by Georg Purvis
IN THE LAP OF THE GODS (Mercury)
• Album: SHA
Completely different from the similarly-titled conclusion of Sheer Heart Attack, ‘In The Lap Of The Gods’ starts the second side of the album off with a cacophonous introduction, complete with astounding screams from Roger, before mellowing out with a distorted lead vocal from Freddie. With an arrangement more akin to the grandiose prog-rock of Queen II, this song was the most adventurous piece on the third album, which Freddie confirmed in a December 1977 interview on BBC Radio One: “I was beginning to learn a lot on Sheer Heart Attack. We were doing a lot of things which was to be used on future albums. Songs like ‘In The Lap Of The Gods’, yes, I suppose. Working out the harmonies and song structure did help on say something like ‘Bo Rhap’. Somebody said this sounds like Cecil B. De Mille meets Walt Disney or something. More to the point than The Beach Boys!”
‘In The Lap Of The Gods’ was performed live as part of the medley between late 1974 and early 1975, but was omitted later that year in favour of newer material.
IN THE LAP OF THE GODS...Revisited (Mercury)
• Album: SHA • Live: Wembley • Bonus: SHA
This touching power ballad is a direct precursor to ‘We Are The Champions’, and became a fitting conclusion to not only Sheer Heart Attack but Queen’s live shows, starting on the tour in support of that album. Freddie takes to task his critics’ charges of delusional grandeur, who were humour-impaired even in the early 1970s, not realizing that the vocalist’s act was exactly that: “There’s no meaning in my pretending”. The crass reference to finances notwithstanding (the band’s maxim of the day was to give off the impression that they were far richer than their bank accounts would have them believe), ‘In The Lap Of The Gods...Revisited’ is a superb example of Freddie’s ability to craft an anthem, even when he’s on the defensive.
By the time ‘We Are The Champions’ became a hit single, ‘In The Lap Of The Gods... Revisited’ was deemed obsolete, and dropped from the set list, only to return in 1986 at Brian’s insistence that the repertoire needed more light and shade.
IN THE SPACE CAPSULE
(THE LOVE THEME) (Taylor)
• Album: Flash
Written by Roger for the Flash Gordon album, this composition features John on Telecaster guitar and Roger on synthesizer and timpani. Written to accompany Flash’s ascent to Ming’s palace, the song also includes appropriate dialogue leading into Freddie’s ‘Ming’s Theme (In The Court Of Ming The Merciless)’.
INNUENDO (Queen)
• A-side: 1/91 [1] • Album: Innuendo
Going by its title alone, ‘Innuendo’ promises to be a grandiose epic, unlike anything Queen had done before and guaranteeing an exploration of musical territories not previously navigated. But by 1991, did Queen really need to reinvent themselves? Was it necessary to go into uncharted areas of music? They had done it all before – it would have been easier to just stick with the pop-rock excursions from their albums of the 1980s.
In fact, the band had been channelling their separate creative energies into solo projects throughout the 1980s, and while Queen’s albums all had been commercially successful, from a creative standpoint, they were unchallenging, by-numbers radio-friendly material, with the occasional diversion thrown in for good measure. Compare the worst of Barcelona to the worst of A Kind Of Magic or The Miracle, and the result is staggering: Freddie was invigorated enough to experiment with an unconventional (to average rock enthusiasts) genre, and yet appeared complacent with his own contributions to the mid-1980s albums. Shaken of their ennui, and jolted back into action by the vocalist’s ailing health, the band knew they were running out of time and made a conscious decision to abandon the trends of the day and deliver an album that could stand up against their earlier albums.
While some songs were carefully calculated, others were spontaneous and developed through jamming, such is the case of the title track: during a jam session at Mountain Studios between Brian, Roger and John, Freddie, perched in the control booth with producer David Richards, suddenly felt inspired and rushed into the studio to take part, improvising lyrics as quickly as he could. With the basic germ of an idea in hand, the song was then fleshed out, with Roger taking control of the lyrics as Freddie became the arranger. “It was a group collaboration, but I wrote the lyrics,” Roger explained in 2002, while Brian told Guitarist magazine in 1994 that the song “started off as most things do, with us just messing around and finding a groove that sounded nice. All of us worked on the arrangement. Freddie started off the theme of the words as he was singing along, then Roger worked on the rest of them. I worked on some of the arrangement, particularly the middle bit, then there was an extra part that Freddie did for the middle as well. It basically came together like a jigsaw puzzle.”
“It’s got the bolero-type rhythm, a very strange track,” Brian said in a 1991 interview with Guitar World. “That’s going to be the first single here. It’s a bit of a risk, but it’s different, and you either win it all or you lose it all. It had a nice sound and feel, and we stuck with that. The Spanish motif is suggested from the start: those little riffs at the beginning are sort of Bolero-esque. It seemed like the natural thing to explore those ideas on an acoustic guitar, and it just gradually evolved. Steve Howe helped out and did a fantastic job. We love all that stuff – it’s like a little fantasy land adventure.”
Yes guitarist Steve Howe was in Mountain Studios, producing Paul Sutin’s Voyagers album, while Queen were recording the track, and ran into Martin Groves, who had worked with Yes in the past and was now Queen’s equipment supervisor. Freddie recognized Steve in the hallways and invited him to listen, before Brian asked him to contribute some flamenco guitar to the track. “They played me ‘Innuendo’ and I go, ‘Yeah, heavy metal flamenco!’” Steve recalled on his website. “And then Brian says, ‘Look, I’d like you to play on this,’ and I said, ‘You’re joking, it sounds great, leave it like it is,’ and he said, ‘No no no, I want you to play on it, I want you to play really fast, I want you to run around the guitar a lot.’ So I got up and running, we did a few takes, we edited it a little bit, we fixed up a few things, then we went and had dinner. So we went back to the studio and they said we really really like this and I said fine, let’s go with it. So I left very happy ... A funny thing happened a little while later, I was on a ferry going to Holland and on this ferry, which takes a long time, five hours, were the Queen Fan Club, all going to Rotterdam to a Queen event, and a couple of them saw me and they came racing over and they said, ‘You’re Steve Howe! You’re on ‘Innuendo’!’ ... My memories of Queen will always be emotional because they were a great band and it was just great, it really was a thrill to be part of that, and thanks for asking me.”
“‘Innuendo’ was an improvisation type song where they actually recorded it here in the big concert hall ... and we set up like a live performance,” David Richards said in 2001, “and they just started playing, and sort of got into a nice rhythm and a groove, and some chords and then Freddie said, ‘Oh, I like that,’ and rushed downstairs into the concert hall and started singing along with it. Obviously then, once that initial idea was down on tape, then there was a lot of rearranging and putting extra things on, but the actual beginning of it was like a live thing. It just happened. It was wonderful. [Freddie] played a strong role in the writing of [‘Innuendo’]. Steve just happened to drop in one day to say hello to me. He had been recording at Mountain some ten years before with the group Yes [Going For The One, 1977]. As soon as he popped his head round the door Freddie recognized him and said, ‘Come on in and play some guitar!’ He had no guitar with him so he used Brian’s Dan Armstrong acoustic guitar with a direct output and tone control. Brian played the rhythm guitar and then echoed the solo afterwards on the Red Special.”
The song was deservedly issued as the first single from Innuendo in January 1991, when it received mixed reviews but crashed into the charts at No. 1, albeit for only a week, thus bec
oming Queen’s third No. 1 single in their career. Backed with ‘Bijou’, the single was expectedly compared to ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, but broke Queen’s previous record of scoring a No. 1 single with a song lasting just under six minutes: ‘Innuendo’ clocked in at 6’31, thus becoming Queen’s longest number one single ever. Though it shouldn’t be considered as such, an extended version of the single appeared on 12” and CD versions: adding on a mere seventeen seconds, the song ends not as a fade-out, but with an explosion that swells into an ultimate full-force gale (appropriately, this was dubbed the ‘Explosive Version’).
“I think ‘Innuendo’ was one of those things which could either be big – or nothing,” Brian told Vox in 1991. “We had the same feelings about ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. It’s a risk, because a lot of people say, ‘It’s too long, it’s too involved, and we don’t want to play it on the radio.’ I think that could be a problem in which case it will die. Or it could happen that people say, ‘This is interesting and new and different and we’ll take a chance’.” Roger agreed with Brian’s sentiment, saying in Rip magazine, “Big, long and pretentious! It goes through a lot of changes.”
A video was assembled for the single in November 1990, but since the band were still working on the album, and a regular performance video wasn’t considered good enough for the single, the band drafted The Torpedo Twins and Disney animator Jerry Hibbert to construct a video using animation and claymation, innovative for its time and even winning an award for best video of 1991. The video uses pre-existing photos of the band, redrawn in the style of different artists: Freddie was modelled after Leonardo da Vinci; John after Pablo Picasso; Roger after Jackson Pollock; and Brian after old Victorian etchings. Unfortunately, the video hasn’t been widely seen since it has yet to be released on the Greatest Video Hits collection, with the third instalment still unrealised.
The only live airing the song received was at the Concert For Life on 20 April 1992, with ex-Led Zeppelin vocalist Robert Plant singing lead vocals. (“Freddie had told me that they wrote the lyrics as a tribute to Led Zeppelin,” Plant said in 2002.) The result is far from inspired, with Plant apparently absent from rehearsals the day he was supposed to learn the lyrics, but acknowledged the nod to Led Zeppelin’s similar-sounding ‘Kashmir’ by throwing in a verse from that song. Because of his sub-par performance, Plant asked that the song not be included on the 1993 VHS and 2003 DVD releases.
INSTRUMENTAL INFERNO: see IMPROMPTU
INTERLUDE IN CONSTANTINOPLE (Taylor)
• Album (Roger): Fun
This short musical link on the second side of Roger’s Fun In Space, placed between ‘Magic Is Loose’ and ‘Airheads’, would have fit in perfectly on Flash Gordon with its opening synthesizer drone and anthemic motif. The sound effects – a knock on a door, the sound of a glass breaking, a man belching, a crowd cheering and footsteps up and down a hallway – conjur up images of an intergalactic rock concert, with the flatulent rock star being introduced on stage by an overexcited emcee: “Good evening, Constantinople! The best audience in the world we’ve been told!” The song made for an appropriate taped introduction to Roger’s 1999 Electric Fire UK tour.
INVINCIBLE HOPE (Queen/Mandela)
• Live: 46664 • Download: 1/05
Credited to Queen and Nelson Mandela, ‘Invincible Hope’ was written by Roger for the 46664 project and was performed at the Cape Town concert on 29 November 2003 as a short snippet after Mandela’s speech. The superior studio version, recorded in March 2003 in Cape Town, South Africa, features Treanna Morris and Roger sharing lead vocals, with Nelson Mandela providing inspirational quotes throughout. Sounding like something from his Happiness? or Electric Fire albums, ‘Invincible Hope’ tackles the AIDS issue with a typical message imploring the impoverished and downtrodden to remain positive in the face of adversity.
The song was remixed slightly and released as part of an internet-only download EP on the iTunes music store. Titled 46664: 1 Year On and released in January 2005, ‘Invincible Hope’ was the lead-off track of the release, which also featured ‘Whole Life’ by Paul McCartney and Dave Stewart, ‘People’ by Jimmy Cliff featuring Sting and Tony Rebel, and ‘Freedom’s Coming’ by Da Universal Playaz. This EP marked the first official release of Brian’s and Roger’s contributions to the 46664 project.
THE INVISIBLE MAN (Queen)
• Album: Miracle • A-side: 8/89 [12] • Bonus: Miracle
Inspired by H. G. Wells’ novel of the same name, this slick disco rocker, with more than a passing resemblance to Huey Lewis and The News’ ‘I Want A New Drug’ (and with lyrics reminiscent of Ray Parker Jr’s ‘Ghostbusters’), brought back horrific memories of the Hot Space debacle, but the fusion of synthesized and real instruments by 1989 was more authentic, and the finished song isn’t as bad as it could have been. “I’m to blame for that one, sort of,” Roger said in a 1989 BBC Radio One interview with Mike Read, “but then everybody came in, and that went through quite a few changes due to everybody else putting in different bits and restructuring it, etc., etc. I don’t quite remember where the idea did come from. I think it came from a book I was reading, and it just seemed to fit in with a rhythmic pattern I had in mind and it sort of came from nowhere.”
The lyrics are painfully simplistic (rhyming “head” with “bed”), and one of the more interesting lines (“Was it the shyness of my soul that made me lonely just like you? / No one noticed I was there, when I walked into the room”), though present on the demo with a more pronounced synthesizer backing, was inexplicably excised on the final version. For the first (and only) time in a Queen song, each band member is mentioned by name just before their respective instrumental solos, with Brian’s contribution being a masterful and downright superhuman guitar solo. Virtuosos and bedroom air guitarists alike, eat yer hearts out.
Released as the third single from The Miracle in August 1989, a video was directed by Rudi Dolezal and Hannes Rossacher at Pinewood Studios on 26 July 1989 – Roger’s fortieth birthday, thus explaining Freddie’s ludicrous sunglasses, necessary amidst the copious amounts of alcohol and bright lights. The band appear as characters in a computer game called The Invisible Man, and during one gaming session the young lad presses the wrong button, and the band are transferred from screen to real life, wreaking havoc on the boy’s bedroom. The actress portaying the teenage daughter is Daniella Westbrook, familiar to fans of EastEnders as Sam Mitchell.
A 12” mix was constructed, with a unique introduction of synthesized flute and bringing the running time to just under six minutes. This mix was also issued as a bonus track on the 1989 CD version (and 1991 US reissue).
IS IT ME? (Taylor)
• Album (Roger): Electric
Like most other songs on Electric Fire, the subject matter of ‘Is It Me?’ is of romantic discord, but while it’s addressed violently on ‘Surrender’, here it’s the typical disagreements that lovers endure at any stage in a relationship. Structurally similar to ‘Breakthru’, with a slow, piano-based introduction giving way to an upbeat body, the song is yet another in a long line of songs that Roger felt needed a horrid “singing down the telephone” effect implemented on his voice, ruining an otherwise pleasant and lovely song. An alternate version, which extended the running time by a minute, was present on the CD master, but ultimately withdrawn and remains unheard.
IS THIS THE WORLD WE CREATED...?
(Mercury/May)
• Album: Works • B-side: 7/84 [6] • Live: Magic, Wembley, 46664
“We were looking at all the songs we had and we just thought the one thing we didn’t have was one of those ‘Love Of My Life’ type of things,” Freddie told Rudi Dolezal in 1984. “That song just evolved in about two days; [Brian] just got on acoustic and I just sat next to him, we just worked it together. I came up with the lyrical side and then he came up with the chords, and something just happened...” Written late in 1983 during sessions for The Works as a replacement for ‘There Must Be More To Life Than This’
, ‘Is This The World We Created...?’ is one of Queen’s simplest songs, with only acoustic guitar and Freddie’s single-tracked baritone serving as its structure. (Additional piano, following Freddie’s vocal melody, was recorded but later wiped.) Because of the minimalist approach to the arrangement, the impact of the potent lyrics of a first-world rock star viewing the injustices inflicted upon an impoverished Africa is heavy, dealing a blow to the heartstrings as the bemused performer ponders what kind of deity would allow His people to suffer so horrifically.
‘Is This The World We Created...?’ was performed alongside ‘Love Of My Life’ during the acoustic set between 1984 and 1986, and was also performed at Live Aid on 13 July 1985, separate from Queen’s appearance: at approximately 9.44 pm, Brian and Freddie came back on stage and performed the song to rapturous applause. Brian revisited the song at the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund concert in October 2002, and played the song with Andrea Corr on vocals at the 46664 concert on 29 November 2003.
IT’S A BEAUTIFUL DAY (Queen)
• CD Single: 10/95 [2] • Album: Heaven • Bonus: Game
Opening Made In Heaven is this atmospheric piece, first recorded as ‘Beautiful Day’ in April 1980 by Freddie doodling around on piano and singing a snatch of uplifting, optimistic lyrics. This improvisation was discovered while trawling the archives for material for Made In Heaven, and John fleshed it out into a full song by orchestrating a lovely keyboard segment, before Brian added some tasteful guitar work. The original “spontaneous idea” was finally released on the 2011 reissue of The Game.
An interesting yet marginally different version was issued on the ‘Heaven For Everyone’ CD single in October 1995, which is an amalgamation of this version and the reprise. More significantly, the song was remixed in 2005 by Ross Robertson and Russian DJ Koma, incorporating bits from all permutations of the song: the original, the reprise, the single version, and the 1998 eYe remix. Queen Productions was so impressed with this mix that it was sanctioned as an official release and sold on iTunes, as well as being used as the taped intro music to the Queen + Paul Rodgers world tour of 2005 and 2006.
