Queen: A Day at the Races (180g, half-speed mastered) [HOLLYWOOD]

Why you'll love it

This 180g reissue was half-speed mastered at Abbey Road by Miles Showell and comes with a photo inner sleeve. The album went to No. 1 in the UK, Japan and the Netherlands and reached No. 5 in the US.

This edition

• 180g vinyl
• Half-speed master
• Remastered
• Inner sleeve with photographs

About the album

Name your album after a Marx Brothers film once and it's a nod; do it twice and it's a plan. After A Night at the Opera, Queen came home from six months on the road, went into The Manor in Oxfordshire in July 1976 and, for the first time, produced the whole record themselves with engineer Mike Stone.

"Somebody To Love" is Freddie Mercury stacking the four of them into a full gospel choir, "Tie Your Mother Down" is Brian May's riff-first opener, and "Good Old-Fashioned Lover Boy" and "The Millionaire Waltz" are Mercury at his most theatrical. Roger Taylor's "Drowse" and John Deacon's "You And I" round it out, and May's "Teo Torriatte (Let Us Cling Together)" sings its chorus in Japanese, a thank-you to the fans who had embraced them there. The four members wrote across the whole record, and the harmonies are stacked as high as anything they ever did.

BBC Radio 2 listeners later voted it among the 100 greatest albums of all time. The band played billiards and cards between takes, which may explain why the finished record has quite so much swagger.

Also at Kops: more Queen on vinyl · browse Rock

Tracklist

Listen

On EMI / Hollywood (cat# D004064801), a reissue of the 1976 album.