“They all chimed in, ‘We want some crazy Spanish guitar. Improvise!’ I thought, ‘I’ve bitten off more than I can chew’”: When Queen pressganged Steve Howe into appearing on Innuendo

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By ( Prog ) published

Yes guitarist was minding his own business in Switzerland, then found himself in a studio being handed a guitar and told to record for 1991 hit single

Singer Freddie Mercury of Queen at the Rosemont Horizon on September 19, 1980 in Rosemont, Illinois. Inset, Steve Howe
(Image credit: Getty Images)

In 2012 Prog stated the case for Queen being regarded as a prog band. One of our main exhibits was 1991 album Innuendo, which included a guest appearance by Steve Howe on the title track. Here’s what he told us about his unexpected day in the studio.

Right at the end of their career as an active band, Queen returned to the adventurous music-making they’d been known for back in the beginning. In 1989 they began working on their penultimate album, Innuendo, in London and Montreux.

In the summer of 1990, Yes guitarist Steve Howe paid a flying visit to the Swiss city, where a chance encounter with a former guitar tech found him being invited to Queen’s studio to hear the album as a work-in-progress.

“Inside, there’s Freddie, Brian and Roger all sitting together,” Howe says. “They go, ‘Let’s play you the album.’ Of course, I’m hearing it for the first time: – I Can’t Live Without You, I’m Going Slightly Mad. And they saved Innuendo itself until last. They played it, and I was fucking blown away.”

If that was surprising, what happened next was utterly out-of-the-blue: the band asked Howe to play on the title track. The Yes man politely suggested they’d lost their minds. It took the combined weight of Mercury, May and Taylor to persuade him.

“They all chimed in, ‘We want some crazy Spanish guitar flying around over the top. Improvise!’” recalls Howe. “I started noodling around on the guitar. It was pretty tough. After a couple of hours I thought, ‘I’ve bitten off more than I can chew here.’

“I had to learn a bit of the structure, work out the chordal roots, where you had to fall if you did a mad run into the distance – you have to know where you’re going. But it got towards evening, and we’d doodled and I’d noodled, and it turned out to be really good fun.

“We have this beautiful dinner, we go back to the studio and have a listen, And they go, ‘That’s great – that’s what we wanted.’”

Released as a single in January 1991, Innuendo gave Queen their third No.1 single. Like Bohemian Rhapsody 25 years earlier, it was as unlikely as hit singles get: a six-and-a-half minute musical jigsaw, complete with flamenco runs, classically-inclined orchestral overloads and maverick 5/4 timing.

Queensrÿche covered the song on 2007’s Take Cover album, and you can hear its echo in Radiohead’s Paranoid Android and Muse’s more elaborate sci-fi epics.

“In the world of rock, Queen stands out as a good example of the clash between guitar and piano in songwriting,” Muse’s Matt Bellamy once said. “I think that’s where you stumble across those more unusual arrangements and chord structures.”

Dave Everley
Dave Everley

Dave Everley has been writing about and occasionally humming along to music since the early 90s. During that time, he has been Deputy Editor on Kerrang! and Classic Rock, Associate Editor on Q magazine and staff writer/tea boy on Raw, not necessarily in that order. He has written for Metal Hammer, Louder, Prog, the Observer, Select, Mojo, the Evening Standard and the totally legendary Ultrakill. He is still waiting for Billy Gibbons to send him a bottle of hot sauce he was promised several years ago.

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