The 1977 album ‘News of the World’ was one where Freddie Mercury and May remained slightly behind in songwriting compared to their previous works, and Taylor and John Deacon showed themselves more in this record. Roger contributed to this album with the songs ‘Sheer Heart Attack’ and ‘Fight from the Inside,’ which he wrote entirely. However, May and Taylor struggled to find common ground regarding one of those tracks.
Besides writing it, Roger Taylor contributed to the piece by playing several instruments. Although Brian May strengthened it by delivering the lead guitar and enthusiastic screams, he was not that eager when Taylor initially came up with the idea of this song, as he revealed talking in a past interview with Jonesy’s Jukebox in 2017.
He could not agree with Roger regarding this song because he had considered Queen a punk rock act since the beginning, and the singer laughingly ridiculed his way of thinking back then. Then the Queen icon praised his bandmate’s awareness of the trends, indicating he explored David Bowie before each of them. Brian also recalled how Taylor was excited after seeing Bowie’s show, where the audience carried the singer off their shoulders.
“‘Sheer Heart Attack’ is Roger’s track. Roger was the one guy in the band who was aware of what was going on around him – very aware of fashions and trends in music and stuff. But he had that track for quite a while – he had it in his head, and he went, ‘I want this on the album. The things are going the punk way, and this is my punk track.’ And I thought, ‘What is this racket?’ Roger and I are famously never in agreement about anything. And I was not in that frame at all. Because in my mind, I think we were punks anyway from the beginning—my strange, deranged brain.
But Roger was, and still is, the guy who’s aware of trends.
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