Here’s the small 3-D guy from the cover of Queen I. A note for Queen historians: nobody knows what happened to the original montage. Freddie and I created it, at his flat, double-size, by cutting up and sticking prints made by our friend Doug Puddifoot. It was all glued to a piece of plywood. It was photographed for the back cover, and if we had even this copy transparency, things would be good. Sadly, the copy and the original collage disappeared from the EMI archives some years ago, along with all the rest of our original art work for the first few Queen album covers – it’s a bit of a tragedy, really. I suppose they will turn up one day, among all the other stolen treasures peddled daily on the Internet. But meanwhile, we have no full-quality representation of our original work. The best quality version we have, kindly supplied for this purpose by Richard Gray, is the one created in Japan a few years ago, for Toshiba-EMI’s mini vinyl collection of CDs. I’m not sure how they did this. Perhaps they had a copy ‘film’ in their archives, from the days when the album was first released (there is no text on this, so it’s not just a photograph of an album sleeve). But it looks like it’s been screened for printing.
Well, here he is … not very good quality, but discernible as a doll of Roger, playing a mini kit, atop an ornamental military drum which Roger probably still has in his drum archives.
Enjoy it in Depth. A precursor of the New Golden Age of 3-D!
And below … here’s the rest of the back cover … including some pictures of the four of us at a fancy dress party given by our friend Les Brown, I seem to remember. (I think it’s time Roger and I wrote that book!!!) I am a penguin, of course, Roger is a Mad Hatter, John is …erm, I’m not sure … and Freddie is … some kind of dashing cavalier … there are also live pictures of us playing the Albert Hall (as Smile, actually) – at the Marquee (as Queen), at least one taken in Trident Studios, and, at the bottom, stills from our first photo session at Freddie’s flat in Victoria Road, decked out with Biba artifacts. This session produced our first poster. The chess piece and the playing card are of course the White Queen and the Black Queen, already in existence in our heads, but to emerge later on Queen II. And in the middle of it all … Deacy hiding behind a feather, and, largely ignored for about 40 years, a 3-D Drummer.
Ah … them were ‘t’ days …..
Cheers
Bri