Roy Thomas Baker

Mack is a poor producer for me. I loathe the dry, tinny sound of drums, the guitar reduced to virtually nothing, awkward synths given more prominence over real instruments. Roy Thomas Baker made Queen's best albumms and David Richards was nearly as good- "Don't Lose Your head" aside. The middle period is deeply disappointing; you can tell that because Mack's songs e.g Dragon Attack, I Want To Break Free, Action This day, all sound drastically better live, where Queen were free of him. The difference is less noticeable with Thomas Baker's productions.

RTB worked with other bands -- the Cars, Devo, some incarnation of G n' R among many others -- with a heavy visual style. With NOTW, the glam era was clearly over, the music changed with less layering and unusual song structures, like "You Take My Breath Away." The striking Jazz cover and the wild stereo/mono trick on "Mustapha" reverberate with RTB's influence. Now, Mack seems to have been more of a sound man-- capturing the fabric of sound-- rather than shaping or molding song ideas. There's good stuff in both places, but one wonders if RTB would let Queen get away with Hot Space before it hit the shelves.

So, to get back to my original question, from what I'm able to gather - the reason Queen didn't work again with RTB was just simply they wanted to update their sound & with changing musical styles they felt it better to do so with someone else. It was nothing personal? or they didn't have a falling out?

Not sure if this answers your original question, but I recall quotes from Brian and Freddie around the time of NOTW saying they'd done the multi-tracked, overdubbed thing to death, and were looking to go a new way with their sound. Maybe they felt RTB was a certain style of producer and they wanted new ideas. From everything I've read, the parting was amicable, as RTB has done docs and stuff and never has a bad word about the band, and never heard Brian or Roger disparage him either.

The only producer they gave the elbow to was John Anthony. Other than him, Fred asked Robin Cable to be there for some tracks since he wanted a specific wall of sound effect, and they departed with Mack (possibly) because they were positively astonished with David Richards' work.

Thanks guys, for clearing up something that I had often wondered about .
Cheers!