by Mark Blake
For Queen, inevitably, there was no time to reflect. Just like ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ before, American radio DJs had begun playing ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’, even though Elektra had no plans to release it as a single. The label relented, and by Christmas 1979, it was at number 1. It was a relief, especially as ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’ had failed even to crack the Top 50. But it was also indicative of musical changes ahead. Queen’s last US Top 5 hit had been ‘We Are the Champions’. Now they were back, but with a knockabout rockabilly number. ‘No doubt there are those who hate the new single, but like what we’ve done in the past,’ said a cautious May. ‘But I think that tends to happen, unless you’re totally predictable. You lose some, you gain some.’ In January, ‘Save Me’, a more traditional Queen ballad, was released as a single, reaching number 11 in the UK.
The success of both singles brought with it the pressure to keep working. Queen returned to Munich in February for a four-month recording session. It was the longest amount of time they’d spent in one place working on an album (working title: Play the Game). ‘Between 1979 and 1984, I probably spent about a year of my life in the Munich Hilton,’ says Peter Hince now. ‘Ratty’ was there to assist John Deacon as part of what was called the Bass Department. The Gentlemen’s Department comprised Mercury and various members of his entourage. The Guitar Department was May and his tech Brian ‘Jobby’ Zellis, while the Drum Department included Roger Taylor and his technician Chris ‘Crystal’ Taylor. ‘There was a certain amount of rivalry, banter and competition – professionally and socially,’ says Hince.
Queen were unusually prolific in Munich. Some claim as many as forty songs were submitted for what would become a ten-track album, eventually titled The Game. As Mack observes, ‘There were two camps of songwriting: Freddie and Brian. Fred was easy. We thought along similar lines and it took him fifteen to twenty minutes to come up with something absolutely brilliant. Brian, on the other hand, would come up with a great idea and get completely lost in insignificant details. Keeping the focus was difficult at the best of times with this mixture of personalities.’
Mack’s request that May use a Telecaster on ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’ wasn’t the only time the two butted heads. ‘There was some conflict,’ conceded May. ‘I had a lot of disputes with him over how we should record guitars. I just wanted to record it the way I always recorded it. I wasn’t even thinking about it. But Mack said, “Look, try my way.” Eventually we did compromise and get the best of both worlds.’
Discussing Queen’s tax year out to record Jazz, Brian May recalled the band thinking that recording overseas would take away the ‘distractions’ of working at home. However, in Munich, there were more distractions than ever. ‘When we did The Game, everything was fun and new and shiny,’ remembered May. ‘But the problems started with, “Let’s have a drink after the studio”, which was nice, at first …’
The regular routine at Musicland would begin with representatives from each of the ‘departments’ meeting at six o’clock, when Brian ‘Jobby’ Zellis would start mixing cocktails. Cocktails would be followed by dinner, more drinks and then on to a club. Mercury and other members of the Gentlemen’s Department would often head for Old Mrs Henderson (known as Henderson’s), a popular gay nightspot on Munich’s Rumfordstrasse. The rest of Queen, ‘Crystal’, ‘Jobby’, ‘Ratty’ and Mack would usually make for the Sugar Shack, ‘the hottest disco in the world,’ as Taylor called it at the time.
‘The Sugar Shack became known as “The Office”,’ laughs Mack. ‘We’d be down there after the studio at least every other day.’ On many occasions, the night would carry on after the club had closed. ‘After the Sugar Shack we might head to the market that was just opening up and have a bottle of champagne,’ remembers Hince. ‘Then back to the Munich Hilton where we’d meet up with Freddie.’ At the hotel, the fun would continue in either Taylor’s suite (nicknamed HH, the Hetero Hangout) or Mercury’s (PPP, the Presidential Pouff Parlour.) ‘Then we’d go to bed, get up in the afternoon and have breakfast … and we lived like that for a year.’
One night, after the Sugar Shack, the band returned to the studio to work on a new piece of May’s called ‘Dragon Attack’. The lyrics to the song even mentioned ‘the shack’. ‘Brian was a vodka-and-tonic man,’ laughs Mack. ‘I don’t think I ever saw him take a drug. But if Brian was loaded he could lose his thread completely.’ ‘Dragon Attack’ was assembled out of thirty minutes of alcohol-fuelled jamming. If the band were under the influence, the song didn’t suffer. It had the same limbrous groove as some of the funkier tracks on the next Rolling Stones album. May played a brawny guitar solo while Mercury dispensed a little Robert Plant-style orgasmic grunting. It was a comfort to any Queen fan turned off by the frippery of ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’.
The Sugar Shack had other attractions beyond the obvious. ‘We would take tracks down there after hours and play them over their system to see how they worked,’ said May. ‘Anything with a bit of groove and space sounded good.’ One of the club’s crowd-pleasers was ‘Feel Like Makin’ Love’, a hit for Bad Company, the band fronted by Paul Rodgers after Free. ‘Bad Company sounded brilliant in there because there was a lot of space in that song. We played some of our stuff, like “Tie Your Mother Down”, and it didn’t work because it was crammed with so many things that there was no space. After that we became obsessed with leaving space in our music and making songs that would sound great in the Sugar Shack.’
But it was John Deacon’s latest creation that would pass the Sugar Shack test with honours. In the studio, Taylor, Mercury and May would share their ideas for songs, humming choruses or demonstrating melody lines, looking for feedback from the others. Deacon preferred to remain silent while composing, leading Mercury to nickname him ‘Ostrich’. ‘He was like a bird who stays quiet until it finally lays a perfect egg,’ says Mack. For The Game, Deakey laid his best egg yet: ‘Another One Bites the Dust’.
Bernard Edwards, the late guitarist of US funk band Chic, remembered Deacon dropping by New York’s Power Station Studios while Chic were recording their 1979 album, Risqué. From those sessions, Chic landed a huge hit with ‘Good Times’. Like ‘Good Times’, ‘Another One Bites The Dust’ was a sparse dance track, driven by much the same bassline. Of course, Deacon’s inspiration for the song could be traced back further to his days playing Motown covers with The Opposition. ‘I listened to a lot of soul music when I was at school,’ he said. ‘I’d wanted to do something like “Another One Bites the Dust” for a while, but all I had was the line and the bass riff.’
‘I must admit,’ said May, ‘that the rest of us had no idea what Deakey was doing when he started this.’ Nevertheless, with the rest of the group assisting, the track took shape. Typically, Brian May remembers Roger Taylor being most resistant to the song: ‘I remember Roger hated it: “This isn’t rock ’n’ roll, what the hell are we doing?” He didn’t want Queen to become funky.’ Interviewed in 2008, Taylor insisted that what he was opposed to was not the song, but putting it out as a single: ‘It wasn’t to everyone’s taste, but it was the second time we’d put our toe in dance music. I’d had a rather ineffectual pop at it with “Fun It” [on the Jazz album].’
Deacon and Taylor worked together on the backing track. Deacon wanted the drums to sound as dry as possible. It was the antithesis of how Queen normally recorded, but Taylor acquiesced, stuffing the drums with blankets to muffle the sound. ‘Roger laid down this beautiful drum loop,’ explained May. ‘It was a very unusual sound for him, as he always liked big, ambient drums. I was fine about doing it, as my job was to inject these dirty little guitars around Deakey’s percussive riff.’
Deacon played the rhythm guitar, leaving May to add the flourishes, while Mack worked the sound of backwards piano, cymbal crashes and handclaps into the mix. The last sprinkle of magic dust came from Freddie Mercury. ‘Fred had a feel for dance music,’ said May, ‘and he was starting to fall in love with singing that way
. He was so into what we were doing with “Another One Bites the Dust” that he sang until his throat bled.’
‘Another One Bites the Dust’ wasn’t the only departure from the norm. After years of resistance, Queen had succumbed to the synthesiser. ‘I’m afraid that was my fault,’ said Taylor. ‘I’d bought this Oberheim polyphonic synth. I showed it to Fred, and immediately he was like, “Oh, this is good, dear …”’ The Oberheim OBX would be used on several tracks, including Taylor’s ‘Rock It (Prime Jive)’. Taylor described the song as his ‘most basic ever’. Like ‘Coming Soon’, it was no-frills rock. But ‘Rock It’ would become the source of disagreement in the studio. Taylor wanted to sing the lead vocal, but Mack wanted Mercury. Two versions were recorded. After hearing both, May voted for Mercury’s, but Deacon wanted Taylor’s. As a compromise, on the final version, Mercury would sing the intro before Taylor took over from the first verse.
The drummer also wanted ‘Coming Soon’ to be released as a single and replaced on the album by another of his own tracks, ‘A Human Body’. The rest of the band disagreed, and ‘A Human Body’ was held over for a future B-side. ‘Roger was the one in search of a new sound,’ says Mack. Taylor was also the one that would work most closely with Mack in finessing his compositions, with some of his rejected songs from The Game finding a home on his first solo album. Taylor’s attitude to punk had softened since News of the World days. In 1980, he enthused in the music press about The Clash’s latest single ‘London Calling’ and new bands such as The Pretenders. But, as Brian May explained, ‘In Queen, in the studio, you only got 25 per cent of your own way at the best of times.’
‘If there was ever a big disagreement it was generally between me and Roger,’ said May. ‘As the original two that put the band together, we were like brothers. And we would always find things to have these violent disagreements about. But it was almost always music. That feeling that you’re not being represented, you’re not being heard.’
May reportedly walked out of the band during the Munich sessions: ‘I left the group a couple of times just for the day. I’m off and I’m not coming back! We’ve all done that. You end up quibbling over one note.’
‘There were huge rows in the studio,’ agreed Taylor. ‘Usually over how long Brian was taking … or whether he was having an omelette. We all drove each other nuts.’
Mercury described the dynamic within Queen more succinctly: ‘Four cocks fighting. Lovely!’
Much like the physics student he was once was, May believed that recording was an exact science. ‘Brian would spend ages getting it right,’ recalls Peter Hince, ‘and then getting it more right, after that.’ While others swapped Musicland for the lure of the Sugar Shack, May could sometimes be found at the studio on what he calls ‘an eternal quest for perfection’. It was a lonely undertaking. ‘I was always the one sat there at three o’clock in the morning trying to make something work,’ he recalled. May sang lead vocals on his own ‘Sail Away Sweet Sister’, a rather downbeat song with a stirring chorus.
Unfortunately, at times, Freddie Mercury sounded as if he was far too distracted by the Munich nightlife. The glib rockabilly of ‘Don’t Try Suicide’ was the weakest song on The Game. The album’s opening track, ‘Play the Game’, was certainly better. A regal ballad, supposedly inspired by Mercury’s romance with Tony Bastin, only the synthesiser dated it as being from 1980 rather than 1975. John Deacon couldn’t hope to better ‘Another One Bites the Dust’, and his ‘Need Your Loving Tonight’ was default-setting MOR rock sandwiched between ‘Another One …’ and ‘Crazy Little Thing …’ on the album’s final tracklisting.
The Game was released in June 1980. Like Jazz and News of the World, it yo-yoed between styles and sounds, as each of its four writers hustled for space. But this disjointedness was fast becoming a key ingredient of the Queen sound. The Game skipped through power ballads, heavy rock, disco, pop and rockabilly on its first side alone. ‘For me, the band was functioning well at this point,’ said Taylor. ‘The Game was much more of a piece than Jazz. Our songwriting was much better.’
EMI also had the album cover they’d always wanted: a black and white shot of Queen in their ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’ get-up. It was the anti-Queen II, selling the group hard as a relevant pop band for the 1980s. In the press, there were murmurs of discontent about The Game including two already available singles, but it made scant difference to sales. Within a fortnight, Queen would have a number 1 album in Britain. Ten weeks later, it achieved the same in the US, where Rolling Stone damned it with the faintest of praise: ‘Certainly The Game is less obnoxious than Queen’s last few outings.’
‘We have great fun, laying down bets on chart positions,’ Roger Taylor told Sounds. The ever-competitive Taylor was especially pleased to discover that The Game was outselling The Rolling Stones’ latest, Emotional Rescue, which had beaten The Game’s release by ten days, but would only make it to number 9 in Britain. Away from Queen, Taylor had something more personal to celebrate. In May, he joined May and Deacon by becoming a father, when girlfriend Dominique gave birth to his first son, Luther Felix.
Meanwhile, Freddie Mercury showed up for a silent cameo in friend Kenny Everett’s TV show, pouncing on the DJ during a comedy skit and wrestling him to the ground. It was a rare TV appearance outside of Queen. Elsewhere, he indulged himself with a little more ‘crazee shopping’. During his tax year out, the singer had instructed Mary Austin to look for another property for him in Kensington. She found Garden Lodge, 1 Logan Place, an eight-bedroom Georgian mansion, complete with three-quarters of an acre of garden, hidden away from the outside world by high brick walls. Mercury was enchanted, and paid £500,000 in cash, without flinching. ‘I saw it, fell in love with it, and within half an hour it was mine,’ he said. ‘It’s full of marble floors and mahogany staircases. I call it my country house in town. I’m not into all this country air and cow dung.’ Almost immediately, he hired an architect and began instigating widespread renovations and conversions to the property.
The single ‘Play the Game’ was less immediate and radio-friendly than ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’, but reached a respectable number 14 in the UK. Of greater interest than the song was Mercury’s latest fashion statement. The singer had completed the Castro Clone look by growing a thick moustache. In protest, the band’s offices were inundated with packets of razors as fans voiced their protest. ‘It’s funny how he got more press out of growing a moustache than he would have done from walking naked down Oxford Street,’ remarked Roger Taylor.
Queen’s next American tour was due to open in Vancouver at the end of June. The Who were touring the US at the same time. Their support band was The Only Ones, a group featuring bass guitarist and former Kensington Market stallholder Alan Mair. Mair’s old employee Fred Bulsara was now Freddie Mercury, millionaire rock star, but Alan would catch a rare glimpse of the old Freddie during the tour.
‘I’d stayed in touch with Queen for the first couple of years, but then I joined The Only Ones and I remember seeing Freddie again and he’d got a bit too into himself, under the influence of whatever he was taking,’ recalls Mair. When The Who played the LA Forum, Mair spotted members of Queen arriving backstage. ‘My initial instinct was to go over and say hi, but then I remembered that the last time I’d seen Fred he’d been such an arsehole, so I looked away.’ Mair left the party to walk back to the band’s trailer. ‘Suddenly, I heard these heels clicking behind me, and it was Fred. He’d seen me turn away. He was extremely friendly, asked me why I’d walked away and said, “Was it because I was such a cunt last time I saw you?” And I said, “Yes, Freddie, it is and you were” … He laughed. But after that I started to see him again.’
When Queen’s own tour began, Mercury’s facial hair would attract yet more attention. At some gigs, fans threw disposable razors on stage. As the tour wound on, Mercury began asking audiences what they thought of the new look, twitchily grinning at the chorus of cheers, boos and cat-calls. �
��D’you girls like this moustache? … D’you boys like this moustache? … A lot of people hate it. I don’t give a fuck!’ Meanwhile, those unsure about who was playing the drums in Queen need only look at Roger Taylor’s bass drum skin, which was helpfully decorated with a picture of his face (‘Just in case he ever got amnesia, he’d know who he was,’ said drum tech ‘Crystal’).
Six songs from The Game had been worked sporadically into a set that now opened with ‘Jailhouse Rock’. ‘Another One Bites the Dust’ was played, but, at first, only occasionally. It was difficult to replicate the dry studio drum sound onstage, and the song’s funkier approach rankled with some of Queen’s audience. ‘They thought it “not very rock ’n’ roll”,’ admitted Brian May. A year earlier, Detroit radio DJ Steve Dahl had launched the ‘Disco Sucks!’ campaign in protest at rock being squeezed out of radio playlists by dance music. It culminated in a ceremonial burning of Bee Gees, Chic and Village People records at a baseball stadium in Chicago. Nevertheless, it illuminated the dividing line between rock and dance traditions in America, with an uneasy sub-text of white versus black music. In a bizarre twist, New York dance station WBLS had picked up on ‘Another One Bites the Dust’, unaware of Queen’s history, and playlisted the record. ‘They thought we were a black act,’ said May. The response was so favourable that other stations followed their lead. When ‘Play the Game’ stiffed at a bully number 42 in America, the band had nothing to lose by such increased exposure.
