by Georg Purvis
Adopting an Elvis-style vocal as a tribute to The King, who had passed away two years before, Freddie’s impression is so convincing that many thought it was a long-lost recording by Elvis himself – or, at the very least, that Queen were covering an old, forgotten song by The King. “It’s not rockabilly exactly but it did have that early Elvis feel,” Roger commented in a 1984 interview with Sounds, “and it was one of the first records to exploit that. In fact I read somewhere – in Rolling Stone, I think it was – that John Lennon heard it and it gave him the impetus to start recording again. If it’s true – and listening to the last album [Double Fantasy] it certainly sounds as if he explored similar influences – that’s wonderful.”
‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’ was released as a UK single with the fast live version of ‘We Will Rock You’ from Live Killers in October 1979, and peaked in the charts at No. 2, the band’s highest placement there since ‘We Are The Champions’ in 1977. Originally, the band hadn’t intended to release the song in the US, but radio stations started picking up the song as an import and demand for the single became massive. Elektra issued the song with ‘Spread Your Wings’ from Live Killers in December 1979, and by the next month, the single flew to the top of the charts, earning the band their first No. 1 there. “We’re not a singles group,” Brian said in 1980, “we don’t stake our reputation on singles and we never have done, but I think it’s brought a lot of younger people to our concerts. No doubt there are those who hate the new single but like what we’ve done in the past. But I think that tends to happen with whatever you put out, unless you’re totally predictable. You lose some and gain some. But the actual live show gives a good crossover, so I don’t think anyone’s disappointed with that.”
A video was shot on 22 September 1979 at Trillion Studios. Directed by Dennis DeVallance, the video shows Queen decked out in leather and performing the song as Freddie prances around, a gorgeous blonde in his arms as he hops onto a motorbike; he struts to the front, surrounded by four professional dancers (two females and two males; this was the first, but not last, time the band would use dancers in a video), and one of the females tears his shirt down the front. Freddie is clearly the star of the show here, and the band are pushed to the sidelines; however, it seemed most comfortable for them, even if the leather didn’t appear so.
The song became a staple in the set list, and was performed at every show between November 1979 and August 1986, with Freddie always on acoustic rhythm (1979–1982) or electric rhythm (1984–1986) guitar. He would usually precede the song with a crack about his lack of guitar skill (“OK, everybody knows I can’t play the fucking guitar,” he said in 1986; “About ten years ago I knew only three chords on guitar. Now, in 1982, I know only three chords on guitar,” he quipped in 1982) before dedicating the song to “anybody who’s crazy out there.” The song offered the chance for extended improvisation, often stretching the song well beyond its original two and a half minute running time, and allowing the band – but especially Brian – free rein to jam. Live versions of the song appear on Live At Wembley Stadium (with one version from the complete gig from 12 July 1986, and a bonus track on the 2003 reissue from the night before), though it wasn’t released on Live Magic, and a great version appears on the 2004 DVD and CD release of Queen On Fire: Live At The Bowl. Robert Plant performed an appropriate version (in the style of his own song ‘Darlene’ from Led Zeppelin’s 1982 album Coda) at the Concert For Life on 20 April 1992.
On 7 October 1979, Freddie appeared with the Royal Ballet at the London Coliseum to take part in a charity gala ballet, organized to benefit the City of Westminster Society for Mentally Handicapped Children. Rehearsing his parts with principal dancers Derek Dene and Wayne Eagling at the London Dance Centre earlier in the week, the visibly nervous vocalist appeared on stage, providing the encore with ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ and ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’. When he urged the audience to sing along with him on the latter number, it must have slipped his mind that the song had been in the shops for only two days, so it’s doubtful that anyone except the few staunch Queen fans in attendance would have known the words. Roger, who came along for moral support, said afterwards, “I was more nervous than he was. I mean, I wouldn’t do it – that’s just not my scene. I’d like to see anyone else have the courage to do that, and carry it off as well as he did. He had a lot of balls to go on that stage. He loves all that stuff.”
CROSSROADS (Johnson)
Undoubtedly Robert Johnson’s best-known song, later famously covered by Cream, becoming Eric Clapton’s signature tune for most of his early career, Ibex performed a version of the song at The Sink Club, Liverpool, on 9 September 1969.
CYBORG (May)
• Album (Brian): World
One of the most unorthodox songs to be written by Brian, ‘Cyborg’ “was a quick job I did for a computer game [Rise Of The Robots, though it wasn’t used until the sequel, Rise 2: Resurrection],” Brian explained in 1998. “And it obviously cried out to be a proper guitar thing, so I went for it. These days I’m using my fingers to pick more. Because there are a lot of things you can do by plucking the strings in different directions. And it also links into tapping, because your right hand isn’t holding a pick, so it’s free to go up on the fret board. I’m not heavily into tapping, but there are certain things you can do where the [right hand] finger can also hit a fret and get little transition notes, which can be really nice.”
The song was initially recorded in 1995 and boasts a set of lyrics taken from the cyborg’s point of view; an update of ‘Machines (Or “Back To Humans”)’ for the 1990s, the mechanized villain begs the protagonist to “come play with me”, with the hero pleading, “I don’t want to / I don’t need to / But I must fight again.” Brian later told Music Scene Magazine, “Right after I got asked for a song by this ‘gang’, I tried to think myself into the mind of this robot, that’s a very interesting thing to do, because it triggers off something in yourself. At the beginning I wrote the song for the robot, at the end it was a song for me. I began to give the robot my emotions.” His voice is electronically lowered to give it a more sinister quality for the cyborg’s voice, and his thin, reedy voice for the hero’s parts contrasts nicely with the menace of the villain. Several alternate versions, each sounding more disturbing than the previous one, would later surface as instrumentals on the Director’s Cut edition of Rise 2: Resurrection. “I’m fascinated with sequencing and loops and all those things,” Brian said. “But this is a romp as well. It’s a science fiction thing, and I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be fun to put the robot’s point of view, for a change, you know, the robot’s emotions,’ and that’s where it started. Again, you can find other stuff in there, because the robot’s like the rest of us, you know? Well, this one is, anyway!”
Taylor Hawkins plays drums on the track, one of the few songs on Another World that didn’t feature Cozy Powell. Brian explained, “Taylor was with Alanis Morrisette when Roger introduced me to him. He did a great job there, but he was kind of in the wrong place, and he’s a totally explosive young guy, with incredible energy, and he found his proper place in the Foo Fighters. Well, we’re Foo Fighters fans, we like them a lot, and been to see a couple of their gigs, and it turns out that they are big fans of us, and they say, ‘Well, Queen’s the Bible for us, you know, we learn a lot of our stuff from listening to you guys,’ so I just said to Taylor, ‘Would you like to come down here and do one?’, and he went, ‘Yeah!’”
Unfortunately, the song is completely out of place on Another World, thus reinforcing the slapdash manner in which the album was constructed, and would have been better off on a completely different project. It’s hard to imagine how the song would help Brian find the “True Direction and freedom of the Spirit” (according to his liner notes for Another World), though it does fit the idea that “things are never quite what they seem.”
DANCER (May)
• Album: Space
Centred around a pulsating drum-machine
beat and bubbling synth bass (both provided by Brian), ‘Dancer’ is Brian’s own attempt to keep up with the funk. “We were thinking about rhythm before anything else,” Brian told the BBC in 1982, “so in some cases, like ‘Dancer’, the backing track was there a long time before the actual song was properly pieced together. We would experiment with the rhythm and the bass and drum track and get that sounding right, and then very cautiously piece the rest around it, which was an experimental way for us to do it.” Lyrically, the guitarist addresses his own awkwardness with the genre, which is evident in the performance. Though not the best track on Hot Space, it is still far better than Freddie’s contributions to the first side, and features several blistering guitar solos.
DANCING IN THE STREET (Gaye/Hunter/Stevenson)
Originally performed by Martha and the Vandellas, ‘Dancing In The Street’ was played live by 1984.
DANCING QUEEN (Andersson/Andersson/Ulvaeus)
A fitting song to play live, The Brian May Band included ABBA’s incredibly popular ‘Dancing Queen’ as an encore during their concert in Stockholm in 1998, sung by Suzi Webb and Zoe Nicholas. Incidentally, when not on tour with Brian, the two women fronted an ABBA tribute band called FABBA.
THE DARK (May)
• Album (Brian): BTTL • Live (Brian): Brixton
Released on Brian’s 1992 debut solo album, Back To The Light, as an atmospheric opener, ‘The Dark’ was recorded during sessions for Flash Gordon in 1980 at Anvil Studios with orchestrations from Howard Blake, and it’s been rumoured that Queen recorded their own version. If the song exists, it’s not known in what capacity it would have been used since it doesn’t fit the themes of the Flash Gordon album, but in the confines of Back To The Light, ‘The Dark’ couldn’t be more appropriate.
DEAD ON TIME (May)
• Album: Jazz
A breathless rocker that rolls faster than any live rendition of ‘Sheer Heart Attack’, Brian’s ‘Dead On Time’ is an astounding if underrated song. The song’s pace supports the lyrics about a man rushing through his life until the concluding cry of “You’re dead!” Roger’s drumming is frantic as Brian riffs heavily alongside a fat bass line. Freddie’s vocal performance is stunning, and the exclusion of this song from the live set is inexcusable, if understandable; the band’s sets in 1978 were averaging two and a half hours a night, and were already physically demanding, especially for Freddie. ‘Dead On Time’ was doomed to obscurity despite a gloriously over-the-top ending with a crashing finale credited to God Himself (the thunderclap was later used between 1979 and 1981 as the introduction for Queen’s concerts).
“That was something I was quite pleased with, but really nobody else was,” Brian said of the song in a 1982 On The Record interview. “It’s something which nobody ever mentions very much. ‘Fat Bottomed Girls’ I thought was okay, but fairly banal. I thought people would be much more interested in ‘Dead On Time’, but it didn’t really get that much airplay. The explosions at the end are a real thunderstorm which occurred when we were in the south of France. We put a tape recorder outside.”
DEAR FRIENDS (May)
• Album: SHA • EP: Five Live • B-side: 4/93 [1]
An exquisite and understated performance, Brian’s brief ‘Dear Friends’ is a gorgeous piano ballad (played by Brian) that languished for years alongside the more experimental second side of Sheer Heart Attack, serving as a refreshing chaser between the frantic ‘Stone Cold Crazy’ and jaunty ‘Misfire’. Although the song enjoyed wider exposure when it was released as the B-side of the live ‘Somebody To Love’ from the Concert for Life in 1993, ‘Dear Friends’ was never aired in the live setting.
DEAR MR MURDOCH (Taylor)
• Album (Roger): Happiness? • CD single (Roger): 9/98 [45] • Download (Roger): 7/11
During the final years of Freddie’s life, he was constantly hounded by the tabloid papers, whose representatives camped out on his lawn awaiting a photo opportunity of the ailing vocalist while printing ludicrous statements in the dailies about his health. Roger took particular exception to The Sun, a paper owned by Rupert Murdoch, the controversial media mogul who also possessed a stranglehold over Fox television. At the end of Freddie’s life, the papers were still scrounging for outrageous and scandalous stories to print, forcing Roger to write an answer in the form of ‘Dear Mr Murdoch’.
Not since the days of ‘Death On Two Legs’ has any member of Queen sounded so vitriolic – compared to ‘Dear Mr Murdoch’, Freddie’s 1975 ode to their former managers sounds like a love song. The song was originally written for an aborted fourth album by The Cross, though a version was rumoured to have been worked on during sessions for Blue Rock in 1991; thankfully, the song wasn’t explored any further, causing Roger’s emotions to fester until he couldn’t take it any more. “I thought it was a gross intrusion on [Freddie’s] privacy,” Roger seethed at the time. “I felt outraged that his house was surrounded by these vultures when he was basically trying to die in peace.” Considered too personal for a Cross album, the song was abandoned and later resurrected for Happiness?.
Set to a slow, dirge-like backing, particular emphasis is given to Roger’s voice, which alternates between a slow, hissing calm and an angrier tone by means of a vocal processor (a similar effect was used on several songs from Happiness? in the live setting). The lyrics read like an open letter, as Roger lists several of Murdoch’s “accomplishments”, concluding that he’s polluting the world with his “jingoist lingo” and “nipples and bingo and sex crimes.”
As with most of Happiness?, the song is performed almost exclusively by Roger, though the minimal guitar work is courtesy of Jason Falloon. ‘Dear Mr Murdoch’ featured live on early dates of the Happiness? tour in 1994, and was even more relevant in September 1998 when it was revealed that Murdoch was proposing a takeover of Manchester United by way of BSkyB. Roger not only supported the Independent Manchester Supporters Association by donating start-up funds of £10,000, he also released a special edition of ‘Pressure On’ with ‘Dear Mr Murdoch’ as part of the release.
DEATH ON TWO LEGS
(DEDICATED TO ...... (Mercury)
• Album: Opera • EP: First EP • Live: Killers • CD Single: 11/88
Queen’s legal troubles in the latter part of 1974 and most of 1975 were well publicized at the time. Unfortunately, as Brian put it, the band discovered that they were “virtually penniless” despite all those successful records and tours. Freddie was especially angry, and wrote the scathing ‘Death On Two Legs (Dedicated to ......’ in the autumn of 1975 as a two-fingered salute to Norman and Barry Sheffield, who had been depriving the band of their hard-earned money. “‘Death On Two Legs’ was the most vicious lyric I ever wrote,” he told Circus magazine in 1977. “It’s so vindictive that Brian felt bad singing it. I don’t like to explain what I was thinking when I wrote a song. I think that’s awful, just awful. When I’m dead, I want to be remembered as a musician of some worth and substance.”
The track, originally titled ‘Psycho Legs’, was the cause of a lawsuit when Trident Productions saw red: despite no specific mention of Queen’s management, the Sheffields concluded that it was about them, and a slanderous dedication at best. Queen were taken to court, tying up the band’s intentions to work on their fourth album (“It affects your morale,” Brian moaned to Sounds in 1975. “It dries you up completely ... We couldn’t write at all that summer.”), while a re-recording of ‘Keep Yourself Alive’ from July 1975, intended for a US-exclusive single release, got tied up in the legal issues, and was abandoned. The lawsuit was settled out of court, with a £100,000 severance and one percent royalties on Queen’s subsequent six albums.
With some gorgeous harmonies and an acidic vocal performance from Freddie, ‘Death On Two Legs (Dedicated to ......’ is an early highlight and gets the band’s pivotal fourth album off to a gleefully vicious start. The song appeared on Queen’s First EP in May 1977 and became a live favourite, played for the first time that same month, a
nd becoming a regular part of the medley between late 1977 and 1981, but was dropped before the second leg of the Gluttons For Punishment tour – intriguingly, at the same time that the Sheffields’ one percent deal as part of their severance ended.
DEEP RIDGE
In the summer of 2004, an alleged confidant of Brian ‘revealed’ that Queen II was originally meant to feature thirteen songs instead of eleven, and that the demo recordings of all the songs were to appear on the still-unreleased anthology box sets. The tipster named the two extra unreleased recordings as ‘Deep Ridge’, reportedly written by Brian, and ‘Surrender To The City’, written by Freddie. While the existence of these two songs is unlikely, it still paints an interesting image of Queen fans with little else to do but make up stories about tracks that don’t exist. However, if ‘Deep Ridge’ and ‘Surrender To The City’ do exist, then I shall be the first in line to eat my hat.
DELILAH (Queen)
• Album: Innuendo
Freddie was living on borrowed time by the time sessions for Innuendo were underway, but he knew that the band were making one of their finest albums since the days of A Night At The Opera. That’s why ‘Delilah’ sits at odds beside the other finely produced and arranged tracks: much like ‘All God’s People’, this song sounds like a demo with additional guitar overdubs from Brian. Though ‘Delilah’ is a quirkily playful ode to Freddie’s cat of the same name (thereby becoming the first and only Queen song to directly reference urination, albeit of the feline variety), the overall sound is tinny and out of place among the rest of the album. Innuendo would have survived without it.
DINER (May)
• Soundtrack (Brian): Furia
Another sombre keyboard piece from the Furia soundtrack, ‘Diner’ lasts just over one minute and, like some of the other shorter pieces on the album, serves merely as incidental music. It’s also one of the few pieces to end with dialogue from the film.
