Friday, October 8, 2010

Queen Song of the Week: Seaside Rendezvous

We're back to the tracks from A Night at the Opera after a brief detour into outer space last week!

Seaside Rendezvous is the final song on Side A of Queen's 1975 album A Night at the Opera. The song was written by Freddie Mercury and is the second of his vaudeville-influenced songs on the album (the other being Lazing on a Sunday Afternoon, discussed here.)

Video courtesy of issac8399.

One unusual aspect of this song is that it doesn't appear that Dr. May played on the original recording at all.

Seaside Rendezvous is best known for the "woodwind/brass" section about :50 seconds into the song. In fact, Freddie imitated all the woodwind instruments himself and RT imitated all the brass instruments (including his highest recorded note on a Queen album, a soprano C). The "tap dancing" sound is actually RT and Freddie tapping on a desk with thimbles.

Prior to the album's release, Freddie told New Musical Express: Seaside Rendezvous has a 1920's feel to it and Roger does a tuba and clarinet on it vocally , if you see what I mean. I'm going to make him tap dance too, I'll have to buy him some Ginger Rogers tap shoes.

We've only got two original Queen songs left on the album to cover and next week's in particular is a real doozy. Dr. May has stated that he considers it his "Bohemian Rhapsody"!

Happy Listening!

3 comments:

  1. ooh!! Ooh!! I'm pretty sure I know what next week's song is!! - I continue to be a giant Queen dork. I went through some of my old things at my parent's house recently and found all my old Queen books that I got in high school. I have happily brought them home to reunite them with the rest of my collection!

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  2. Suz - Yeah this one is lots of fun! Too bad they never performed it live: how cute would that have been!

    Sarah - Haha I'm sure you do know! I'm so jealous that you have an actual collection - my dad loved music/records, but for some reason we never had a lot of stuff that I liked in the house growing up! Oh well.

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