I decided to waste my time amidst this global panic and quarantine, to figure something almost nobody asked for
When was the thunderclap on Dead on Time recorded?
Short answer is below the long one, read the long one for the research process.
Long Answer: From what’s been told, the
thunderclap on the record was recorded at Switzerland. Queen moved to Switzerland for the Jazz sessions on August 1st / 2nd. This is just a shot in the dark date, Queen usually scheduled recording stuff to begin sometime at the dead start of the month. New month, new you I guess. I believe they had a 3pm - 11pm shift, this was revealed from News of the World session documentation that’s listed sessions from August 22nd - September 5th, 1977. A majority of sessions started at 3:00pm, and ended at 11:00pm. There would usually be a break from around 7:30pm to 8:30pm. Sometimes the times were slightly moderated. Examples: A session on September 2nd lasted from 3:00pm to 12:00am. On session on August 9th lasted from 2:30pm to 12:00am. Some were pushed back or later times in the day or were very greatly pushed into the next morning. A session on August 26th, 1977 (costing about £486) lasted from 3:00pm - 4:00am. Another one, on September 4th, 1977, lasting from 3:00pm - 6:00am. Anyway, enough with the tangent. I looked up the weather report in Switzerland for August 1978. All I got was pages about a band named Weather Report. So I worded it as Weather Archives, and then, I found a site that would have given me the the reports, but when I entered “August 1st, 1978”, it said: “You must enter a date form the past” so I tried rewording again. I looked up any storm reports or archives from Switzerland. After about 17 or 18 pages of just surfing, I found a PDF providing me a timeline on storms in Switzerland from 1975 - 1982. I found a storm that formed at 4:58pm on August 6th, 1978. Four years to the date when Queen began recording the backing track to Father to Son (to son). I looked into it a bit further. 80mm (3.1 inches) an hour of rain and hail fell down onto Switzerland that night. No thunder, but the next night, it was vicious. It crept into Montreux past midnight on August 8th. I’d say the thunder woke up Brian, who thought it would have been a good idea to record the thunderstorm. So our final date was August 8th, 1978. You’re probably thinking, there must have been more storms, yes, but Queen were in France when those storms stopped by. No more storms were reported in Switzerland until June 10th, 1979. I’m sorry for making you read all this, it was useless information, but I thought I’d give it a go anyway.
Short Answer: August 8th, 1978, shortly after midnight. Remember, this is presumably, not the real deal. This is second hand information. We don’t have any strict documentation telling us when this was recorded.
The photo I provided is the weather reports from Switzerland (from July 8th, 1975 - July 16th, 1982)
News of the a World Documentation: https://we.tl/t-YapH6kcUhk
Anyway, that’s the deal.
Queenfanatic_