Legendary producer Roy Thomas Baker, best known for his work with Queen, has died at the age of 78. His publicist confirmed the news in an official statement, revealing that Baker passed away on April 12 at his home in Lake Havasu City, Arizona. The cause of death has not been disclosed.
Baker was born in 1946 in Hampstead, north London, and kicked off his career at Decca Records in the late sixties, where he worked alongside fellow producers Tony Visconti and Gus Dudgeon on recordings by Ten Years After, Dr. John, Ginger Baker’s Air Force, Savoy Brown, Moody Blues, Nazareth, Yes, David Bowie, Be Bop Deluxe, Rolling Stones, The Who, Dusty Springfield, Free, T. Rex and plenty of others.
Once he’d made a name for himself, Baker became in-house engineer at Trident Studios in central London, which is where the long and hugely successful collaboration with Queen began. After producing their debut, he went on to work on the albums “Queen II”, “Sheer Heart Attack”, “A Night At The Opera” (home to the rock classic Bohemian Rhapsody), “A Day At The Races” and “Jazz”.
Looking back on Bohemian Rhapsody, Baker once said: “It was the first time an opera section had been put on a pop record, and nobody dreamed this record would become a number one. It was a really unusual thing, and at first we only planned a few ‘Galileos’. But things often turn out differently once you’re in the studio, and the piece just got longer and grander.
“The opera section kept growing, so we kept adding enormous lengths of tape to the reel. Every time Freddie came in with the next ‘Galileo’, I’d splice on another piece of tape that looked like a zebra crossing!”
“We spent about three weeks on that section alone, which in 1975 was the average time it took to record an entire album.”
After Queen’s success, Baker moved to New York and worked for Columbia Records, where he produced the album by Journey, as well as Ian Hunter and Ronnie Wood, before being offered the top A&R job at Elektra Records, where he looked after albums by Lindsey Buckingham, Dokken, Mötley Crüe, Joe Lynn Turner and The Cars.
Baker also produced recordings by Foreigner, Alice Cooper, Cheap Trick, Devo, Ozzy Osbourne, Sammy Hagar, T’Pau, Devo, The Stranglers, Guns N’ Roses, The Darkness and Smashing Pumpkins. In 2014 he also produced the album “Heaven & Earth” by Yes, 35 years after the famous aborted recording sessions in Paris, when Yes were piecing together material for a new album, which marks the modest outcome of what became “Tormato”.
