Queen put out One Year of Love as a single on June 4, 1986, and Brian May did not play a note on it. For a band built around May’s guitar, that made the release stand out immediately.
The song was written by bassist John Deacon and sung by Freddie Mercury, and it already had a place in Queen history through the film Highlander and the band’s 12th studio album, A Kind of Magic. It was also part of a small group of Queen songs written entirely by Deacon, which is one reason fans still talk about it years later.
Steve Gregory, who played the saxophone part, said the session was “short and sweet” and took “an hour at the most.” He recorded his part at the Town House in Shepherd’s Bush, London, and said Freddie was clearly steering the room. “Freddie knew what he wanted,” Gregory said, adding that Mercury told him where to start and then worked through the part piece by piece.
What makes the single unusual is not just that May was absent. There was no guitar on the track at all. Deacon played Yamaha DX-7 synth instead, while a string orchestra conducted by Lynton Naiff filled out the arrangement. That gave the song a sound that sits apart from the rest of Queen’s catalogue and from what many listeners would have expected from a Queen single in 1986.
The oddity is sharpened by the fact that the track came from the same era as Highlander and A Kind of Magic, when Queen was still releasing music tied closely to film and to Mercury’s voice. Yet this one carried a different signature: Deacon’s writing, Mercury’s vocal, Gregory’s saxophone and no May guitar anywhere on it.
The release now mostly serves as a reminder of how far Queen could stretch without losing its identity. For listeners revisiting the song today, the unanswered question is the creative one: why this track, at that moment, was allowed to go out as a Queen single with Brian May left completely out of the frame.
