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From the very beginning, Queen knew they wanted their second album to be “big”. Both in musical ambition and thematic grandiosity, 1974’s Queen II, as guitarist Brian May noted, enclosed a “whole world”. Though not strictly tied to a concept, it grew from a myriad of influences, from classical literature to chess imagery and Victorian fine art. However, it was frontman Freddie Mercury’s interest in the latter that delivered one of the album’s most outlandish masterpieces, The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke.

The track – derived from the 1864 painting of the same name by English painter Richard Dadd – was Queen’s “biggest stereo experiment”, mirroring the complexity of the original artwork as well as the sense of mania that found its way into the mind of its creator. Though masked by an entrenched whimsy, The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke conceals a dark history, one involving mental illness, incarceration and murder.

Following a brief career in draughtsmanship, Dadd experienced a psychotic breakdown during an expedition through the Middle East in 1842. Undergoing a striking personality change while travelling up the River Nile, he believed himself to be under the direct guidance of the Egyptian god Osiris. Later, upon his journey home through Rome, he became incensed by the desire to kill Pope Gregory XVI, though he abandoned the mission due to the religious leader being “too well guarded”.

Dadd’s increasingly violent urges soon turned fatal. At the time, the painter was under his family’s care in Kent, following a diagnosis of unsound mind (by today’s medical standards, his illness would be recognised as schizophrenia) which described an “aberration of the intellect” along with the suggestion of confinement within an asylum.

Uncomfortable with this idea, his father, chemist Robert Dadd, proposed a course of “quiet and retirement” at home. Unfortunately, in the summer of 1843, Dadd – later claiming to have been under the instruction of Osiris – murdered his father by stabbing him and slashing his throat, convinced that the man was possessed by demons.

Upon fleeing to France, Dadd additionally attacked a fellow traveller before being apprehended by French police. After almost a year’s detainment in the Clermont de L’Oise asylum at Fontainebleau, he was then extracted to England, where he was incarcerated in the State Criminal Lunatic Asylum of Bethlem Royal Hospital.

Dadd, who had begun creating fairy-inspired pieces long before his mental illness took hold, was encouraged to continue his work by the hospital’s head of staff, George Henry Haydon, who commissioned The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke. From 1855, Dadd worked on the piece until 1864, upon which time it remained – according to him – unfinished.

Meanwhile, Freddie Mercury’s love of art sparked during his formative years at Ealing Art College. In the book A Life In Lyrics, former partner Mary Austin recalls Mercury’s “fascination” with The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke. “It began with a story he read in a Sunday supplement. He showed me the clipping and told me we had to go see it, as if it couldn’t wait another day.” Describing the work as small but “so dense”, she continued, “You could stare at it for ages and still miss half of it…it was like a puzzle”.

Measuring just 21 inches tall, it depicts a busy woodland scene centred by the “fairy-feller”, an axe-wielding man positioned to cut through a nut. Around him are winged fairies, Oberon and Titania (king and queen of the fairies in William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream), peasants, military, a trumpet-playing crane fly, and even Dadd and his father themselves.

Many of the characters, lifted from English folklore and Shakespeare, are given purpose in the painting’s companion poem, Elimination of a Picture & Its Subject-Called the Feller’s Master Stroke, and appear again in The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke’s lyrics, which portray each scene: ‘The fairy folk have gathered round the new moon shine / To see the feller crack a nut at night’s noon time’.

“That song was totally Freddie’s thing”, said drummer Roger Taylor to Mojo in a 2004 interview. “Full of Olde English vocabulary – tatterdemalion, satyrs, pedagogues, ostlers and junketers. Some really astonishing stuff.”

According to Austin, Freddie was so “transfixed” by Dadd’s creation that he insisted on viewing it on a weekly basis: “We’d go to the Tate, stand in front of the painting, and then go home again.” In a 2014 conversation with Classic Rock, May described his bandmate as “obsessed”. “He used to take us on the bus to Pimlico to see it at the Tate Gallery”, he said. “If you look at [the painting], it’s so complex, with many layers, which is what Freddie was trying to turn into sound”.

On what attracted the singer to the work, Austin believed that he “resonated with the madness. He wasn’t afraid of it”. She explained, “Every visit, we’d find something new. It was folklore, it was fantasy, all these tiny figures layered on top of each other. It showed him how far you could push detail, how intricate you could make something.”

Bustling with energy, The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke captures Queen at their most extravagant. Equally as ornate and maximalist as the painting, the track is stuffed full of sound, composed of frantic harpsichord, hopping drums, numerous vocal layers and overdubbed guitar parts.

“Freddie was really coming into his own”, said Taylor. “With this album he had this crazy plan for this vast number of vocal counterpoints – a six-part harmony there, another six-part harmony overlapping. He didn’t seem remotely bothered by the fact that there were only four of us to sing all these parts.

“It was a massive amount of work. We really were consciously trying to break the boundaries of what people thought they could do in the recording studio.”

Due to its complexity, which, according to May in a 2019 Mojo interview, saw the band push “everything to its limit”, the track “could only have been a studio creation”, and was therefore only performed a few times during the Queen II album tour in 1974. The first live recording of the song appeared as late as 2014, when it was released on Live At The Rainbow ‘74.

Though The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke was rarely performed, Dadd’s creation found another way to the stage – through Freddie’s costumes. As per a 1975 Sotheby’s listing, the frontman approached designer Wendy de Smet with a costume sketch inspired by a character within the artwork, together creating his white ‘Mercury Wing’ catsuit.

At this time of writing, the Royal Academy of Arts is displaying Richard Dadd’s The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke in London as part of the first major museum exhibition dedicated to the artist in over 50 years.

However, it’s typically housed at the Tate Britain (formerly known as the Tate Gallery), the place where Freddie Mercury’s enchantment with the artwork originally began, inspiring not only one of Queen’s greatest albums, its formative extravagance a portent to classics such as Bohemian Rhapsody, but numerous other creators, including English comic writer Alan Moore, doom metal pioneers Candlemass and fantasy / science-fiction author Terry Pratchett.

The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke undoubtedly holds a complicated, sad legacy, but just like the Queen song born from it, it continues to unveil something new upon every encounter – a masterstroke of obsessive complexity and dedication.

The Richard Dadd: Beyond Bedlam exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in London runs until October 25, 2026. Read more about Queen and Freddie Mercury’s last stand in Classic Rock’s latest issue, out now.

There are two sides to every story, and Alice Cooper just happens to be on both of them. Born Vincent Damon Furnier on February 4, 1948, his creation of Alice Cooper – the larger-than-life villain inspired by 50s horror movies – helped to inject a bit of theatricality into rock’n’roll that has helped inspire everyone from Kiss to Mercyful Fate.

Cooper has shared parts of his story before – notably in 1976’s Me, Alice and 2007’s Golf Monster – but his latest book, Devil On My Shoulder, is a novel reappraisal of his life through the lens of both Furnier the man and Alice Cooper the character. Hammer caught up with the shock rock legend to talk about his new book and how he feels about his place in the pantheon of rock and metal greats.

What inspired you to do a book basically cross-examining yourself?

“I have to deal with both me and Alice! Who are two entirely different people, by the way. So I got to thinking, ‘Hey, that’d be a great idea for a book – the conflict between the two.’ They coexist, and get along quite well even though they’re opposites. I am just the dad, grandad, church-going guy who’s as normal as can be. Alice is just the opposite – he’s the villain of rock! I have to jump between those skins a lot.”

Rock’n’roll has always had an element of reinvention, but it seems there was always an element of Alice in you even when you were in school?

“Well, I was certainly the class clown. I went to a lot of different schools and I figured the only real way to get along was to be the funny kid you didn’t want to beat up. I learned how to exist like that and I was always the kid who wanted to go see horror movies, always more on the side of the villain than the good guy. But I could see the humour in those movies too, where the guy would come out of a cave and you could see the zipper on the back of his scary costume. I was way ahead of other kids my age when it came to understanding the absurdity of things. I created Alice to be my favourite rock star – he still is.”

We’re at a point where theatricality is coming back into rock and metal in a big way. Does it feel like we’ve come full circle?

“I grew up in Detroit with Motown and stuff. But I really loved Chuck Berry, because he would lead a song off with his guitar. He could tell a story in three minutes and make it syncopated, funny, tragic or whatever. To me, that was so clever. He was the architect for the Rolling Stones and The Beatles – he put the rock into rock’n’roll. So that was my biggest influence at the time, until I was about 15 and then it was the British invasion.”

There’s a point in the book where you point out all the bands who’ve cited Alice as an influence. Has there ever been anyone who made you go “I’m not sure I see us in that.”

“Almost all of them. They’d say, ‘We really digested this album’, but it’d always end up being an album where I’d be like, ‘Really?’ The punks kind of liked albums like Zipper Catches Skin, or Special Forces – those really blackout albums I had. Whereas Metallica said they listened to Welcome To My Nightmare. The Sex Pistols said Killer was their favourite album… everybody had a different take.

I think what it was, is that we went so far against what you were supposed to do and still made hit records that could be played on the radio. Everybody could see that, from KISS to [David] Bowie. It was like, ‘Wow, you can be a character and still get hit records?’ That was what we brought to the table. Without Bob Ezrin we would’ve dissolved, I think. He was our George Martin – he took what was good about us and made it better.”

You mention being fascinated by horror movies from a young age – when metal came up and was quite explicitly influenced by that stuff, did it feel like a scene that immediately appealed to you?

“I looked at heavy metal as just being very hard rock – it was still guitar driven rock’n’roll. All it was, was now the frills had been taken out. I found a lot of your metal bands were actually prog bands. Listen to Iron Maiden – they’re metal, but they’re also prog. There’s a 10-minute song that goes through 28 changes, but they keep the attitude. The thing about metal is that it’s all about attitude. How do you want that band to come off? You want the anger and frustration to show, to spit at society. Spit at authority. It kind of got funny to me watching it for a while, because half of these people wanna be Vikings.

It got humorous, because I’m looking at some of these bands – death metal is still hard rock. It’s still guitar driven hard rock, with a different attitude. Then it got more theatrical. It was really just bands… not necessarily living that lifestyle, but doing what I was doing – playing characters up there. I think that’s healthy, I think that’s great. Being a Christian, people would say, ‘What about these death metal bands who are anti this or that?’ I’d go, ‘Hey, they’re yelling at God. I think he can take it.’”

What’s your favourite rumour you’ve heard about yourself?

“Oh my God, I’d hear a new one every day! There was no internet when we started, it was all word of mouth, so stuff like the chicken incident [in 1969 Alice threw a live chicken into an audience thinking it would fly away – the crowd instead tore it apart] started it all. We weren’t the band your parents wanted you to see. The funny thing was, there was nothing in the show that was bannable. It was just so different that nobody knew how to put it in a box.

We’d get to towns and the ASPCA would turn up like, ‘You cannot see a German Shepherd on fire in this show.’ I’d go, ‘What?! Are you kidding me? Who even thought of that?’ The absurdity of it got so humourous we just had to not deny anything and the notoriety would get bigger and bigger.”

How mad did it get?

“The best thing that ever happened to us was when they tried to ban us in Britain – our next record [1989’s Trash] went right up the charts and we sold out Wembley. I’d send David Blunkett gifts – he couldn’t figure out why we were so happy!”

Devil On My Shoulder is out now via Ebury Spotlight. Alice Cooper is currently on tour in the UK, and tours North America later this month.