevor Horn

The producer of the first Cars album was Roy Thomas Baker, an Englishman best-known for his mile-high production work on the first four Queen albums. But although the album sounds like an immaculate studio production, Hawkes says the recorded versions are pretty close to how the songs sounded live. “We were the same arrangements we id on the demo—The most obvious difference is that we added the multi-track backing vocals, and did a fair number of overdubs. I do remember that on ‘Just What I Needed,’ Roy suggested we do two choruses at the end instead of just one.” By then Hawkes had already come up with the song’s trademark keyboard lick.

Producer, active 1970's to the present. Baker began career at Decca in England aged 14. Moved to Trident Studios. After co-founding Trident's record company Neptune, Baker began working with Queen whom he produced for five albums including the song "Bohemian Rhapsody".

Baker recalls his first hearing of the song: "We were going out to dinner one night and I met Freddie at his apartment in Kensington. He sat down at his piano and said, 'I'd like to play you a song that I'm working on at the moment.' So he played the first part and said, 'This is the chord sequence', followed by the interim part, and although he didn't have all the lyrics together yet, I could tell it was going to be a ballady number. He played a bit further through the song and then stopped suddenly, saying, 'This is where the opera section comes in.' We both just burst out laughing. I had worked with the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company at Decca where I learned a lot about vocals and the way vocals are stressed, so I was probably one of the few people in the whole world who knew exactly what he was talking about.

"It was the first time that an opera section had been incorporated into a pop record, let alone a Number One. It was obviously very unusual and we originally planned to have just a couple of 'Galileos'. But things often have a habit of evolving differently once you're inside the studio, and it did get longer and bigger. The beginning section was pretty spot on and the end section was fairly similar, although we obviously embellished it with guitars and lots of overdubs. But the opera section ended up nothing like the original concept, because we kept changing it and adding things to it."

Roy Thomas Baker, produttore dei primi 4 album dei Queen, ci illustra le varie tracce che compongono il leggendario pezzo "Bohemian Rhapsody" tratto dall'album "A Night at the Opera" del 1975. Baker has produced and added his distinctive sound to artists such as The Cars, Ian Hunter, Nazareth, Guns N' Roses, The Who, The Rolling Stones, David Bowie, Foreigner, Journey, Ozzy Osbourne, Mötley Crüe, T.Rex, Devo, The Stranglers, Dusty Springfield, Yes, Cheap Trick, Gasolin', The Darkness and The Smashing Pumpkins.

Along with engineers Mike Stone, Gary Lyons and Geoff Workman, Baker took the helm on a variety of consoles at the sessions, including a custom-built desk at Rockfield, a Cadac at the Roundhouse, and "an old, blue Neve with big knobs on it" at Wessex. When Baker and Queen retreated to SARM (East) Studios for the mixing sessions, they were treated to a Trident B console.

"That console was the second B-series model that Trident delivered from Malcolm Toft. It was a great board with such a unique sound, although I couldn't say why. I noticed that when it was resold, it was described as the board used to mix 'Bohemian Rhapsody', and I think they got more money than they originally paid for it. We used an MCI machine at SARM which we called 'Munchy, Crunchy and Intermittent', because it was always falling apart!"

Now famous for his work with The Art Of Noise and Trevor Horn, and productions for Spandau Ballet and Mick Jagger, Gary Langan was a fresh-faced, 18-year-old assistant engineer at SARM when he came to work alongside Baker, Stone and Lyons on the 'Bohemian Rhapsody' mix. Langan's first task at the sessions was to put together a composite multitrack master from the three distinct sections of the song. He says: "Nobody really knew how it was going to sound as a whole 6-minute song until it was spliced together. I was standing at the back of the control room and you just knew that you were listening for the first time to a big page in history. Something inside me told me that this was a red letter day, and it really was."

One new item of equipment which was installed at SARM only days before the 'Bohemian Rhapsody' mix was the Alison computerised mixing system. Langan laughs: "It was the first automated system in the world, but it was ridiculous because it never worked properly! You had to store data on two tracks, so you'd end up with no more than 22 tracks of music on your tape, to provide room for the data."