by Georg Purvis
Record Collector was cautious: “It’s not until track 12 that the epic ‘Say It’s Not True’ rekindles the pomp of Queen of old, followed by the harmony-rich ‘Surf’s Up ... School’s Out!’. Ending on a high note, then, but it may take some plays to get used to the idea that QPR is very much a meeting of equals.” The Pace Press was more realistic: “[It] isn’t a perfect album, but is well worth the thirteen-year wait. Brian May’s guitar playing abilities, for someone as old as he is, haven’t faded in the least. This album is full of tunes that will have fans rocking out and playing air guitar while walking city streets ... This album will take you up, down and all around Queentown. It’s not perfect, but it’s a step in the right direction.”
“The Cosmos Rocks is undeniably patchy (as were all Queen albums, remember),” Guitarist opined, “but the band does rise to the occasion more than once, with ‘Some Things That Glitter’ offering a familiar piano-fueled arrangement and some lovely guitar from Brian May. Elsewhere ‘Surf’s Up ... School’s Out!’ is far better than the toe-curling title would suggest and the lyrical pomposity of ‘We Believe’ is rescued by a wonderful lead vocal from Rodgers. All in all the album does exactly what it says on the tin.” The BBC, too, had above-average marks for the album: “All in all, The Cosmos Rocks displays a band that seem to still be in love with rock. Why else would they be doing it? Surely not for money. May’s guitar is in fine fettle throughout, and it’s hard to begrudge such stalwarts their noisy fun. Fans of both sides will be happy, and that’s just about as much as anyone could expect.”
Stripped to its basic core, the album is indeed, as its creators had taken special care of noting, organic: the drums pop with a deep, resounding thud; the guitars are processed naturally and beautifully; and the band sounds as if they’re in the same room together, instead of being pieced together bit by bit like so much of the music from the 1980s and 1990s. There’s no studio trickery, no ProTools or Auto-Tune to sweeten what wasn’t there initially; just three musicians getting together to record some music together. But once the other elements – melodies, hooks and lyrics – are considered, the result isn’t as pretty. The songs aren’t bad; they’re just spectacularly unremarkable. When taking into account some of the more adventurous songs from Roger’s Electric Fire, or the softer compositions from Brian’s Another World and Furia soundtrack, a lot of the songs on The Cosmos Rocks are shockingly generic; ‘Still Burnin”, described in the press release as “a mission statement of why artists are compelled to create”, is built upon a thundering blues/rock foundation, but when it’s pulled apart and dissected, all that remains is gratuitous fluff. Roger is as committed as ever, and Paul, too, makes the best of the situation by establishing a vocal force on the songs, but the self-proclaimed bonhomie just isn’t there.
Part of the problem is that the songs, while well-performed and musically interesting, struggle to match the stratospheric proportions of Queen’s back catalogue. This was a built-in pitfall with using Queen’s name: nothing would ever compare to the halcyon days of Queen II, ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ and ‘We Are The Champions’, and it would be impossible for a trio of sixty-something rockers to reinvent the wheel. What works the best is the unconventional: ‘Small’, for instance, is a delicate acoustic rocker, while ‘Voodoo’ is a Santana-inspired Latin/blues pastiche that works as a mid-album throwaway. The most Queen-like song on the album, ‘Some Things That Glitter’, harks back to the gentler ballads that Brian contributed to their mid-career albums, while ‘Surf’s Up ... School’s Out!’ married some much-needed humor with open power chords and an explosive, orotund arrangement. Other than that, the songs either tried but fizzled – for instance, ‘Cosmos Rockin”, which rocks convincingly but comes off as forced; ‘Time To Shine’, an anthemic power ballad about mythical creatures (yes, really); and ‘Call Me’, a delightfully irritating ditty that goes on far too long – or failed to catch fire completely – the plodding blues rock of ‘Warboys (A Prayer For Peace)’, which equates soldiers to mindless automata; the overly preachy and laboured ‘We Believe’; and the faceless and unmemorable ‘Through The Night’. After considerable build up, the let down was equally significant.
Another reason was that Brian was the one who had to be convinced the most to participate in the sessions, and a band is only as happy as the unhappiest member. “Brian is always the reluctant one,” Roger told Classic Rock, “but when he gets there, he ends up loving it. With his astronomy and other commitments he has an awful lot in his life, whereas for me, everything else is peripheral to the music.” This off-handed comment – much like the little digs in the press at John Deacon talking more to the accountants than he does to his former bandmates – hinted at something just bubbling under the surface. The songwriting details in the initial pressings credited everything to Queen + Paul Rodgers, but when the North American release came a month later, songs were credited to their three names, with the primary songwriter listed first. What was shocking was that Roger had written the bulk of the material, with Brian writing only three songs, with only ‘Some Things That Glitter’ remotely approaching his capabilities. Furthermore, as the year wore on, Brian became increasingly displeased with the tour, and militant changes to the set list stripped away the most adventurous new material and replaced them with the old familiars; for instance, ’Surf’s Up ... School’s Out!’ was introduced as the set opener midway through the tour, and worked surprisingly well, but after a half dozen dates, it was removed – apparently at Brian’s insistence – and replaced with ‘Hammer To Fall’, which just didn’t work as a concert opener.
So what happened along the way? The primary musicians refused to air any dirty laundry in public, but reports (“unnamed sources” usually being a lighting crew member who heard a story from a friend of a friend of a personal assistant to Jamie Moses’ personal assistant) circulated that Paul and Roger were frustrated with Brian’s reluctance to rehearse new material, while Brian and Roger were frustrated with Paul for detaching himself from the others as the tour wore on – though this may have had something to do with the constant comparisons to Freddie, and, when the tour reached South America, where Freddie is highly revered, Paul was practically ignored at press conferences. There may have been other forces at play, or it may have been as simple as the band agreeing that their time together ended naturally and amicably, but when a proposed North American tour for 2009 failed to materialize and Paul instead announced a solo tour, suspicions were confirmed: Queen + Paul Rodgers was no more.
LIVE IN UKRAINE
Parlophone 9 64603 2 0, June 2009
Hollywood Records D000453400, September 2009
‘One Vision’ (4’03), ‘Tie Your Mother Down’ (2’29), ‘The Show Must Go On’ (4’37), ‘Fat Bottomed Girls’ (5’00), ‘Another One Bites The Dust’ (3’35), ‘Hammer To Fall’ (3’42), ‘I Want It All’ (4’10), ‘I Want To Break Free’ (3’55), ‘Seagull’ (4’50), ‘Love Of My Life’ (5’45), ‘’39’ (4’37), Drum Solo (5’00), ‘I’m In Love With My Car’ (3’42), ‘Say It’s Not True’ (4’02), ‘Shooting Star’ (6’21), ‘Bad Company’ (5’36), Guitar Solo (3’58), ‘Bijou’ (2’07), ‘Last Horizon’ (4’32), ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’ (4’04), ‘C-lebrity’ (3’52), ‘Feel Like Makin’ Love’ (6’45), ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ (5’53), ‘Cosmos Rockin” (4’28), ‘All Right Now’ (5’31), ‘We Will Rock You’ (2’19), ‘We Are The Champions’ (2’59), ‘God Save The Queen’ (2’05), ‘A Kind Of Magic’ (digital download only) (5’43), ‘Radio Ga Ga’ (digital download only) (6’15)
Musicians: Brian May (guitars, vocals, acoustic guitar), Roger Taylor (drums, vocals), Paul Rodgers (vocals, acoustic guitar on ‘Seagull’), Spike Edney (piano, keyboards, keytar, vocals), Danny Miranda (bass guitar, vocals, upright electric bass on ‘’39’), Jamie Moses (guitars, vocals)
Recorded: 12 September 2008 at Freedom Square, Kharkov, Ukraine
Producer: Joshua J. Macrae, Justin Shirley-Smith, Peter Brandt
The f
irst night of most tours is rarely filmed or recorded, for at least two very good reasons: the band is still blowing off the cobwebs from a lengthy period of rest, and the set list is often still in its infancy, with the band still trying to figure out a cohesive order based on audience reaction. It’s surprising, then, that the first night Queen + Paul Rodgers’ Rock The Cosmos tour was filmed, recorded, and eventually released as the final album of the union. It was certainly all for a good cause, as explained in Section 7; with the sextet headlining the Don’t Let AIDS Ruin Your Life free concert, the performance attracted ten million worldwide viewers, and with old stalwart David Mallet returning to direct the show, the band felt more comfortable than they might have otherwise. But they were still in the process of working out the opening night jitters, which meant that some studio work had to be done to bring the performance up to the band’s impossibly high standards.
It would be easy to focus on the glaring negative, that the set list remained too similar to the 2005/2006 tour, with only a handful of new songs (‘One Vision’, ‘Shooting Star’, ‘Bijou’, and three album tracks from The Cosmos Rocks) replacing old favourites. Indeed, the repertoire would progress throughout the tour, with more emphasis (eventually) placed on The Cosmos Rocks; there’s no denying that the similarity in selections between Return Of The Champions and Live In Ukraine is frustratingly strong. But there were some new elements that made this a more attractive purchase: Roger’s drum solo was more visual this time, starting off with Roger and Danny Miranda goofing around on an upright bass, before Roger sat down in front of a snare and bass drum; roadies worked hurriedly around him to construct a more elaborate drum set that finally led the band into ‘I’m In Love With My Car’. Brian’s solo, too, varied a bit, and saw perhaps the biggest surprise of the tour: the live debut of ‘Bijou’, with Brian playing to Freddie’s pre-recorded vocal. Even the three Cosmos Rocks tracks – ‘C-lebrity’, ‘Cosmos Rockin”, and the power ballad rendition of ‘Say It’s Not True’ – received a more muscular performance in the live setting.
All in all, it’s difficult to escape the notion that Live In Ukraine was simply a way for the band to justify the elaborate cost of a film crew, and while the performance is genuine, its release six months after the cinematic release of Let The Cosmos Rocks smacks of afterthought. Furthermore, the CD wasn’t released separately from the DVD (although a digital release was offered, with two bonus tracks – ‘A Kind Of Magic’ and ‘Radio Ga Ga’, though ‘Wishing Well’ remains inexplicably unreleased), which certainly didn’t help sales. As a result, Live In Ukraine failed to chart in the UK, the first instance that a Queen-related product didn’t chart. (Surprisingly, the package was released in the US, though predictably failed to chart.) By this point, Brian, Roger and Paul were well past caring, and Live In Ukraine, for all its plusses, remains an undignified end to a union that deserved better treatment.
PART THREE
THE SONGS
This section covers songs written, recorded, covered or played live by John Deacon, Brian May, Freddie Mercury and Roger Taylor, either as solo artists, in early bands from the 1950s and 1960s, or as the collective unit known as Queen. Cover versions of Queen songs are only dealt with in rare cases (e.g., Bad News performing ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ or Nine Inch Nails performing ‘Get Down, Make Love’); renditions by obscure bands on numerous tribute albums have been ignored.
A | B | C | D | E
F | G | H | I | J
K | L | M | N | O
P | Q | R | S | T
U | V | W | Y
It should be remembered that Queen Productions are particularly guarded over the contents of the band’s vaults, and that only a handful of songs marked as unreleased have actually been heard by collectors and fans, myself included.
AARON (May)
• Soundtrack (Brian): Furia
Yet another variation on the soundtrack’s main theme, taken in a slightly lower key, ‘Aaron’ is a short and sweet performance by Dave Lee on the French horn, again with keyboards adding dimension to the piece.
ABANDONFIRE (Taylor/Richards)
• Album (Roger): Frontier
Perhaps the weakest track from Strange Frontier, ‘Abandonfire’ (without a space to separate the two words) sounds like something taken from David Bowie’s mid-1980s excursions, Let’s Dance and Tonight. Indeed, Roger strikes a bleak balance of conformity and nuclear war while contriving to sound like Bowie himself. And although the lyrics are clever, there’s no doubt that with a far less synthesized arrangement (which has David Richards’ fingerprints all over it), the song would have been far stronger.
ACTION THIS DAY (Taylor)
• Album: Space • Live: On Fire • Bonus: Space
Taking its title from a favourite expression of Winston Churchill, Roger’s ‘Action This Day’ is perhaps the most successful fusion of rock and funk on Hot Space. Lyrically addressing the actions of love, the song is set to a pulsating drum-machine beat that tends to fall flat on record (live, it received a far more energetic treatment), but is notable as one of the last times Roger and Freddie shared lead vocals on a song.
‘Action This Day’ was performed at every Hot Space concert during 1982. For years, the definitive live version was that released on Queen On Fire: Live At The Bowl, but a second live version from a November 1982 performance in Tokyo was released on the 2011 reissue of Hot Space.
AFFAIRS
This jam was recorded during the Montreux sessions for Innuendo in 1990, and leaked onto the internet in November 2010 by way of producer David Richards, who premiered them at an appearance at the Italian Queen Community’s fifth anniversary. Much like several other scraps of songs from this time (‘My Secret Fantasy’, ‘I Guess We’re Falling Out’ and ‘Robbery’), ‘Affairs’ has several good ideas and certainly deserved another look-in, but ultimately the right decisions were made. Still, this recording barely scratches the surface of what lurks in the archives, remaining to be unearthed and released to fans.
AIN’T PUT NOTHIN’ DOWN (Moss)
•Album (The Cross): Blue
Written by Clayton Moss and released on Blue Rock, ‘Ain’t Put Nothin’ Down’ (for you verbalists out there, parse your way around the double negatives in that title!) is a slight but enjoyable track that would have benefited from an additional remix to bring Roger’s voice to the fore a bit more. The song is a plea to remain optimistic when all else fails but, unfortunately, the weak lyrics detract from the message considerably.
The song was performed live on the 1991 Blue Rock tour, usually as the third number, with a live version appearing on the Fan Club-only cassette release Live In Germany, and was included in the set lists for the remaining few shows between 1992 and 1993. ‘Ain’t Put Nothin’ Down’ was also released as the B-side of the ‘New Dark Ages’ single in 1991, with a unique single mix, extending the song by thirty seconds but adding very little except for a marginally longer intro and outro.
AIRHEADS (Taylor)
• Album (Roger): Fun
Dominated by drums, much like ‘Let’s Get Crazy’ and ‘My Country I & II’, ‘Airheads’ is a chunky rocker with Roger riffing manically while singing a set of disposable lyrics about his “less than refined” group of friends. The bass work is the most interesting aspect, as he achieves a more distorted sound than John Deacon was known for, but the song itself is a slight blemish on an otherwise excellent debut solo album.
ALL DEAD, ALL DEAD (May)
• Album: World
Written about the death of Brian’s childhood pet cat, ‘All Dead, All Dead’ is a mournful paean to lost friends, years ahead of ‘The Show Must Go On’ and Brian’s solo track ‘Another World’. Assuming a childlike naïveté and illustrating a simpler view of death, the song is set to a grand piano backing track with lead vocals from the guitarist and harmonies from Freddie on the choruses.
“That’s one of my favourites,” Brian said in a 1983 interview with Guitar magazine. “That was one of the ones whi
ch I thought came off best, and I was really pleased with the sound. It always gives me a surprise when I listen to it, because it was meant to really bring tears to your eyes. It almost does it to me.”
ALL GOD’S PEOPLE (Queen/Moran)
• Album: Innuendo • B-side: 5/91 [14]
Fifteen years after first attempting gospel with ‘Somebody To Love’, Queen once again revisit the style with ‘All God’s People’. When asked about the song in an interview in Guitar World, conducted by Extreme guitarist Nuno Bettencourt, Brian said, “I love it too. I had less to do with that than I did with most of the stuff on the album. That was originally something Freddie was going to do on a solo album, and gradually we all played on it. I went in and played guitar and it seemed to work very well. John went in and played bass, Roger put the drums in, so it became a Queen track. I love it. Not many people have spoken to me about it, but I think it’s great. It’s got a lot of depth to it.”
Written by Freddie and Mike Moran (who contributed keyboards to the recording) in 1987 and recorded as a demo for Barcelona, with the working title of ‘Africa By Night’, the song was dusted off for inclusion on Innuendo, and while it’s not completely unsuccessful (delivering a message of peace and hope for the human race and sung with ever-growing power by Freddie), ‘All God’s People’ shifts styles too frequently, beginning with the gospel intro, before becoming suitably African, then jumping into an awkward blues pastiche. Unlike ‘Somebody To Love’, though, ‘All God’s People’ sounds thin, due to an undeveloped arrangement and a flat production at odds with the rest of Innuendo.
