by Georg Purvis
There’s no denying that the song was well-suited to the live setting, which the David Mallet-directed promotional video captured perfectly. The filming took place on 25 August 1984 at the Forêt Nationale in Brussels (the band had played a date at that venue, the first on the Queen Works! European tour, but had a day off on the day of shooting), and premiered the tour’s impressive lighting rig, two mechanical cogs behind Roger and dry ice galore. The video was also interspersed with crowd shots from the previous day’s show, with the soundtrack overdubbed with the crowd screaming and clapping along.
‘Hammer To Fall’ was performed at every show between 1984 and 1986, including the Live Aid performance at Wembley Stadium on 13 July 1985, and by Extreme vocalist Gary Cherone at the Concert For Life in 1992. Brian played the song live as the last song on his Back To The Light tour, but restructured the song for the 1998 Another World tour, slowing the song down as a shimmering ballad, before kicking the tempo up for the outro. A similar arrangement was used again on the first Queen + Paul Rodgers tour in 2005 and 2006, with Brian tackling the slower first verse and chorus, and Paul taking over for the double-time remainder.
Several remixes were produced shortly after its release; the 12” mix, dubbed the Headbangers Mix, is essentially an extended remix of the track, with a pounding introductory drum solo and additional guitar work throughout. Brian Malouf remixed the song in 1991 for a Hollywood Records promotional release, giving the song a punchier mix and more prominent drum sound.
HAND OF FOOLS
(OUT OF CONTROL) (Edney/Noone)
• Album (The Cross): Blue
The penultimate track on Blue Rock is the gorgeous ‘Hand Of Fools (Out Of Control)’, addressing the topical conflict in the Gulf and pondering the eternal question of the validity and necessity of war. The line “While profit oils the big machine / And we’re shortchanged the facts” rings eerily true to this day, with the world’s dependency on oil a bane to advancing green technology. Set to a gentle bed of acoustic guitars and keyboards, the song was doomed to obscurity: it was never performed live nor featured on any single release.
HANG ON IN THERE (Queen)
• B-side: 5/89 [3] • Bonus: Miracle
Sessions for The Miracle proved to be fruitful, with the band writing songs based on collective jams while getting reacquainted with each others’ company. One of the first songs recorded during the sessions was this acoustic rocker, originally titled ‘A Fiddly Jam’, which makes up the second half of the song, but finally given the more inspirational title of ‘Hang On In There’.
Initiated by Freddie, the song hints at his own condition: by now suffering the effects of AIDS, it’s not coincidental that he was writing more positive songs in order to keep his optimism high through the dark times ahead. Why it was left off The Miracle is puzzling because it is certainly a far better track than ‘Party’ or ‘My Baby Does Me’, perhaps the worst offenders on that album. Instead, it was issued as the B-side of ‘I Want It All’ in May 1989, and also appeared as a bonus CD track on both the 1989 original issue and the 1991 reissue.
HANGMAN
One of the most sought-after Queen songs is ‘Hangman’, a track performed as a regular in the set list between 1970 and 1973, and only scarcely thereafter until 1976. Its origins remained shrouded in mystery for years until the early 1990s, when Brian confirmed in a personal letter to a collector that he wrote the music and Freddie penned the words. With a nod to Queen’s early day Led Zeppelin-inspired crunch, ‘Hangman’ was derived from that band’s 1970 rendition of Leadbelly’s ‘Gallows Pole’. The words were fluid and changed nightly, depending on Freddie’s mood, with a curious line about pork pies and cups of tea thrown in for good measure. What was consistent was Freddie’s cry of “Shag out!”, just before an instrumental jam, which bootleggers erroneously divided into another track of that name. Given the abundance of material written for the first two albums, rumors circulated that a studio version was recorded for the debut album, although the official word was that no such recording exists. It turns out that the rumors were true: a 10” acetate from the 1972 Trident sessions contains a studio recording of ‘Hangman’, though this is now in Queen Productions’ possession, and if it will ever be released is anyone’s guess.
HAPPINESS? (Taylor)
• Album (Roger): Happiness? • A-side (Roger): 11/94 [32]
The title track to Roger’s third proper solo album is, uncharacteristically for Roger, an upbeat ballad with a set of introspective and philosophical lyrics of not only the need for happiness in everyone’s life, but that the definition of happiness is based on the individual’s needs and goals. Based on a delicate piano (performed by Mike Crossley) and acoustic guitar backing, the song kicks into high gear with a soaring guitar solo from Jason Falloon, leaving Roger as the other musician on understated drums, bass and keyboards. Cleverly and beautifully arranged, ‘Happiness?’ is an early triumph, and was released as the third and final single from the album, peaking at No. 32.
A video was filmed for the single on 23 May 1994 in Vienna by the infamous Torpedo Twins, bringing to life the imagery of the album sleeve, with close-up shots of Roger’s visage set against a colorful clouded sunset. Suitably, the song was a staple in Roger’s 1994/1995 solo repertoire, but, in keeping with his desire to progress and incorporate newer material in lieu of older songs, wasn’t revisited for the 1998/1999 Electric Fire solo tour.
HAPPY HENDRIX POLKA
Credited in As It Began by Jacky Smith and Jim Jenkins as a “minor hit ... by a group called the Scandinavian Spotnik”, which Brian learned for a gig by 1984 at the Mosely Boat Club in the summer of 1966, ‘Happy Hendrix Polka’ has eluded collectors, and no information about the song or the alleged group exists anywhere.
HAPPY X-MAS (WAR IS OVER) (Lennon/Ono)
John Lennon’s 1969 single was performed live by The Cross at both Fan Club shows in December 1992 at the Marquee.
A HARD RAIN’S A-GONNA FALL (Dylan)
Bob Dylan’s 1964 folk protest song was performed live by Roger Taylor during the early part of his 1994 Happiness? tour, but was dropped in favour of ‘Man On Fire’.
HAVE A NICE DAY (Mercury/Moran)
• Compilation (Freddie): Solo Collection
On 18 April 1987, Freddie and Mike Moran were hard at work recording ‘Rachmaninov’s Revenge’ at Townhouse Studios when the vocalist took the opportunity to record a greeting for the upcoming Fan Club convention. Instead of providing a spoken greeting, he characteristically went over the top and recorded an improvised song. ‘Have A Nice Day’ (or ‘Good Times’ as it has alternately been called on bootlegs) gets the job done in its short, forty-six-second lifetime.
HEADLONG (Queen)
• Album: Innuendo • A-side: 5/91 [14]
• Live (Brian): Brixton
Rock songs were the minority on the latter-day Queen albums: though The Miracle was a welcome return to what Queen did best, it was sabotaged by of-its-time production and too much of the bland, by numbers rock explored on The Works and A Kind Of Magic. With the mission statement for Innuendo to not be a collection of songs but instead a cohesive album, ‘Headlong’ was readily accepted and provided the band with a much-needed return to form, firmly reestablishing them as a heavy rock band.
“‘Headlong’ came from me, at our studio in Montreux, a home recording studio for us that’s very state-of-the-art, lovely for creating,” Brian told Rip magazine in 1991. “The ideas came in a couple of days. At first I thought about it as a song for my solo album [Back To The Light] but, as always, the band is the best vehicle. As soon as I heard Freddie sing it, I said, ‘That’s it!’ Sometimes it’s painful to give the baby away, but what you gain is much more. It became a Queen song.”
A promotional video was shot on 23 November 1990 at Metropolis Studios, and was directed by The Torpedo Twins. Showing the band recording the song in the studio, it was interspersed with footage of the band goofing around in the control room and lying on bunk beds while sing
ing the chorus. Freddie appears very perky during the performance, leaping around the sound stage and even doing push-ups at one point – certainly not giving the impression that he was on his deathbed. The video also features a unique guitar solo from Brian, extending the running time to just under five minutes (the audio of this version hasn’t appeared anywhere on disc).
Released as the third single from Innuendo in May 1991 and backed by ‘All God’s People’ (with the previously unreleased Queen outtake ‘Mad The Swine’ as a CD-only bonus track), ‘Headlong’ peaked at No. 14 in the UK. In the US, the single was backed by ‘Under Pressure’ and issued as the lead single in January 1991, and though it didn’t appear in the Billboard Hot 100, it did reach No. 3 in their rock charts. Brian performed the song on all of his solo tours, with a version from the Back To The Light tour released on his 1994 live album, Live At The Brixton Academy.
HEARTLAND (Noone)
• German CD single (The Cross): 10/91
A terse and uncompromising track of mental and emotional abandonment, ‘Heartland’ was recorded during sessions for Blue Rock but was deemed surplus to requirements and relegated to B-side status. It’s no worse than anything else on the album and, with only ten tracks barely scraping forty-five minutes, ‘Heartland’ would have been an ideal addition. As on ‘Breakdown’, Peter once again takes the lead vocal for the first half of the song before Roger takes over, their two voices harmonizing on the chorus, the former’s nasally hum contrasting nicely with the latter’s raspy squawk. The strength of the song lies in the band’s performance, turning in a tight and remarkable effort showing instrumental maturity, with Clayton Moss especially showing little restraint on guitar.
Issued on the October 1991 CD single release of ‘Life Changes’, ‘Heartland’ deserved to be more widely heard but, out of respect for Freddie’s death the following month, ‘Life Changes’ was withdrawn from release.
HEART FULL OF SOUL (Gouldman)
This revolutionary Yardbirds track was played live by 1984 and even, apparently, by The Art.
HEAVEN FOR EVERYONE (Taylor)
• Album (The Cross): Shove • A-side (The Cross): 3/88 [83] • A-side (Queen): 10/95 [2] • Album (Queen): Heaven • Compilation (Queen): Hits3
Crystal Taylor once labelled ‘Heaven For Everyone’ as the Queen single that never was, even suggesting that Roger save the song for a Queen project. Though a version was recorded during sessions for A Kind Of Magic in 1986, possibly intended for Joan Armatrading, the song was left incomplete and the drummer instead reworked it for his 1987 solo album, Shove It. Released as that album’s third single in March 1988, it peaked at an abysmal No. 83 in the UK, despite the presence of Freddie on backing vocals.
The Cross did perform the song regularly throughout their career, but it was omitted from the set during the 1991 support tour to Magnum. The single was heavily promoted upon its release, with the band appearing on German television programmes Formel 1 on 23 April 1988 and on ZDF, around the same time, and was given further exposure when The Cross appeared at the Golden Rose festival in Montreux on 12 May 1988. A performance video, directed by Dieble and Myers, was also shot that year, with Roger languishing on a tropical beach (heaven) with a guitar as homeless people rise from beneath a decrepit building to join him, transformed from the unwashed masses to Hawaiian shirt-clad beach bums.
‘Heaven For Everyone’ was restructured by Brian, Roger and John in 1994 for inclusion on Made In Heaven. Freddie had recorded a lead vocal track for the song, which ended up on the UK release of Shove It and the German B-side of the same single, and the band took Freddie’s original vocal and recorded fresh arrangements, including a scorching guitar solo from Brian but, unfortunately, dropping the spoken bits. While a case can be argued in favor of The Cross’ original, Queen’s re-recording is vastly superior, and not only because of Freddie’s ethereal vocal performance.
Chosen as the debut single from the album and the first “new” Queen single since ‘The Show Must Go On’ four years prior, ‘Heaven For Everyone’ was released in edited form in October 1995 with a unique mix of ‘It’s A Beautiful Day’. The single reached No. 2 in the UK, Queen’s highest, new-chart entry since ‘Innuendo’ in 1991 ... and this was with an eight year-old song! David Mallet was recruited to make a film for the single; since there wasn’t any footage of Freddie singing the song, a heavy dose of creativity was used to fashion an original video combining footage from the 1902 film Le Voyage dans la lune (A Trip To The Moon) with clips of the band, to remind you that this was a Queen video. The result was met with approval from the band, and inspired the band to commission independent directors from the British Film Institute to create unique videos for all the songs from Made In Heaven. The version directed by Simon Pummell, retitled ‘Evolution’, features performance artist STELARC. This was issued on the video compilation Made In Heaven – The Films, while Mallet’s version was released on Greatest Flix III.
HELLO MARY LOU (GOODBYE HEART)
(Pitney/Manginaracina)
• Live: Wembley
First released by Ricky Nelson in 1961 as the US B-side to ‘Travelin’ Man’, but released in the UK as an A-side, ‘Hello Mary Lou (Goodbye Heart)’ is a classic relic of the innocent, pre-British Invasion rock ‘n’ roll, and was cited by Brian as a favourite single of his, not least because of the guitar solo. “And then you would find this wonderful solo in the middle of ‘Hello Mary Lou’, by Rick Nelson and that was wow, incredibly inspiring for me to find things like that,” Brian gleefully told Richard Allinson in June 1998.
No surprise, then, that Brian was the prime mover in the song’s inclusion in the set list for the 1986 Magic tour. Performed as the second song in the acoustic medley of influential 1950s and 1960s rock ‘n’ roll songs (Elvis’ ‘(You’re So Square) Baby I Don’t Care’ and Little Richard’s ‘Tutti Frutti’ were the other two songs), ‘Hello Mary Lou (Goodbye Heart)’ featured Brian on prominent vocals, almost overpowering Freddie and Roger at times. Though it lasted just over a minute in the live setting, it was pleasant enough to nearly justify the inclusion of the medley at the expense of ‘Somebody To Love’, ‘It’s A Hard Life’, or ‘Princes Of The Universe’.
HELP! (Lennon/McCartney)
This Beatles song was played live by 1984.
THE HERO (May)
• Album: Flash • Live: On Fire, Montreal • Bonus: Flash
Of the eighteen compositions released on the Flash Gordon soundtrack album, only two have a set of lyrics: ‘Flash’s Theme’, the lightweight main theme for the title character which also became the album’s sole single, and ‘The Hero’, a far superior, and more universal, track reminiscent of Queen’s heavier songs. Written by Brian, the song is essentially a vocal version of ‘Battle Theme’, constructed around film composer Howard Blake’s melody of the same-titled orchestral piece. Stuck for an end credits composition, Brian and engineer Alan Douglas created a rough demo of ‘The Hero’ out of drum machine loops, before the rest of the band joined the session to commit to tape the raucous rocker. Completed in a day, the solo was overdubbed on an unknown guitar, as The Red Special was then back in Munich, and not at the Townhouse in London. Freddie reportedly cried to Brian, “You always write me these songs which fucking kill my beautiful voice!” Hearing his powerful but strained howl on ‘The Hero’, it’s hard not to sympathize with him. An alternate take, with a slightly different vocal from Freddie, was heard during the end credits of the film, and was then released on the 2011 reissue of Flash Gordon.
‘The Hero’ was included in the set list late in the 1980 The Game European tour as part of a Flash Gordon medley. This was retained throughout 1981 in the Japanese, South American and Mexican tours, and was also played in Montreal for the ‘We Will Rock You’ video shoot but dropped prior to its release. The song then became the opening number on the 1982 Hot Space European, UK and (occasionally) Japanese tours before being dropped indefinitely.
“HEROES” (Bowie/Eno)
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br /> Instead of David Bowie tackling any other Queen tracks besides the obvious one at the 1992 Concert For Life, the chameleon rocker opted to perform two of his own songs, ‘All The Young Dudes’ and ‘“Heroes”’, backed by Brian, Roger, John, Spike Edney on keyboards, and a host of backing vocalists. On ‘“Heroes”’, Bowie’s 1977 classic is transformed into an even more powerful anthem than on its original studio recording, and is undeniably one of the best performances of the concert.
HEY MAMA (KEEP YOUR BIG MOUTH SHUT)
(McDaniel)
This little-known Bo Diddley track was performed live by The Reaction.
HIJACK MY HEART (Queen)
• B-side: 8/89 [12]
It had been nearly a decade since Roger sang lead vocals on a Queen song, but those yearning for the drummer’s raspy, high-pitched voice would be pleasantly surprised by ‘Hijack My Heart’, an outtake from The Miracle sessions issued as the B-side of ‘The Invisible Man’.
With the unspoken rule persisting throughout the 1980s albums that Freddie should be the main vocalist, it’s unsurprising that ‘Hijack My Heart’ wasn’t a serious contender for The Miracle, but it’s a shame that a concession couldn’t have been made. It’s certainly a stronger track than ‘Party’ or ‘My Baby Does Me’, and would have offered a bit of diversity, not only in the vocal department, but also in terms of lyrics: the song is very ‘Roger’, as he sings about beautiful women and fast cars. The faded outro contains some delicious funk bass lines, though a demo version which leaked out in 2006 contains some beautiful piano playing absent from the finished version.
THE HITMAN (Queen)
• Album: Innuendo • B-side: 3/91 [22]
This vicious rocker is a welcome return to such early Queen anthems as ‘Tie Your Mother Down’ and ‘Sweet Lady’, and provided Innuendo with a fresh balance of hard rock songs with the more introspective ballads. The initiator this time was Freddie, who originally wrote the song on keyboards but gave it to John, who restructured the arrangement. “[The] finished version had very little to do with the original idea,” Brian told Rip magazine in 1991. “Most of the riff came from Freddie. I wasn’t even in the room when they wrote it. I changed the key and some of the notes to make it playable on the guitar. We finished the backing track, but it seemed to ramble. John sat down and decided to reconstruct the track. He changed the order. He changed everything. I went back and played on that. Then we filled in the gaps on the lyrics, did the harmonies and generally tidied up.”
