Songfacts®:

• Brian May wrote "The Night Comes Down" shortly after Queen's formation in 1970, a time when he wasn't always in a good place.
  
  "The song, actually, was being about those moments when you are not jolly, those moments when you feel like you've lost it," he revealed in Queen The Greatest, a YouTube series. "And when I look back at it, I was very young to be writing that stuff but I did get depressed in those days."
  
  He was, by all accounts, in a bit of a funk when he wrote the song. "It was always about relationships," May said, admitting that he was "never any good" at making them work.
  
  "I had moments where I thought, 'I am in a great place. I can make music. I'm with great friends. I'm at college doing stuff that I love doing. Everything's great.' And then somehow, everything would fall apart," he added. "It's like the night came down in my head. So that's what the song was about. It's not a jolly song."
• When I was young it came to me
  And I could see the sun breaking
  Lucy was high and so was I
  Dazzling, holding the world inside
  
  The lyric references the Beatles song "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds." May is a devoted Beatles fan and, like most other budding British musicians of his generation, he more or less built his musical DNA around them.
• "The Night Comes Down" dates back to Queen's first recording session in December 1971 at De Lane Lea Music Centre in London, where the still-unsigned band was hired to test new studio gear.
  
  In 1972, Queen secured a recording contract with Trident Studios. They commenced work with Roy Thomas Baker, who, along with studio owners and managers Norman and Barry Sheffield, mandated the re-recording of the demos previously cut at De Lane Lea Studios. A new version of "The Night Comes Down" was recorded, but the band was unhappy with the outcome.
  
  To get their preferred version of the song onto their eponymous debut album, Queen smuggled in the De Lane Lea master in a box labeled "Trident Studios." It was then mixed there, the powers that be seemingly none the wiser.
  
  It was a small but satisfying act of artistic defiance - proof that, even in their earliest days, Queen knew exactly what they wanted and were perfectly willing to bend the rules to get it.