Roger Meddows Taylor - Solo Career

Solo Career

Taylor has had a productive solo career, releasing four albums. His first single was his 1977 cover of The Parliaments' "I Wanna Testify". He recorded it during Queen's sessions for the News of the World album. The A-side, although a cover, was completely different from the original. The B-side was a self-penned song "Turn On The TV".

His first solo album, Fun In Space, was released in 1981. Taylor performed all vocals and played all instruments aside of about half of the keyboards, which were done by engineer David Richards. With Queen still touring heavily and recording at the time of release, Taylor was unable to promote the album to its fullest extent, so he appeared on some European TV shows to promote the single, "Future Management", including Top Of The Pops. The only other single to come from the album was "My Country". The only US single released from the album was "Let's Get Crazy".

His next venture, Strange Frontier, came in July 1984. The three singles from the album were the title track, "Beautiful Dreams" (in Portugal only) and "Man On Fire", the latter becoming a live favourite for him in later years. No attempts to promote the singles were made since Queen toured to promote The Works, and Taylor did not perform on any TV shows. Strange Frontier included guest appearances by bandmates Freddie Mercury and John Deacon. Mercury sang backing vocals on "Killing Time", Deacon remixed the B-side "I Cry For You" and Rick Parfitt co-wrote and played on "It's An Illusion". David Richards, Queen's engineer and producer at the time, also co-wrote two of the tracks. The album includes covers of Bruce Springsteen's "Racing in the Street" and Bob Dylan's "Masters of War".

After Queen finished their 1986 Magic Tour, Taylor started a new band, The Cross, which released three albums over their six years of existence. In 1993 the band split up, after performing one final gig at the Gosport Festival.

In 1994 Taylor worked with Yoshiki Hayashi, drummer and pianist of X Japan and released the song "Foreign Sand" and a reworking of The Cross' "Final Destination". The album Happiness? was "Dedicated to the tasmanian tiger – thylacinus cynocephalus, but most especially... for Freddie". "Nazis 1994" from this album became Taylor's first hit single in England and was followed by two other top 40 UK hits, "Happiness" and "Foreign Sand."

In 1998 he released his fourth solo album Electric Fire. He supported it with a small tour in the spring of 1999, on which Brian May joined him at the gig in Wolverhampton. Taylor also performed one of the first Internet-gigs – for which he got a mention in the Guinness Book of World Records.

In 2010, after nearly twelve years between solo albums, Taylor planned to release a new studio album titled The Unblinking Eye (Everything Is Broken). The first single, of the same name, was released on 23 November 2009 as a digital download, but due to popular demand it was released as a limited edition single. Originally leaked to the official Queen fan club's website for members only, it still managed to be on YouTube within hours of the early bird release. It was announced in late 2012 that fans would be able to vote on which songs appeared on the new album, with the album itself slated for a 2013 release.