Seven Seas of Rhye

Mercury began the song in 1969 with his earlier band Wreckage. A short instrumental sketch of it closes the first album. The full recording was made at Trident in August 1973 for Queen II, intended as a single that would grab a listener at once after Keep Yourself Alive failed.

May recalled in a documentary that the piano riff was Mercury's idea and that he wrote the middle eight himself, but Mercury took the credit and the band accepted the unwritten rule that whoever brought a song in got the writing credit. Rhye is a fantasy world that Mercury had invented with his younger sister, and it turns up in My Fairy King and Lily of the Valley. Mercury told Tom Browne in 1977 that it was a figment of the imagination. The track ends on a crossfade into the band singing I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside, with a stylophone played by producer Roy Thomas Baker, and whistled at the opening of Brighton Rock.

Single and live

Queen were booked onto Top of the Pops in February 1974 when David Bowie could not appear, and EMI rushed the single out on 22 February. It reached number 10 in Britain, their first hit. Cash Box called it a high energy rocker with Led Zeppelin overtones. The song was dropped from the live set in 1976 and returned on The Works Tour in 1984.