Queen – Sheer Heart Attack

Named for the 1974 album it missed, finished in time to be mistaken for punk

Sheer Heart Attack is the title of Queen’s third album, released in 1974, and the song of that name is not on it. It turned up three years and three albums later on News of the World, where listeners took it for Queen’s answer to punk, although Roger Taylor had started writing it before punk existed. On the record the band’s drummer plays nearly every instrument himself. In Munich on February 11, 1979, all four members tore through it in front of German television cameras, and the song finally sounded like a band.

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The delay was simple. During the 1974 sessions Taylor had a title and the start of a song, and he could not finish it in time. The band liked the phrase enough to put it on the album cover anyway, and the song went into a drawer. When Taylor completed it in 1977, British music had changed around him. A fast, loud, three-minute song with an abrupt ending now sounded like a comment on the new bands, and the finished lyric did take a veiled swipe at the newcomers who were sneering at the older guard. Taylor has always been clear about the order of events: the song came first.

Queen recorded News of the World between July and September 1977 at Basing Street and Wessex Studios in London, producing it themselves with Mike Stone. Taylor treated his song almost as a solo project. He played the drums and the rhythm guitars, then borrowed John Deacon’s bass and played that too. Brian May added the squealing lead guitar in the instrumental break, and Freddie Mercury shared the vocals with Taylor. Deacon does not appear on the track at all, which makes it one of the few Queen recordings without him.

A B-side on two continents

EMI released the album in October 1977, with Elektra handling it in the United States. Sheer Heart Attack sat third in the running order, directly after We Will Rock You and We Are the Champions, and it never got a single of its own. In Britain it went on the back of Spread Your Wings, which reached the Top 40. In America it backed It’s Late. Rolling Stone called it a punk-rock blast, and the idea that Queen had written a reply to the Sex Pistols’ generation stuck, even though the song was older than the movement.

The stage is where it stopped being a studio curiosity. Queen opened the European leg of the Jazz tour in Hamburg on January 17, 1979, and recorded the shows for what became their first live album. They played two nights at Munich’s Rudi-Sedlmayer-Halle, on February 10 and 11. Cameras filmed the second night, and the West German television program Musikbox broadcast the footage on March 9, 1979, eight days after the European dates ended in Paris.

Four players instead of one

In Munich the song is redistributed. Taylor is back behind the drums, where he could not be while he was playing everything else. Deacon plays a bass part he never recorded. May carries the guitars Taylor had tracked in the studio, and Mercury takes the front of the stage. Queen placed it late in the set, just ahead of the closing pair of We Will Rock You and We Are the Champions, and used its speed to push the show toward the finish. When Live Killers came out on June 22, 1979, its version of Sheer Heart Attack was credited to this same Munich night.

The song spent its early life filed in the wrong place: named for an album that did not contain it, released in a year that made it look like a reaction, and recorded by one man on a record credited to four. The Munich film corrects all of that. It was never Queen imitating punk. It was a hard, fast rock song a drummer had been carrying since 1974, and it needed the whole band and an arena to show what it was.