Queen: The Complete Works

by Georg Purvis

  Indeed, while the album returned the band’s standing back to positive with the fans and critics, there was an overwhelming sense of safe playing. The only two adventurous tracks – and, indeed, the longest – are ‘Radio Ga Ga’ and ‘Machines (Or “Back To Humans”)’, both of which explore the human versus technology elements that Brian and Roger especially enthused about in interviews. The rest of the album is Queen lite, with nearly every song referencing arrangements past: Brian’s ‘Tear It Up’ and ‘Hammer To Fall’ reaffirmed the band as a loud guitar band in the styles of ‘Now I’m Here’ or ‘Tie Your Mother Down’ (intriguingly, Brian contributed no ballads to the album, a rare instance indeed), while Freddie’s ‘It’s A Hard Life’ was a superior update to ‘Play The Game’, and ‘Man On The Prowl’ a third-rate ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’ knock-off. ‘Keep Passing The Open Windows’ and ‘I Want To Break Free’ were both delightful slices of pop, and ‘Is This The World We Created...?’ a tender acoustic ballad written after witnessing a documentary on third-world poverty. But there wasn’t anything that pushed the boundaries (disco and funk excursions were both deliberately avoided), and while it may have been a more traditional Queen album in terms of songwriting and arrangements, there was nothing particularly outlandish or cutting-edge; no ‘Mustapha’s or ‘Good Company’s.

  The reviews, surprisingly, were generally positive; even the unsparing Rolling Stone gave the album three stars out of five, saying, “Granted, the messages have all been heard before and practically cancel each other out: love is all you need; let’s get physical; machines have feelings, too; be an individual, stand your ground. Instead, the revelations are in the music ... The Works is a royal feast of hard rock without that awful metallic aftertaste; as such, it might turn out to be the Led Zeppelin II of the 1980s. Not such a depressing prospect at that.” Record Mirror said of the album, “The comfortable yet demanding ‘Radio Ga Ga’ is brought down to earth by the hot and oily ‘Tear It Up’, with its cat scratch fever guitar. Another jewel in the crown.” And Sounds uncharacteristically gushed, “It’s all there, I can assure you: spurious social commentary in ‘Machines’, slight Fred ballad via ‘Is This The World We Created...?’, and even a nip of the old Brian May metal with the excellent ‘Hammer To Fall’.”

  1984 also saw the band immerse themselves in producing videos for the album’s singles, a project Roger disliked: “Now you’ve gotta make a mini-film! And often it’s more expensive, and the record doesn’t always suit the visual medium.” When asked about the danger of video depriving the listener of their own imagination, Roger responded, “It can in a way. That was something that ‘Radio Ga Ga’ was about: you used to make your own pictures in your mind, but now there’s a video, and you immediately think of those visual ideas that have already been thought of by somebody else.” John was more optimistic: “It’s a very important aspect of a group. And we’ve also all changed our looks over the years, but it’s something that I don’t tend to get involved with as much as the others.”

  The videos for three of the four singles – ‘Radio Ga Ga’, ‘I Want To Break Free’ and ‘It’s A Hard Life’ – might seem overproduced, but ‘Radio Ga Ga’ will be remembered as one of the finest videos Queen ever produced and ‘I Want To Break Free’ became famous for its hilarious segments featuring the band members in drag. However, ‘It’s A Hard Life’ projected the band in an unflatteringly flamboyant way: it’s obvious that Roger and John are miserable throughout the video, scowling and grumbling to each other, but Freddie was proud of the end result. Aware of their reputation for elaborate videos, but possibly financially overextended from the previous three, ‘Hammer To Fall’ was instead recreated in the live environment, stripping away the grandeur of the prior videos to show that Queen were still a rock band at heart.

  The advent of MTV in August 1981 meant that videos could now capture a larger demographic audience, which should have worked to Queen’s advantage in America. ‘Radio Ga Ga’ made the Top Twenty in the US, and ‘I Want To Break Free’ looked like it would follow its predecessor into the higher ranks of the charts. Unfortunately, Queen’s reign in America between 1977 and 1980 had faltered, and the image of the band running around in drag (and Freddie cavorting with a group of spandex-clad ballet dancers) was a bit too much for Americans to tolerate. This was given as the official reason for Queen’s decision to stop touring in America but, when inspected a little closer, invites scepticism. Both Culture Club, fronted by gender-bending vocalist Boy George, and Frankie Goes To Hollywood (their 1984 gay-themed hit ‘Relax’ topped the UK charts and prevented ‘Radio Ga Ga’ from hitting No. 1) were extremely popular in America, as were their explicit videos.

  The success of the album in the UK was greeted with a sigh of relief, but more worrisome was the album’s faltering in the US. Hopes were high for Capitol to deliver the goods after the disappointing promotion by Elektra of Hot Space. The record company had become a handicap to them; despite the band’s lengthy live campaign across the States in the summer of 1982, record sales were poor. The band had been looking for a way out even before Hot Space, but that album was delivered to Elektra, who had contested that Flash Gordon wasn’t a genuine Queen album. “We were trying to break from our old record company in America, which was important,” Brian said the following year. “We didn’t want to deliver another album in that situation. There was that feeling that we might just be making another Queen album and putting it back into the machine. We didn’t want that, and it’s all worked out very well. We agreed on Capitol, and signed a deal with them. Suddenly, we have a company in America that’s really excited to be getting their first Queen album.”

  The early US success of ‘Radio Ga Ga’ (still better than the placement of ‘Under Pressure’ yet, bafflingly, five notches worse than ‘Body Language’) gave Queen high hopes for a reconnection with their American audiences. However, several unfortunate factors came into play between ‘Radio Ga Ga’ in January and ‘I Want To Break Free’ in April 1984. The band’s relationship with the radio networks was damaged by a breakdown in communication. In addition to this, as Brian explained to Q in 2005, there were record company problems. “We had spent a million dollars getting out of our deal with Warner-Elektra to get onto the Capitol label. And Capitol got themselves into trouble with a dispute that raged in the early 1980s over the alleged corruption of independent record promoters in the US. It was basically the ring of bribery that went on to get records played on US radio. There was a government enquiry into it, and everybody shut down very, very fast. Without going into it too deeply, Capitol got rid of all their ‘independent’ guys – and the reprisals from the whole network were aimed directly at all the artists who had records out at that time. We had ‘Radio Ga Ga’, which I think was Top Twenty and rising, but the week after that it disappeared from the charts.”

  As a result, Queen lost a substantial amount of airplay and coverage, and without those promoters to assist the band’s newest singles with radio play and chart success, the band focused on other countries. This undoubtedly soured relations: the band must have felt bitter at the unfortunate timing, while Capitol must have been horrified – they had just signed Queen to a multimillion dollar record deal, and now the band refused to tour America. (They did agree to appear on a few music programmes to talk about the record, though that did very little to boost sales.) There was little incentive, then, for the record company to market an album that the band wouldn’t promote; as a result, the years with Capitol were discordant. Additionally, Freddie was becoming increasingly disenchanted with the longer tours, more comfortable with the brief European and British jaunts and the occasional excursions to other countries. If the band had followed their earlier touring cycles, there wouldn’t have been a six-month gap between the release of The Works and the start of their European tour: it would probably have been filled with an extensive tour across America. Peter “Ratty” Hince, head of the band’s road crew, later told Queenarchives.com that the
band were considering it: “Yes, I believe some dates were planned in reserve. I think it was a huge mistake by Queen not to take that tour to America – it effectively killed the band there. The decision was because the singles from The Works had not done very well in the US, but were big hits everywhere else. Queen had just signed to Capitol Records and expected more I guess. The breaking point was the video for ‘I Want To Break Free’ – the ‘drag’ and comedy didn’t go down well in America and Queen would not make an alternative video for the US market.”

  The video for ‘I Want To Break Free’ has often been singularly attributed with destroying Queen’s relationship with North America. Brian later recalled to Mojo, “It was received in horror in most of America. They just didn’t get it. To them it was boys dressing up as girls and that was unthinkable, especially for a rock band. I was in some of those US TV stations when they got the video, and a lot of them refused to play it. They were visibly embarrassed.” Hince also remembered, “Queen were asked to do another promo for [the song]. They were told, ‘This one isn’t right for America. Will you do a performance video?’ And they said no. They should have done it, because it killed them in the US.” Freddie was exasperated at the sudden turn of events, and sighed to Simon Bates in 1985, “For the first time in our lives we were taking the mickey out of ourselves. But in America they said, ‘What are our idols doing dressing up in frocks?!’”

  Worse was still to come. Paul Prenter, Freddie’s personal manager, was making enemies in the US. “I think America very much depends on the network of people who care about music, and a lot of that is the radio stations,” Brian explained in Q Classic in 2005. “Radio stations are the connection between the artist and the community, and rightly so. Freddie had a personal manager [Paul Prenter] at the time who was very dismissive. And OK, Freddie needed a bit of protection, it was hard for him at that time. But I think this guy ... well, I know for a fact this guy went around saying, ‘No, Freddie doesn’t want to talk to you. Why should he want to talk to you anyway?’ And an enormous amount of damage was done to our relationship with the radio networks, who up to that point had been very close to us, very helpful.” The result destroyed Queen’s reputation in North America. “Freddie didn’t want to go back and play smaller venues that we’d been before,” Brian continued. “He was like, ‘Let’s just wait and we’ll go out and do stadiums in America as well.’ But it was one of those things that wasn’t to be.”

  Instead, the band shifted their attention to the rest of the world, and while tours of Europe, South Africa, Australasia and Japan brought them to a wider audience, they ended the tour in lower spirits than before, and doubly exhausted. Not only were they suddenly pariahs in America (Brian would later lament that they couldn’t even get arrested there), the trying ordeals of the year – including an ill-fated tour of apartheid Sun City, which had earned Queen a blacklisting on the Musicians’ Union, hefty fines and a ban on performing there as long as segregation dominated South Africa – had taken their toll on the band. Queen were looking forward to an indefinite, extended break at the conclusion of the Japanese tour in May 1985. They separately and emphatically maintained that breaking up was never an option: “It’s not the money anymore,” Roger told Sounds in 1984, “it’s the thought of, ‘Christ, what would we do if we ended it?’ Obviously we could all have our solo careers and put new bands together, but that would be like climbing Mount Everest again ... We’ll only do it while the enthusiasm’s there. The more interest that’s shown in the band, the more enthusiasm is generated within the band.” Little did they know that a well-polished, twenty-minute set at Live Aid would generate more interest than they’d ever experienced before in their career.

  A KIND OF MAGIC

  EMI EU 3509, June 1986 [1]

  EMI CDP 7 46267 2, June 1986 [1]

  Capitol SMAS 512476, June 1986 [46]

  Capitol CDP 7 46267 2, June 1986 [46]

  Hollywood HR 61152 2, June 1991

  ‘One Vision’ (5’10), ‘A Kind Of Magic’ (4’24), ‘One Year Of Love’ (4’28), ‘Pain Is So Close To Pleasure’ (4’23), ‘Friends Will Be Friends’ (4’04), ‘Who Wants To Live Forever’ (5’16), ‘Gimme The Prize (Kurgan’s Theme)’ (4’34), ‘Don’t Lose Your Head’ (4’38), ‘Princes Of The Universe’ (3’37)

  Bonus tracks on CD issue: ‘A Kind Of “A Kind Of Magic”’ (3’37), ‘Friends Will Be Friends Will Be Friends...’ (5’58), ‘Forever’ (3’20)

  Bonus tracks on 1991 Hollywood Records reissue: ‘Forever’ (3’20), ‘One Vision’ (Extended Vision) (6’23)

  Musicians: John Deacon (bass guitar, keyboards on ‘One Year Of Love’ and ‘Pain Is So Close To Pleasure’, rhythm guitar on ‘Pain Is So Close To Pleasure’ and ‘Don’t Lose Your Head’), Brian May (guitars, vocals, keyboards on ‘One Vision’ and ‘Who Wants To Live Forever’), Freddie Mercury (vocals, piano, keyboards on ‘A Kind Of Magic’, ‘Friends Will Be Friends’ and ‘Princes Of The Universe’), Roger Taylor (drums, vocals, electronic drums on ‘One Vision’, keyboards on ‘A Kind Of Magic’ and ‘Don’t Lose Your Head’), Spike Edney (additional keyboards), UMI & BBC B (computer keyboards), Lynton Naiff (string arrangement on ‘One Year Of Love’), Steve Gregory (saxophone on ‘One Year Of Love’), Michael Kamen (orchestra arrangement on ‘Who Wants To Live Forever’), National Philharmonic Orchestra (strings on ‘Who Wants To Live Forever’), Joan Armatrading (incidental vocals on ‘Don’t Lose Your Head’)

  Recorded: September 1985–March 1986 at The Townhouse Studios, London; Musicland Studios, Munich; and Mountain Studios, Montreux

  Producers: Queen and Mack (‘One Vision’, ‘One Year Of Love’, ‘Pain Is So Close To Pleasure’, ‘Friends Will Be Friends’, ‘Princes Of The Universe’, ‘Friends Will Be Friends Will Be Friends...’ and ‘One Vision (Extended Vision)’), Queen and David Richards (all other tracks)

  “We did some touring last year,” John said in 1986. “We did a big festival in Brazil, and then later we went to Auckland, New Zealand, then [did] some shows in Australia and Japan.” “It’s strange,” Roger agreed, “we did about four or five concerts last year, and we played to over a million people. That’s only a week’s work! But it seemed to be a very efficient way of doing things.”

  There were two major factors that gave Queen the inspiration to return to the studios in the later part of 1985, the first being their flawless performance at Live Aid on 13 July 1985. The reception was universal and unanimous: Queen were the best act that day. So energized were they by all the praise that they went back into the studios in September – with no material whatsoever – to begin work on their next album. As a forerunner for the (as yet uncompleted) album, ‘One Vision’ was released in November, with an instrumental variation titled ‘Blurred Vision’ as the flipside; the single peaked at No. 7 in the UK.

  The second factor that encouraged the band to return to the studio was Russell Mulcahy’s request that they contribute a song to his motion picture Highlander. So impressed were the band by the film’s twenty-minute rough-cut that they offered to contribute the entire soundtrack. Brian, in particular, was very impressed, writing the film’s love theme directly after viewing the twenty-minute sampler, a song that later turned into ‘Who Wants To Live Forever’.

  “We had the scripts and we went to see quite a lot of the footage they’d got already,” John said of the Highlander project, “and then we all went away and tried to write songs for various bits. I ended up writing a slow ballad in 6/8 which is called ‘One Year Of Love’.” Added Roger, “We found plenty of things in the plot to jump off on, to write songs around,” noting also that the completed album was not a soundtrack in the strictest sense: “I think the idea of a complete soundtrack album puts quite a lot of people off. I think they’re imagining all these orchestral links, which don’t really do anything, and it’s really sort of background music.”

  “We did all the music for the film first,” John explained, “then when we came to do the album, we actually re
arranged a lot of the tracks, made them longer, wrote more lyrics and tried to make them into fully-fledged songs. So they stand up in their own right, without necessarily needing the film. You can actually hear them on the radio and [they] sound more like songs than incidental music.”

  However, Queen weren’t in the right mental space to work on two projects simultaneously; they had done so with relative success back in 1980, with The Game and Flash Gordon, and had tried to do so again in 1983, working on their unreleased contributions to The Hotel New Hampshire in addition to their The Works album. Now, they tried something different: they worked on a batch of songs that would not only be Queen songs but could also be incorporated into the film. As a result, alternate versions of ‘A Kind Of Magic’, ‘One Year Of Love’, ‘Who Wants To Live Forever’, ‘Princes Of The Universe’, ‘Gimme The Prize’ and ‘Don’t Lose Your Head’ were featured in the film’s final cut, in addition to incidental music and orchestrations that wouldn’t have fit on a regular Queen album.

  By this point, the band and their preferred producers had split into two coteries: Brian and Roger worked with David Richards on their songs, while John and Freddie worked with Mack. Richards, who had struck up a friendship with Roger in 1979 and helped the drummer record his two solo albums (even co-writing a handful of songs on Strange Frontier), was a familiar face to the band, and with Brian craving a change and sympathetic ear to his grandiose song ideas, the shift was natural. Freddie and John were more loyal to Mack, who saw his role decreasing greatly; he later lamented, “Everybody was doing their own thing now, in their own studios.”