6. QueenSheer Heart Attack
John Deacon is in the ‘Stutter Rap’ video and he is also in the rock band Queen.
Now that you mention John Deacon, I’m going to tell you that one of the first few gigs that Mclusky did was at the Borderline in London. We supported a band who were on Roger Taylor from Queen’s label. They were a proper acid-jazz band and obviously the bill didn’t work, as you’d imagine. Someone who was in or with the band kept saying to people, "Do you know that most of the high harmonies on Queen records were sung by Roger Taylor and not Freddie Mercury?" To which I replied, "Yeah, yeah, I’m a Queen fan. I know about that. It’s commonly known." I can’t remember if this was before QI was on the television or not because it seems like a QI thing to go around telling people in the same way that – and this is something that plagues me – in a three-year period I had four people come up to me and tell me apropos of nothing that ciabatta means "sandal" in Italian.
Once I was with my mother in Roath Park and we were waiting to get on a pedal boat to pedal around the lake. My mother was eating a panini. She wasn’t even eating a ciabatta. This guy who was stood in the queue said, "Do you know that ciabatta means ‘sandal’ in Italian?" And I said, "That’s a panini." This is what he said, and it made me so mad: "Irregardless," he said. Then I said, "Do you know what ‘irregardless’ means?" and he stopped talking to us.
I don’t know how we got there from John Deacon but Sheer Heart Attack by Queen is one of the greatest albums ever recorded by human beings. I wasn’t allowed to have that album out because there’s a history of heart problems in our family so when I was a little kid it used to piss me off that the best album was called Sheer Heart Attack. In our house, I had to hide it under an LP copy of News Of The World which is a significantly worse album.
Sheer Heart Attack has got everything. For a lot of people, that could be the weakness of it. It’s all over the place. The personality which smashes out of that record is just everything to me. Even, or particularly, the ridiculous songs like ‘In The Lap Of The Gods’ and ‘Bring Back Leroy Brown’. I can’t believe there are people out there who would claim to like really colourful rock music who could not like that record. I think it’s peerless. Sorry. It’s so weird for me just to give a straight opinion of something. I do apologise. I probably threw you there. You’re probably waiting for me to undermine it somehow but I really fucking like it.
