Queen reissue “A Day at the Races” on vinyl for its 50th anniversary

Queen are marking the 50th anniversary of “A Day at the Races” with two new vinyl editions, due on 11 December through Sony Music Entertainment. The album will come as a blue marbled pressing and as a picture disc sold exclusively via the Sony Music Store. Pre-orders are already open, with details on the band's official site, according to OndaRock.

Released on 10 December 1976, “A Day at the Races” was the first album Queen produced entirely themselves, with Mike Stone as engineer. Like its predecessor “A Night at the Opera”, it took its title from a Marx Brothers film, and Brian May and Roger Taylor have described it as a natural continuation of that record. It reached number one in the UK and number five in the United States.

The gospel-inspired “Somebody to Love”, released three weeks before the album, became one of the band's signature songs; George Michael's performance of it with Queen at the 1992 Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert was issued in 1993. The album also features Brian May's “Tie Your Mother Down”, “Good Old-Fashioned Lover Boy”, the twelve-string-led “Long Away”, a single in the US and New Zealand, “The Millionaire Waltz” and “Teo Torriatte (Let Us Cling Together)”, partly sung in Japanese and released as a single in Japan.

Queen formed in London in 1970, mixing progressive, glam and hard rock. Their newest studio album is “Made in Heaven” from 1995, according to MusicBrainz. In October mbuzz reported that Brian May said the band will never tour again.