by Georg Purvis
“I was working in Los Angeles with Gary Moore at the time,” Mack told iZotope.com in 2007. “One day I had lunch with Giorgio Moroder. He mentioned rumors that I was supposed to go to Munich to work with Queen. Which was news to me. After calling the studios in Munich I was in a dilemma. Nobody knew anything about the sessions. So I figured [I would] take the trip. Worst case – a week and a ticket lost – no pain, no gain. Luckily it worked out pretty good ... The band came off a tour of Japan and had some time to spend before going back to England. So it just fell into the ‘right time, right place’ category. The project did not start out as an album. It was a bunch of one- and two-week sessions. The first track we attempted was ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’. Freddie picked up an acoustic guitar and said, ‘Quick, let’s do this before Brian comes’. About six hours later the track was done. The guitar solo was an overdub later on. Brian still hates me for making him use a Telecaster for the part. It was released as a pre-album single and went to number one. That obviously helped a great deal to inspire confidence and the working relationship tremendously.”
Though the initial sessions in June 1979 were merely an attempt to explore and understand their separate working methods, Queen’s partnership with Mack would prove fruitful. He encouraged the band to record in a simplified fashion, manifest in ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’ and ‘Coming Soon’. However, Brian continued to write songs that were still very much like the Queen of old and insisted that ‘Save Me’ and ‘Sail Away Sweet Sister’ return to the more powerful ballads of their early days. After a brief break and a return to the stage rounding out the year, the band took some time to flesh out additional ideas and create fully-fledged songs.
Brian said of the recording sessions, “That was breaking ground for us because, for the first time, we went into a recording studio without a deadline, purely with the intention of putting some tracks down as they came out. ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’ was one of them; another was ‘Save Me’. There was a wide variety of things, and we’re left in the position of having something in the can that we don’t have to release straight away, and which at some future date we can perhaps fashion into an album. The basic reason for doing it was to put ourselves in a totally different situation. It’s a way of getting out of that rut of doing an album, touring Britain, touring America, etc. We thought we’d try and change and see what came out. You have to make your own excitement after a while.”
In October, the band released ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’ as their first non-album single; assisted by an image-conscious video, the single shot to No. 2 in the UK, their highest-charting single in two years. The resulting tour introduced the new single as well as Brian’s ‘Save Me’, already touted as the next 45 and destined to become one of those rare songs played on a tour before its release. Surprisingly, when ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’ was released in America in December, the public were so delighted with the style change that the song soared to No. 1, becoming one of the fastest-selling singles of the year, eclipsed only by ‘Another One Bites The Dust’ in August 1980.
When the tour concluded in December 1979, the band took a four-week break before returning to the recording studio, fresh with new material and ideas. In February, the band started work on what was provisionally titled Play The Game, Queen’s eighth studio release. The sessions were so productive that twenty-five songs were submitted and worked on. “We took more time than usual because we wanted to get something fresher instead of just churning out another one,” Roger told Rolling Stone in July 1980. “This is the most different album in relation to the one before it. We wrote the whole album in the studio and then pared twenty-five songs down to ten. It’s the first time we’ve cut more than we needed. Some of the tunes will be changed and re-recorded and some of them will get lost. Some of them deserve to get lost.” Of the known unreleased material, Brian’s ‘The Dark’, ‘My Boy’ and possibly ‘I Go Crazy’, plus Freddie’s ‘It’s A Beautiful Day’, were recorded. Also recorded during the sessions were the non-album B-sides ‘A Human Body’ and ‘Soul Brother’, as well as a funky jam entitled ‘Sandbox’.
It would be uncharacteristic for only six tracks to have been recorded in the vast amount of time the band allowed themselves (four months, compared to other recording sessions, which usually lasted no longer than six or eight weeks). “Recently, we’ve become more selective, I think,” Brian explained shortly after the release of the album, “and we try to make albums which don’t go in so many directions at once. For example, The Game was really pruned, and the others refused to include a couple of things I wanted on, because they said they were too far outside the theme of the album, and that we should be trying to make slightly more coherent albums.” As an aside, he remarked, “I’m into paradoxes. I wanted to make an album about them, but the group told me I was a pretentious fart. They were right.”
For the first time, but certainly not the last, the band experimented with synthesizers. Unlike the earlier attempts at the beginning of the 1970s by Stevie Wonder and Pete Townshend, who used the instrument as an integral part of the composition (witness ‘Baba O’Riley’, one of Townshend’s first songs written on the instrument), the synthesizer was almost superfluous in the hands of Queen. It was used sparingly but, for those fans used to the traditional Queen sound, the introduction to The Game (fifteen seconds of piercing, unnecessary synth whoops) was an unpleasant jolt. ‘Play The Game’ was the biggest offender, though the sound was splashed more subtly across some of the other tracks. Its use on ‘Rock It (Prime Jive)’ added to the sci-fi effect Roger was attempting, and it furnished a particularly atmospheric backing for Brian’s two ballads.
“Roger’s really the guy who introduced us to synthesizers,” Brian said. “You can now get polyphonic synths with a device for bending the notes which is much closer to the feel of a guitar than ever before, so now we use the synth, but sparingly, I think, particularly on The Game. There’s very little there, and what there is merely complements what we’d used already, so there’s no danger of the synth taking over, which I would never allow to happen. I get a good feeling from playing the guitar which you don’t get with anything else: a feeling of power, and a type of expression.”
John expanded on Brian’s thoughts: “We wanted to experiment with all that new studio equipment. We had always been keen to try out anything new or different while recording. The synthesizers then were so good; they were very advanced compared to the early Moogs, which did little more than make a series of weird noises. The ones we were using could duplicate all sorts of sounds and instruments – you could get a whole orchestra out of them at the touch of a button. Amazing.”
The fans wouldn’t be quite so receptive to the new sounds; as early as 1977, the band had stopped putting the “No Synthesizers” disclaimer on the inner sleeves of the albums, but that doesn’t mean that they actually used the instrument. (On ‘Get Down, Make Love’, the strange effects come courtesy of a harmonizer, controlled by Brian, while the only synthesized instrument on Jazz is the Syn-drums on ‘Fun It’.) While ‘Play The Game’ has often been credited with being the first Queen song to use a synthesizer, that honour technically belongs to ‘Save Me’ and ‘Sail Away Sweet Sister’.
Additional departures which caused many fans to throw their collective hands into the air were the tighter structure of the songs and the lack of a general theme. “Most of the album is different from the epic sound,” Roger told Rolling Stone. “It’s punchier, harder-hitting and more to the point. It doesn’t really sound like a Queen album in the old sense. We felt almost too much effort went into Jazz and we wanted to be more spontaneous this time.” “Spontaneous” had been used to describe News Of The World, Queen’s last deliberate revitalization, but while the stripped-back sound had worked on that album, they fell back into old habits with Roy Thomas Baker on its follow-up, resulting in a bloated, convoluted album. Brian was happier with Mack and the initial sessions, telling International Musician
& Recording World in 1982, “The Game was a result of a new environment. Working in Munich with a new engineer produced a really different approach. We started to put a whole lot of importance on the backing track once again. The emphasis was on rhythm and clarity. We had to build each track up.”
The emphasis was now on the rhythm, instead of on orchestrations and lavish productions. The prime mover in this new sound was John: one of his new songs, ‘Another One Bites The Dust’, was written and recorded as a deliberate reaction against Queen’s previous excesses, stripping back the pomp and circumstance to reveal the rhythmic side of the band, with the drums and bass pushed to the front, and the guitar practically non-existent. Elsewhere, Roger championed the New Wave sound, while Freddie’s own songs were par for the course: two pastiches and a ballad. Only Brian was determined to maintain Queen’s status as a rock band, with ‘Dragon Attack’ balancing that fine line between rock and rhythm, while his other two songs were touching, poignant piano-based ballads.
“I like [the guitar] to be rich and warm, but at the same time aggressive and with an edge to it,” Brian told Sounds in 1984. “Getting back to Mack, our approach to the guitar differed because he wanted me to try different amps and I wasn’t happy with that, but for certain things it worked out well. On ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’, where we were going for a period sound, I played a Telecaster through a Boogie amp and it worked out fine. It was different. I kicked against that, but in the end I saw it was the right thing to do. As far as recording my own guitar, he wanted to use more mikes and get the same approach as you would with the drums, that started to make it too distant for me. I wanted the guitar to be inside the speaker and the ambience to be created in the listener’s environment. This all came from my resistance to putting echo on anything. I regarded ambience on the guitar as the same as echo and thus making it less immediate. I wanted to hear all the guts and the string stretch and the fingers.”
The result was an unhappy compromise. With Brian firmly planted in the traditional Queen sound, and Freddie and John moving away from that sound, The Game finds the band pulling in opposite directions, and not necessarily succeeding, for the first time. The guitarist would never truly be happy with Queen’s sea change, always regarding Mack’s new methods with cautious praise, but maintaining his love of loud guitars and drums. “Everything we did on The Game was different from the way we’d done it before,” Brian told Sounds in 1984. “It was a fusion of our methods and his methods. There was some conflict; I had a lot of disputes with him over how we should record guitars. I suppose by that time I wasn’t even thinking about it, I just wanted to record it the way I always recorded it. But Mack said. ‘Look, try my way.’ Eventually we did compromise and got the best of both worlds.”
The shift worked, however, and the singles that were chosen were undoubtedly the strongest songs from the album: ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’, a welcome shift in style, and ‘Save Me’, a traditional Queen ballad-cum-rocker, both came nine and six months, respectively, before the album was released, while ‘Another One Bites The Dust’, the band’s most successful foray into funk, was released two months after The Game. ‘Play The Game’ was released as the forerunner to the album, and though it was the most traditional Queen-sounding song of the bunch, it also performed the worst in the UK. Not better was John’s ‘Need Your Loving Tonight’, released in Elektra-only territories five months after the album was released, and so it performed miserably, peaking at No. 44 in the US; considering that their last single, ‘Another One Bites The Dust’, had reached No. 1 three months before, this was a major disappointment for the band.
The album, now retitled The Game after Roger complained about the original title’s implications of conformity (“It was suggested that we call the album Play The Game,” Roger later said, “and I don’t like the idea of that; basically, that means, in English, let’s go along with the Establishment. I don’t particularly sympathize with that view.”), was released in June 1980, just as Queen were about to embark on an extended North American tour. Reviews were generally positive. Record Mirror opened with “I LIKE QUEEN, I LIKE QUEEN, I LIKE QUEEN! So there you are, you bunch of jerks making your cute little sideswipes at one of Britain’s leading attractions. Go and slap on the next Willie Nile record and leave me in peace,” going on to say that “This album is a straight kick into the goal (Christ, what a pun). It’s like winning the men’s singles at Wimbledon. It’s a pity, though, that Queen have seen fit to include two recent singles in the running order. Considering the price of albums these days would it not have been worthwhile to slap on some new material?” Incidentally, the most criticism in this review was reserved for ‘Another One Bites The Dust’: “What’s all this then, eh? ‘Bites The Dust’ merely comes over as a bit of disco wrapping. Maybe the track isn’t meant to be taken that seriously but I’m not sure. Sorry, but this is the weak point of side one plundering from a well flogged idea.”
Sounds was typically caustic: “Of course, bands like Queen do not belong in the pages of the throwaway pop press! The many thousands of their faithful fans will declare The Game to be just what they wanted (or will they – the standard’s dropped to an all-time low) but the journalists won’t even recognize its existence. The Game is a colossal mountain of unmovable mediocrity. It is old and tired and bland and blinkered. It purrs with self-satisfaction,” closing with, “In case it passed you by, Sham 69 also have a new album called The Game. Struggling beneath the usual Sham difficulties lies a message of protest, pleading and relevant 1980s comment. Queen’s game is rather different. Cash from chaos? Cash from trash!”
“After five years of unchallenging, dismal albums, this was supposed to be Queen’s comeback,” The Washington Post wrote after lambasting the new directions. “But no such luck.” NME wasn’t any better, in a dual review of The Game and Kiss’ Unmasked: “It would be nice to hope that these bands will one day recognize their creative bankruptcy and retire with dignity – nice, but unrealistic. Instead, we get two more utterly unnecessary albums full of a music which ran its course a good six years ago: lumbering slack-jawed, big-booted heavy rock; either in harmony syrup (Queen) or with cartoon crassness (Kiss). Both are slick, glossy and soulless. Neither mean a thing. Both have been joylessly conceived with cynical disregard for every value which ever made music genuinely important to life ... As a matter of fact, all the comparisons to be made here are immensely flattering to Queen. Like Kiss, they’re flogging a dead pantomime horse, but it’s at least one of their own design. You must strive to forget every Freddie Mercury song you hear, but at least you remember it in the first place. And so on.”
Meanwhile, Rolling Stone unleashed all its pent-up hatred for Queen. “Sad to say, Queen seemed more comfortable with the brazen hodgepodge of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, the martial madness of ‘We Will Rock You’, and the pointless frenzy of ‘Bicycle Race’. Black leather jackets, echo chambers, funky handclaps, prominent bass lines and sparse instrumentation – these guys know how this music should sound and feel, but they can’t bend enough to get with it. Which is probably why some of the current record consists of the same inflated ballads and metallic shuffles that have padded every previous Queen disc ... Certainly, The Game is less obnoxious than Queen’s last few outings, simply because it’s harder to get annoyed with a group that’s plugging away at bad rockabilly than with one blasting out crypto-Nazi marching tunes. The future doesn’t look bright, however. No matter how much Queen may try to hide it, they’re still egomaniacs.”
Egomaniacs or not, the band still had a hit record on their hands, even if it represented an uneasy truce for the first time. The Game quickly shot up to the top position in both the UK and the US, making it their first and only No. 1 record in America. (In the UK, it was their third, and certainly not their last.) With ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’ lodged high in the American charts, the band and their entourage stormed the US for their largest and longest tour ever; after being away from the State
s for nearly eighteen months, it was exhilarating to them that they could still sell out venues like Madison Square Garden (four nights, which closed their campaign at the beginning of October) and have a high-profile album and single in the charts. The success was short-lived, though; these were their halcyon days, and after working so hard to finally break through, it would take only a few questionable flash decisions to dethrone them permanently.
FLASH GORDON
EMI EMC 3351, December 1980 [10]
Elektra 5E-518, January 1981 [23]
EMI CDP 7 46214 2, December 1986
Hollywood HR-61203-2, June 1991
Parlophone CDPCSD 137, 1994
‘Flash’s Theme’ (3’30), ‘In The Space Capsule (The Love Theme)’ (2’43), ‘Ming’s Theme (In The Court Of Ming The Merciless)’ (2’41), ‘The Ring (Hypnotic Seduction Of Dale)’ (0’57), ‘Football Fight’ (1’29), ‘In The Death Cell (Love Theme Reprise)’ (2’25), ‘Execution Of Flash’ (1’06), ‘The Kiss (Aura Resurrects Flash)’ (1’45), ‘Arboria (Planet Of The Tree Men)’ (1’42), ‘Escape From The Swamp’ (1’43), ‘Flash To The Rescue’ (2’45), ‘Vultan’s Theme (Attack Of The Hawk Men)’ (1’12), ‘Battle Theme’ (2’18), ‘The Wedding March’ (0’56), ‘Marriage Of Dale And Ming (And Flash Approaching)’ (2’04), ‘Crash Dive On Mingo City’ (1’00), ‘Flash’s Theme Reprise (Victory Celebrations)’ (1’24), ‘The Hero’ (3’36)
