by Georg Purvis
This signalled dark times for the guitarist, who found the distractions of Munich not entirely to his taste. “Emotionally, we all got into trouble [there],” he told Mojo in 2008. “‘Hey, let’s have a drink after the studio.’ It was nice to start with ... We’d go out after the studio and then we weren’t getting back until eight in the morning. So you don’t get much work done the next day ... and then it’s time to go out drinking again.” After a particularly boisterous evening at a club, an inebriated Brian came back to the studio and demanded that Mack fire up the tape machines with a whole load of echo applied, and barely squeezed out a guitar solo for ‘Put Out The Fire’.
Brian’s guitar was almost entirely absent from John’s and Freddie’s dance songs, which Brian later complained about: “Fred’s thing was: less is more, make it more sparse, and play less guitar.” John, who had a more rhythmic feel on guitar, was recruited to play on ‘Staying Power’, and insisted on playing on his own ‘Back Chat’. Dissatisfied with the latter title, Brian suggested a fiery solo to complement the argumentative feel of the lyrics – which, incidentally, brought the bassist and guitarist to verbal blows. “I remember John saying I didn’t play the type of guitar he wanted on his songs,” Brian later told Mojo in 1999. “We struggled bitterly with each other.”
Not that Freddie was entirely to blame for the guitarist’s frustrations: Peter “Phoebe” Freestone, the singer’s personal assistant, recalled an outburst that, while superficially full of frustration, was still laced with humour: “What the fucking hell do you want? A herd of wildebeest charging from one side to the other?!” Mack, who had the unenviable task of making sense of the songs, recalled, “Making The Game was the last time the four of them were in the studio together. After that, it felt like it was always two of them in one studio and two of them in another. You’d come in one day and say, ‘Oh, where’s Roger?’ and someone would say, ‘Oh, he’s gone skiing’ ... It’s easier to conceive and give birth than it is to get this album finished.” In March 1982, just as the sessions came to a close, Mack’s wife Ingrid gave birth to their first child, John-Frederick.
Hot Space was finally finished in late March 1982, and the band flew off to Canada to film a video for ‘Body Language’ as well as to rehearse for their upcoming world tour. There’s no doubt that recording had exhausted the band, and they hoped to find renewed energy in the live shows. “I enjoy the live stuff a lot more,” Brian lamented to Guitar Player in 1983. “There are moments in the studio I enjoy, but most of the studio is sheer misery. The writing and the arranging of material is such a painstaking process these days for us. I can get in and play a solo anytime, but that’s not the majority of the work that’s done. The majority of it is real soul-searching and wondering whether a song is right. It’s painful.”
The album was released in May 1982 after considerable delay (David Bowie, who guested on both ‘Under Pressure’ and ‘Cool Cat’, asked that his voice be removed from the latter, though he neglected to tell the band until the day before the album’s release), nearly two months after ‘Body Language’ and almost two years after The Game. Sales were adequate, especially remarkable considering that the first single reached only No. 25 in the UK charts, and the album peaked at No. 4. It must have been disappointing for the band though, since The Game had reached the top slot in both England and America, but their fans across the pond hadn’t embraced the new album as enthusiastically as had their British fans, and it reached only No. 22 in the US charts. This was the first Queen album since Queen II not to reach the Top Twenty, a steady decline in the band’s US popularity beginning here and deepening over the next decade. Subsequent albums would never again reach the Top Twenty in America.
“I haven’t found it that easy to accustom myself to the new stuff,” Brian said in 1982. “A lot of the music which Freddie and John want to do is more R&B-oriented, and it’s hard for me to do that because my playing is a reaction to that style, in a sense. I used to listen to people plucking away on Motown records, and I really didn’t like it. I always thought to myself, ‘That’s the kind of thing I don’t want to play. I want the guitar to be up there speaking’. So in a way the return to that was difficult to me. It was a discipline which I gradually worked into, but I find myself wanting to burst out of it all the time and make a lot of noise.”
“[It] is an attempt to do funk properly,” Brian cryptically explained in 1982. “It has a style of playing where you get in and get out quickly, hence the title.” Brian, ever the defender of Queen’s music, was himself unsure of the band’s sudden departure in style. He updated his stance more clearly in 1989, saying, “I think Hot Space was a mistake, if only timing-wise. We got heavily into funk and it was quite similar to what Michael Jackson did on Thriller a couple of years ago, and the timing was wrong. Disco was a dirty word.
“Possibly Freddie was then getting interested in other things,” Brian continued, “and a bit bored with being in the studio, because we did studios to death with the previous two albums, when we’d be in there for months on end, just working away, although we weren’t particularly inefficient, it was just that there was a lot to be done. We all felt we’d done enough of that for the time being, and wanted to get back to basics and do something simpler, but Freddie got to the point where he could hardly stand being in a studio, and he’d want to do his bit and get out.”
Reviews for the album were surprisingly positive ... Record Mirror: “New styles, and a whole new sense of values. You’ll love Hot Space, eventually.” Sounds: “Queen have never made particularly blinding albums, but you’ll have to agree that Hot Space shows more restraint and imagination than tripe like Jazz.” Even NME, who normally reviled everything Queen released, was (relatively) glowing: “The production of the whole album is really a peach.” Rolling Stone was mixed, praising ‘Back Chat’, ‘Calling All Girls’ and ‘Cool Cat’, though censuring the rest as “at best, routinely competent and, at times, downright offensive. ‘Give me your body / Don’t talk,’ sings Mercury in ‘Body Language’, a piece of funk that isn’t fun.” It was a viewpoint shared by most fans.
At several points throughout the Hot Space world tour, when introducing particular tracks from the new album, Freddie categorically denied that the band had lost their traditional sound, and even said during the Milton Keynes performance, “It’s only a bloody record! People get so excited about these things.” Perhaps, but the rest of the band disagreed, and while most of the songs got a regular workout in the live setting in 1982 (only ‘Dancer’, ‘Las Palabras De Amor (The Words Of Love)’ and ‘Cool Cat’ remained unperformed), ‘Under Pressure’ was the only one to remain in the set list after 1984. (‘Staying Power’ was played for the first half of the Queen Works! tour in 1984, but was dropped and never reappeared after that.) There were no Hot Space tracks offered on the 1991 compilation Greatest Hits II, and only ‘Las Palabras De Amor’ was released on Greatest Hits III in 1999. ‘Body Language’ was issued on the 1992 US update of Greatest Hits, but the other singles have remained conspicuously absent from any compilation.
Brian was particularly critical of the album, while Roger, John and Freddie preferred to look on it as an experiment and nothing else. When asked if he was happy with the direction Queen were going in, Brian answered bluntly: “To be honest, no. I didn’t feel that this tour [the 1982 Hot Space world tour] was making me very happy. I’ve often felt that in the studio, but that’s the first time I felt it on tour. I didn’t feel very happy until the last concert. The last night in Los Angeles, I felt quite cheered up. I was prepared to think, ‘Well, I don’t really want to do this anymore’. Somehow, when it got to the last one, Freddie was really on form and giving a million per cent, and I felt that I was going well. So the end of the tour finished on a good note for me. I felt like I did want to be out there doing it again sometime. But we are going to have a long rest.”
THE WORKS
EMI WORK1 EMC 240014 1, February 1984 [2]
Capitol ST-1232
2, February 1984 [23]
Capitol CDP 7 46016 2, February 1984
EMI CDP 7 46016 2, December 1986
Hollywood HR-61233-2, November 1991
‘Radio Ga Ga’ (5’48), ‘Tear It Up’ (3’26), ‘It’s A Hard Life’ (4’09), ‘Man On The Prowl’ (3’27), ‘Machines (Or “Back To Humans”)’ (5’10), ‘I Want To Break Free’ (3’20), ‘Keep Passing The Open Windows’ (5’23), ‘Hammer To Fall’ (4’28), ‘Is This The World We Created...?’ (2’17)
Bonus tracks on 1991 Hollywood Records reissue: ‘I Go Crazy’ (3’42), ‘Radio Ga Ga’ (extended version) (6’53), ‘I Want To Break Free’ (extended version) (7’19)
Musicians: John Deacon (bass guitar, rhythm guitar and synthesizer on ‘I Want To Break Free’), Brian May (guitars, vocals, synthesizer and harmony vocals on ‘Machines (Or “Back To Humans”)’, acoustic guitar on ‘Is This The World We Created...?’), Freddie Mercury (vocals, piano, synthesizer on ‘Radio Ga Ga’ and ‘Keep Passing The Open Windows’), Roger Taylor (drums, percussion, vocals, synthesizer on ‘Radio Ga Ga’, vocoder and synthesizer on ‘Machines (Or “Back To Humans”)’), Fred Mandel (piano finale on ‘Man On The Prowl’, synthesizers on ‘Radio Ga Ga’, ‘I Want To Break Free’ and ‘Hammer To Fall’, programming on ‘Radio Ga Ga’), Mack (Demolition Fairlight programming on ‘Machines (Or “Back To Humans”)’)
Recorded: August 1983–January 1984 at The Record Plant, Los Angeles, and Musicland Studios, Munich
Producers: Queen and Mack
The Hot Space world tour had been a strain on the band; tensions were starting to mount on the road for musicians who, after all, could have retired, unworried about their financial future. Thankfully, Queen were still eager to express their collective creativity, even if it meant they’d be together, as Freddie put it, “until we fucking well die.” They deserved a break, however, both from each other and from the music industry. So, following their final show at Seibu Lions Stadium on 3 November 1982, the band agreed on a year’s hiatus, a well-deserved opportunity to relax and enjoy their success while they still had the chance.
“After the relatively unsuccessful Hot Space album,” John said in 1984, “there was a little bit of dissatisfaction there, and we toured and didn’t enjoy it so much, and we decided to take a long time off. It was quite a long time before we actually went into the studio, which gave us all a chance to get a break from each other and try new things as well. It has resulted in Brian doing some solo work, Roger doing another album, Freddie starting an album, and in the end I think it was good for us as well, and now that we’re back together, we’re more committed as a group.”
While Brian, Roger and Freddie started separate solo projects during their time apart, John rested in the interim, though he did admit that the long, unproductive period often caused bouts of depression. “We’re not so much a group anymore,” he told Martin Townsend in 1985. “We’re four individuals that work together as Queen but our working together as Queen is now actually taking up less and less of our time. I mean basically I went spare, really, because we were doing so little. I got really bored and I actually got quite depressed because we had so much time on our hands...” Salvation came in July 1983 when he and Freddie flew to meet with director Tony Richardson in Los Angeles, where discussions were in progress for Queen to contribute music to the big screen adaptation of John Irving’s 1981 novel The Hotel New Hampshire. While in the States, the two also decided to record the next album at the famous Record Plant studios; the following month, the band assembled for their first recording sessions together in almost eighteen months.
As in previous group sessions, the time spent together was not without incident, as Brian explained to Q’s Phil Sutcliffe in 1991: “We did hate each other for a while. Recording The Works, we got very angry with each other. I left the group a couple of times, just for the day, you know. ‘I’m off and I’m not coming back!’ We’ve all done that. You end up quibbling over one note.” Despite their differences, which always seemed to produce interesting music, the sessions proved fruitful: nearly twenty songs were recorded for the album, comprising the nine that were selected for release (including the non-album track ‘I Go Crazy’), as well as several songs which would remain unreleased. An early handwritten line-up for the album ran as following: ‘Tear It Up’, ‘Whipping Boy’, ‘I Want To Break Free’, ‘Machines’, ‘Man On Fire’, ‘Take Another Little Piece Of My Heart’, ‘It’s A Hard Life’, ‘Your Heart Again’, ‘Man On The Prowl’, ‘Radio Caca’ (sic), ‘Hammer To Fall’, ‘Keep Passing The Open Windows’ and ‘Man Made Paradise’. ‘Whipping Boy’, a song that originated during sessions for Hot Space, has been speculated to be ‘I Go Crazy’, while ‘Your Heart Again’ was recorded three years later by EastEnder actress Anita Dobson as ‘Let Me In (Your Heart Again)’. ‘Take Another Little Piece Of My Heart’, meanwhile, was a jam with Rod Stewart and Jeff Beck, and surfaced in 1995 as ‘Let Me Live’. ‘Man On Fire’ was saved for Roger’s Strange Frontier, ‘Man Made Paradise’, which had started life as a Hot Space outtake, was finally released on Freddie’s Mr Bad Guy, and ‘Is This The World We Created...?’ was a last-minute addition. Further outtakes include ‘There Must Be More To Life Than This’ and ‘Love Kills’, both of which were released as Freddie solo projects.
The vocalist explained the writing process of The Works in 1984: “Every album that’s ever come out of Queen, we’ve come up with a batch of songs, and we really pick the best, and if I have songs that I feel are better than somebody else’s – if I have five songs that are better than one of Roger’s songs, I’ll say we won’t have his one song. I can remember that Roger actually wrote about three or four songs and, as far as I was concerned, [they] weren’t good enough, so I said, ‘Go back and write some more.’ Then Roger will come up with something like ‘Radio Ga Ga’ and it’s perfect!”
During the recording sessions, the band also concocted several songs for The Hotel New Hampshire but were disappointed when the producers decided to cut costs by using pre-recorded classical tracks instead, effectively nudging Queen off the project. The band didn’t let the experience sour their attitude; instead, they incorporated at least one track, Freddie’s epic ‘Keep Passing The Open Windows’, onto their new album.
The band spent eight weeks in Los Angeles, recording basic tracks and jamming with anyone who happened to stop by the studios. While out in the west coast city of excess, the band wracked up enormous bills hiring rental cars and partying after sessions, but the discouraging news of Richardson’s soundtrack-killing decision forced them to recoup their losses and head back to Munich to finish up the album. It was there that their old demons returned: Freddie once again hit the nightclubs (not that he had behaved himself in Los Angeles: he met a biker known as Vince the Barman, who was always referred to by Freddie’s friends with wistful sighs and earned the reputation of being “the one that got away”) and Brian, Roger and John all drank too much and missed their families. One day, the bassist, burned out on recording, went on an impromptu trip to Bali without telling the others.
The band were recording more as a band this time, though tensions were still frayed. Brian and John once again clashed over techniques, with John insisting that guest keyboardist Fred Mandel, who had accompanied the band on their 1982 Rock ‘n’ America and Japanese Hot Space tours, record the solo on the Roland synthesizer. Mandel was taken aback: “This was controversial, as no one did solos apart from Brian.” Mack was convinced that the solo would remain a placeholder, but Freddie and John both insisted it remain; Brian relented, but not before adding a few touches on The Red Special to beef up the sound. The sour mood of Brian’s insistence on a guitar solo on ‘Back Chat’ hadn’t dissipated, and while all would maintain that contrasting viewpoints made for better results, it was still an uneasy compromise.
When sessions concluded in early January 1984, the band – particularly Brian – were pleased with the results. The guitarist explained, “I think our next album
is damn good, much better than anything we’ve done for a while. It’s going to be called The Works. And it really is! There’s all the Queen trademarks: lots of production and arrangements and harmonies. We’ve experimented in the past and some of the experiments didn’t work. Our last album was one big experiment and a lot of people totally hated it. And it didn’t sell very well – not compared to earlier stuff, anyway.
“I always got the most enjoyment out of the harder material,” he continued. “Actually, our new album is a lot harder, but I did fight to get it that way. We’ve done some fantastic over-the-top harmonies and a lot of heavy things that we haven’t done for years. The pressure has always been against me, because not everybody in the band is into the same stuff as I am. I get the most pleasure out of things that I can hammer down and really get some excitement out of. Basically, I’m just like a little boy with the guitar, I just like the fat, loud sound of it. But that’s not important to the others, and I agree with this, the songs come first. That’s where the common ground ends and the arguments begin. The result is always a compromise.”
With this album, the band had finally perfected the synthesizer sounds they had dabbled in on the previous three studio albums, successfully incorporating them not as a main instrument but as a vehicle to broaden the overall sonic scope of the songs. “The synthesizers changed when we changed,” Brian noted in 1984. This integration is most successful on tracks like ‘Radio Ga Ga’ and ‘Machines (Or ‘Back To Humans’)’, which were admittedly written on the synthesizer as opposed to the usual, more conventional instruments. The band had finally achieved the fine balance between synthesized and natural sounds, which enhanced the overall delivery of the album; indeed, the band had released their first cohesive album in quite some time.
The Works was released as Queen’s lucky thirteenth album (including Live Killers and Greatest Hits), and returned them to near the top of the UK charts in February 1984. With the assistance of ‘Radio Ga Ga’, a UK No. 2 hit, the album entered the charts at a similar position, and stayed in the Top Ten for four consecutive weeks, returning later in April and again in August – thanks to the ‘I Want To Break Free’ single and the announcement of their UK tour, respectively. In the US, the album struggled into the charts at No. 58, and peaked at No. 23 – a disappointing result, considering the effort the band went to to make it more digestible to their fans. Brian was happy enough, telling Faces, “Now, The Works is doing very well, but I myself am starting to wonder: does that mean we played it too safe? I really do think you need to take the musical risks, to be comfortable with yourself.”
