Queen: The Complete Works

by Georg Purvis

  Bonus track on 1991 Hollywood Records reissue: ‘Flash’s Theme’ (remix by Mista Lawnge) (6’49)

  Bonus tracks on 2011 Universal Records deluxe reissue: ‘Flash’ (single version) (2’48), ‘The Hero’ (revisited, October 1980) (2’55), ‘The Kiss’ (early version, March 1980) (1’11), ‘Football Fight’ (early version, February 1980) (1’55), ‘Flash’ (live version, Montreal Forum, November 1981) (2’12), ‘The Hero’ (live version, Montreal Forum, November 1981) (1’48)

  Bonus videos, 2011 iTunes-only editions: ‘Flash’ / ‘The Hero’ (live version, Morumbi Stadium, March 1981), ‘Flash’ (alternate promotional video), ‘Flash’ (Queen + Vanguard promotional video)

  Musicians: John Deacon (bass guitar, synthesizer on ‘Arboria (Planet Of The Tree Men)’, guitar on ‘In The Space Capsule (The Love Theme)’, ‘In The Death Cell (Love Theme Reprise)’ and ‘Execution Of Flash’), Brian May (guitars, vocals, piano, organ, synthesizer), Freddie Mercury (vocals, synthesizer), Roger Taylor (drums, percussion, vocals, synthesizer on ‘In The Space Capsule (The Love Theme)’, ‘In The Death Cell (Love Theme Reprise)’, ‘Escape From The Swamp’ and ‘Marriage Of Dale And Ming (And Flash Approaching)’, timpani on ‘Flash’s Theme’, ‘In The Death Cell (Love Theme Reprise)’, ‘Escape From The Swamp’ and ‘Flash To The Rescue’), Howard Blake (orchestral arrangements)

  Recorded: October–November 1980 at The Townhouse and Advision Studios, London; The Music Centre, Middlesex (‘The Hero’ recorded at Utopia Studios, London; orchestrations recorded at Anvil Studios, Denham)

  Producers: Brian May and Mack

  1980 was proving to be a hectic year for Queen: with the international successes of ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’, The Game and ‘Another One Bites The Dust’, the band were now subject to a greater amount of exposure. Consequently, the demand for live shows increased greatly and they suddenly found themselves playing to larger audiences in more high-profile cities. The tours, too, stretched on far longer than before. The band’s 1980 North American tour kicked off at the end of June and finally concluded in early October; after a short break, the band recommenced the tour in European cities and British territories between November and December, and then continued the tour in the first part of 1981 in Japan and South America.

  Surprisingly, during their first break in October and November, the band were able to squeeze in final recording sessions for a film project they had started concurrently with The Game that spring. The year before, the band had been approached by director Dino de Laurentiis, who asked them if they would be interested in providing the main theme and incidental music for his film adaptation of Flash Gordon. Roger, an enthusiastic sci-fi and comic fan, jumped at the project, while the others were hesitant at first. Even de Laurentiis wasn’t sure if he was making the right decision: when he learned of the band and how right they would be for the project, he innocently asked, “But who are the queens?” But all concerned quickly warmed to the idea. “We saw twenty minutes of the finished film and thought it was very good and over the top,” Brian explained. “We wanted to do something that was a real soundtrack. It’s a first in many ways, because a rock group hasn’t done this type of thing before, or else it’s been toned down and they’ve been asked to write pretty mushy background music, whereas we were given the licence to do what we liked, as long as it complemented the picture.”

  Their initial reservations arose from a reluctance to work against a deadline, which they hadn’t done willingly since News Of The World in 1977. Additionally, the band were suddenly forced to please the director, a marked change after spending years working only for themselves. “Unfortunately, we didn’t have enough time,” Brian told On The Record in 1982. “We were doing The Game and an American tour at the same time Flash was going on, so it was ridiculous. We put as much time as we could in. We would do a week here and a week there. I spent some time with the arranger and orchestra to try and get some coherence to it all. It was good experience, but next time I hope we have time to really pull the whole thing together as a unit ... The main challenge was working for a boss who wasn’t yourself. We had the director in there the whole time. The only criterion for whether something was good was whether it helped the movie.”

  This album saw the band hopping from studio to studio almost as frequently as they had for A Night At The Opera in 1975: the bulk of the sessions took place at The Town House, which would later be used for the A Kind Of Magic and The Miracle albums, while overdubs occurred at The Music Centre and Advision Studios. Orchestrations, arranged by Howard Blake, were recorded at Anvil Studios, while Freddie quickly nipped into Utopia Studios to record a vocal on ‘The Hero’, which used a similar backing to an earlier song called ‘Battle Theme’.

  Blake wasn’t the band’s first choice to work with on the project: Paul Buckmaster, a meticuolous perfectionist who had long ago worked with David Bowie, The Rolling Stones and Elton John, was drafted based on Queen’s recommendation. After a few weeks on the project, the producers discovered to their horror that Buckmaster had written and recorded only a small fragment of the score; pressed for time, the producers opted to instead work with Blake, who had a mammoth task ahead of him: to write and record the soundtrack in ten days, a task that he met admirably. Three days before the completion of his score, he collapsed due to exhaustion, exacerbated by bronchitis; additionally, he discovered to his annoyance that his score had merely been a skeleton, to be replaced later by synthesizers. The composer maintained that he got along well with the band: “[They] were always cordial,” he later wrote on his website. “Brian May came over one day and hummed an idea for an overture. As he did so I jotted it down on some manuscript paper and then played it back on the piano, which really startled him. They all came along to the orchestral recordings and seemed fascinated. I remember Freddie Mercury singing the idea of ‘Ride to Arboria’ in his high falsetto and I showed him how I could expand it into the orchestral section now on the film, with which he seemed very pleased. Whilst scoring I had cassettes of guitar ideas from Brian, in particular the slow ‘falling-chord’ sequence. I wrote this out into my score at one point and surrounded it with big orchestral colour. When I came to the recording I had Brian’s solo guitar on headphones and conducted the orchestra in synch around it. Many months later Brian came over and we listened to the finished album.”

  It was a haphazard way of working but the results were far more impressive than most fans care to admit. Brian was characteristically proud of the album, while the others remained indifferent or even unaware that it was theirs. (One night in 1981, John and members of the road crew got rip-roaring drunk, and someone put on the soundtrack album; after a few minutes, John slurred to Crystal Taylor, Roger’s (unrelated) assistant, “Who is this?”) Ever the spokesman for Queen’s works, the guitarist admitted to being wary of the film project at the beginning, but became very excited about it: “We’d been offered a few, but most of them were where the film is written around music, and that’s been done to death – it’s the cliché of ‘movie star appears in movie about movie star’, but this one was different in that it was a proper film and had a real story which wasn’t based around music, and we would be writing a film score – we were writing to a discipline for the first time ever.”

  The album would mark the first – and only – time that a Queen album wasn’t produced collectively between all the band members and a producer; instead, it’s credited to May and Mack. “It was interesting to write music for that movie,” Brian said in an off-the-cuff 1981 interview in South America. “Particularly I learned a completely new job because I had never composed any soundtrack before. And it gives the band a possibility to open a new market. Besides, for the first time we worked for someone else. We didn’t create songs for our own pleasure, but for the film director. Anyway, we worked freely, I mean, nobody told us what we had to do. We wrote some of the songs quickly and easily because this record sounds like a typical Queen album.”

  The songs are
given a stripped-back sound – only one or two musicians were together in the studio at any given time; this is certainly true on both John’s and Roger’s songs – but things do tend to get typically Queen in areas. The opening song, a predictably bland yet irritatingly catchy main theme for the titular protagonist, is the only overblown moment on the first side, while things stray towards the meandering and pompous starting with the second side.

  “We all started with the new LP, Flash Gordon,” John explained in 1981, “but in the end it was Brian saying what is on the disc or not. That is a very unusual thing for us, and we got some trouble with it. Brian wanted to have a German producer, with whom he worked very closely in Munich, while we would have preferred an album from Queen. We did agree then, but were not very happy about it. But for the world it was another Queen album. People from outside do not have any idea how personal some songs are. For them it’s a Queen song, even if it is a very personal [thing] of one member only.”

  Of course, it would be unfair to judge Flash Gordon as an actual album: the tracks were written to complement certain scenes in the movie, not to stand up as separate songs. However, the band insisted the album be marketed as a Queen album instead of a film soundtrack, which was a bad move on their part, as it has been consistently noted as the worst album they ever did. Again, this is unfair; David Bowie released several albums that brought synthesizers to the fore, and there are several songs on Flash Gordon that sound straight out of his Berlin era (the trilogy of Low, “Heroes” and Lodger). It’s Queen’s most avant-garde experiment in music; there’s nothing exactly bad about it, just that it’s not something that a casual fan could listen to on a regular basis. Brian defended the album in a 1983 BBC Radio One interview: “It’s a Queen album with a difference but, we wouldn’t have put it out with the name Queen on it if we didn’t think it was musically up to scratch in that sense. So it was music written for a film but with the idea that it will stand up as an album even if you’ve never heard the film. Which is why I particularly wanted bits of the dialogue in it as well rather than just a dry music soundtrack album. I wanted to be able to put the album on and to be able to visualize the whole thing even if you hadn’t seen it, virtually. So hopefully, it tells a story, you know, like those children’s records you buy which I like very much. Where they tell the story and then they have the music and everything. You don’t need anything else, it’s just your own little world. You just get carried along by the story.”

  Surprisingly, the reviews were positive, for the most part. Record Mirror raved, “This is the sort of stuff I haven’t heard since Charlton Heston won the chariot race in Ben Hur. An album of truly epic proportions that warrants an equally epic five out of five.” Sounds, too, was impressed: “As a film soundtrack, Flash Gordon is something extraordinary.” The album, upon its release in December 1980, coincided with the European and British legs of The Game tour, and led in nicely to the Japanese tour in February 1981. It gave Queen a Top Twenty album worldwide – impressive for a film soundtrack with only two actual songs – except in the US, where it peaked at No. 23, thus starting an unfortunate decline of the band’s reign there. If releasing a film soundtrack as a main album wasn’t a career destroyer, their next project would very nearly prove to be exactly that.

  HOT SPACE

  EMI EMA 797, May 1982 [4]

  Elektra E1-60128, May 1982 [22]

  EMI CDP 7 46215 2, December 1986

  Hollywood HR-61038-2, March 1991

  Parlophone CDPCSD 135, 1994

  ‘Staying Power’ (4’12), ‘Dancer’ (3’50), ‘Back Chat’ (4’36), ‘Body Language’ (4’32), ‘Action This Day’ (3’32), ‘Put Out The Fire’ (3’19), ‘Life Is Real (Song For Lennon)’ (3’33), ‘Calling All Girls’ (3’51), ‘Las Palabras De Amor (The Words Of Love)’ (4’31), ‘Cool Cat’ (3’29), ‘Under Pressure’ (4’08)

  Bonus track on 1991 Hollywood Records reissue: ‘Body Language’ (remix by Susan Rogers) (4’45)

  Bonus tracks on 2011 Universal Records deluxe reissue: ‘Staying Power’ (live version, Milton Keynes Bowl, June 1982) (3’57), ‘Soul Brother’ (non-album B-side) (3’36), ‘Back Chat’ (single remix) (4’12), ‘Action This Day’ (live version, Tokyo, November 1982) (6’25), ‘Calling All Girls’ (live version, Tokyo, November 1982) (5’45)

  Bonus videos, 2011 iTunes-only editions: ‘Las Palabras De Amor (The Words Of Love)’ (Top Of The Pops version, June 1982), ‘Under Pressure’ (“rah” remix promotional video), ‘Action This Day’ (live version, Milton Keynes Bowl, June 1982)

  Musicians: John Deacon (bass and rhythm guitars, synthesizer, piano and drum programming on ‘Cool Cat’), Brian May (guitars, vocals, synthesizer, synth bass on ‘Dancer’, piano), Freddie Mercury (vocals, piano, synthesizer, drum programming on ‘Body Language’ and ‘Staying Power’), Roger Taylor (drums, percussion, vocals, rhythm guitar on ‘Calling All Girls’, synthesizer), David Bowie (vocals on ‘Under Pressure’)

  Recorded: June–August 1981 at Mountain Studios, Montreux; December 1981–March 1982 at Musicland Studios, Munich

  Producers: Queen and Mack (‘Under Pressure’ produced by Queen and David Bowie)

  With the success of ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’ and ‘Another One Bites The Dust’, Queen were suddenly catapulted into a new realm. The stadium rock of News Of The World had been honed into a finely executed chart sound, and the band found themselves catering more to the hit parade than creating albums.

  The more rhythmic side of The Game was explored in their next studio release, although they were certainly in no rush to start work on it. In what would become a trend for the remainder of their career, the band stayed out of the studios as much as possible so they could focus on their live shows. “In the studio it was difficult,” Brian said in a 2005 Capital Gold radio interview, “because we were all pulling in different directions with our own ideas, our own dreams we wanted to fulfil, so yeah, we had some pretty difficult times. The great thing which I think counts for us is that we never aired our dirty laundry in public. We never went out and slagged each other off in public. We settled our problems privately, and so we were able to move on.”

  When the band returned for a brief break between their first South American tour and their autumn tour of Mexico, there were several issues to settle before they focused on their new album. They had started discussions for their first greatest hits package, which had been planned for Christmas 1980, but it was cancelled as it would have been their third album release that year, adversely flooding the market. It was decided that the compilation would be released instead in 1981, officially their tenth anniversary as a band.

  They had also decided to film a series of shows and splice the best performances together for their first live video release. They had attempted this before with their November 1974 concerts at The Rainbow and again in June 1977 at Earl’s Court Arena, but film from both of these (excellent) shows was scrapped for unknown reasons. After touring South America and Mexico in September, the band played their only North American shows in late November in Montreal for the film project, though the resulting footage wouldn’t be used for nearly three years.

  Remaining was the issue of the new album. Just as they had done in 1979, the band started recording sessions with Mack in the summer of 1981 with no specific tracks in mind, jamming until ideas developed. The sessions unfolded discontinuously between June 1981 and March 1982: the first round of sessions took place between June and August, before the band broke for rehearsals and a tour of Mexico; the second was a two-week interval starting on 6 December; and the third commenced in the New Year, with Roger and John arriving on 18 January, and Freddie and Brian showing up five days later. This hinted at the band’s preference to record at a comfortable pace. “We don’t have a concept,” Roger told Popcorn in June 1981. “Most of the songs are already there, but the different effects and details come to life step by step. When the album is finished, we will surely go on tour again. And it will be a completely
new show.”

  “We moved out to Munich to isolate ourselves from normal life so we could focus on the music,” Brian told Uncut in 2005, “and we all ended up in a place that was rather unhealthy. A difficult period. We weren’t getting along together. We all had different agendas. It was a difficult time for me, personally – some dark moments.” The band had indeed changed into traditional rock stars. Freddie was content to explore the licentious side of Munich, and frequented nightclubs almost every night of the week. Brian and Roger, too, would go out partying with their own circle of friends, while John preferred to be with his family or go on holiday during lulls in recording.

  The sessions were fraught with disagreements, with each band member pulling violently in different directions while trying to maintain a unified sound. In the studio, Mack was expected to make sense of the songs that the band was individually bringing to the table, with directives from each band member over the sound and feel of the songs. It didn’t help that Brian was digging his heels in to keep the band focused on their rock sound (indeed, of his three songs, only ‘Dancer’ dipped its toe into the dance/funk category) while John and Freddie desired the airiness of dance records. “As a group, we do not have a single direction,” Brian admitted in a 1984 interview with Faces. “We’re four very different people. I do feel we’re more democratic than any group I’ve come across. But that means there’s always compromise – no one ever gets his own way totally. We’re always pushing four different directions, not quite sure where the equilibrium position is, for balance. We fought about arriving at a sensible format for Hot Space, then decided to push into a very rhythmic and sparse area, disciplining out all the indulgences we’ve been used to putting in. We felt our fans would take it as another experiment. But we found we’d stepped out – at last! – from the music people felt they could expect from us.”