Summer 1976. Eight months after tore up the rule book for hit singles, have finally – finally – released a follow-up single, . It’s a lovely pop-rock ditty, infectious and in the groove and.
.. what the fuck? That’s your follow-up to the most titanic rock song of all time? Well, no.
It would have to do for now, though, while Queen struggled fitfully to try to come up with the real follow-up to the squillion-selling album . The one they were bending over backwards in the studio pretending wouldn’t have anything to do with being a follow-up. The one they were pretending hadn’t changed a thing, but which in fact had changed everything.
Indeed, in the weeks leading up to the band going into the studio to start work on the new album, guitarist had married his girlfriend Christine Mullen at a church in Barnes, south London, and moved into a newly purchased semi nearby. Bassist John Deacon had bought a Victorian semi in Putney and moved in with his wife Veronica and their son Robert. Drummer , who was even richer, having accumulated extra royalties from having written and sung the B-side to , the otherwise pedestrian , bought a smart house in upmarket Fulham, before also acquiring a country house in Surrey.
Even singer was undergoing his own kind of love-home reinvention, splitting from his long-term, live-in girlfriend Mary Austin and moving into a luxury apartment in Holland Park, buying Mary a £30,000 flat nearby. Now, in July, the band had entered The Manor studios i.