Queen: The Complete Works

by Georg Purvis

  LOVE OF MY LIFE (Mercury)

  • Album: Opera • A-side: 6/79 [63] • Live: Killers, Wembley, On Fire, Montreal • Live (Brian): Brixton • Live (Q+PR): Return, Ukraine • Bonus: Opera

  There are many highlights on A Night At The Opera, but none is quite as perfect as Freddie’s ‘Love Of My Life’. Blending nicely with the outro from ‘The Prophets Song’, the track is a mournful ballad that many sources have indicated was written about Mary Austin, Freddie’s longtime companion and girlfriend between 1970 and 1977. In several of Freddie’s early songs, the underlying message indicated that he was emotionally confused, which Brian suggested was the inspiration for ‘Lily Of The Valley’; if so, then ‘Love Of My Life’ can be seen as a poignant romantic send-off to Mary. Indeed, Freddie maintained that Mary was the love of his life, and the two remained best friends until his death in 1991, with the bulk of his estate bequeathed to her.

  The band turn in a gorgeous, understated performance, with bass and percussion flourishes from John and Roger. The song’s main focus is not only Freddie’s classical piano, but the orchestral harp that accentuates Freddie’s more dominating instrument. “There’s also a lovely little ballad; my classical influence comes into it,” Freddie explained to the New Musical Express in September 1975, well before the album was finished. “Brian is going to attempt to use harp, real life-size harp. I’m going to force him to play till his fingers drop off.”

  “I did it chord by chord,” Brian told Guitar Player in 1983. “Actually, it took longer to tune the thing than to play it. It was a nightmare because every time someone opened the door, the temperature would change and the whole thing would go out. I would hate to have to play a harp on stage. I just figured out how it worked – the pedals and everything – and did it bit by bit.”

  The song became a live favourite over the years, and was reworked as a duet between Freddie and Brian. “It’s adapted on stage for guitar,” the vocalist told Melody Maker in 1981, “but it was written on the piano. I’ve totally forgotten the original and if you asked me to play that now, I couldn’t. Sometimes, I have to go back to the music sheet, and I can’t read that well either.” The song was introduced on the 1977 News Of The World tour and remained an integral part of the acoustic segment until Queen’s last tour in 1986, though it was omitted for the 1982 Rock ‘n’ America tour. While the legend remains that the song was a natural for audiences to sing along to from its first performance, audience recordings indicate that this wasn’t so; it wouldn’t be until 1978 that UK audiences would participate, and it was on the 1979 Jazz European tour that the tradition really took off, hence its belated single release. The song was brought out of mothballs for Brian’s 1992/1993 Back To The Light tour, and was performed as a tribute to the recently deceased Freddie. The reception made it almost impossible to remove from the set, and so it remained on the 1998 Another World tour, and again on the 2005/2006 and 2008 Queen + Paul Rodgers tours, with Brian once again leading the audience in a touching duet.

  A live recording from Live Killers was released as a UK single in June 1979, where it became the poorest-selling single in Queen’s history, peaking at a dismal No. 63. The song struck quite a chord in South America, and it was only after the single was in the charts there for over a year that Queen finally took notice and booked a tour there in February 1981. “There are certain songs which are more popular in different countries,” Roger said in 1991, “and we used to vary the songs that we played. For instance, in South America, there was a song that was a major hit, called ‘Love Of My Life’, which was never a hit anywhere else. So we’d always include that, and that became a major part of the show there.”

  LOVE ON A TIGHTROPE (LIKE AN ANIMAL) (Taylor)

  • Album (The Cross): Shove

  Dominated entirely by trick-shot drum effects, percolating sequencers, cheesy synthesizer effects and lacklustre lyrics, ‘Love On A Tightrope (Like An Animal)’ is a good example of what’s wrong with Shove It, in danger of being overcome by its own arrangement. Programming, when used properly, can achieve beautiful results; this is not one of them.

  For reasons known to no one, the song was issued on a promotional disc, along with one track each from Phil Collins, China Crisis and Donny Osmond (of all people). The song was performed live by The Cross in 1988, and, with a slightly refined arrangement, became a halfway decent song – but not enough to save its reputation.

  LOVE TOKEN (May)

  • Album (Brian): BTTL • B-side (Brian): 6/93 [23] • Live (Brian): Brixton

  Despite being one of the more upbeat rockers on Back To The Light, it would be in the listener’s best interest not to pay too much attention to the lyrics. Relating the tale of a son watching his parents’ marriage dissolve (a method of dealing with his own marital strife with wife Chrissy), the words border on the embarrassing, with Brian using questionable euphemisms and metaphors that would have benefited from some careful editing. Perhaps the most humorous moment comes about two and a half minutes in, when Brian takes on the roles of both mother and father in the middle of a ‘colourful’ fight. In keeping with his quieter demeanour, what could have been an interesting diversion was cleaned up for general release, though an early vocal track, included on a promotional disc for RCD Magazine, gets a little dirtier: “Meat for brains” becomes “Shit for brains”, and “That’s a shame” becomes a blunt “Fuck you”.

  Beyond the lyrics, though, ‘Love Token’ is a well-constructed track, with Cozy Powell the dominant force – his thunderous drums give the song its catchy rhythm, while Brian merely focuses on the rhythm until he delivers a scorching guitar solo after the fight. The song concludes with some bluesy piano from Mike Moran before leading into ‘Resurrection’.

  The song was performed live on the Back To The Light tour, usually after ‘Back To The Light’ (on the 1992 leg) or ‘Tie Your Mother Down’ (during the first part of 1993), before becoming an abridged intro to ‘Headlong’, as evident on the live album Live At The Brixton Academy. The song was slightly edited for release as the B-side of ‘Resurrection’ in June 1993, fading out just before the extended piano outro kicked in.

  LOVER: see LIAR

  LUCILLE (Richard)

  • Live (The Cross): Bootleg

  Little Richard’s 1957 single was played by the band as an encore number at Earl’s Court on 7 June 1977. The song was reprised by The Cross on their 1990 tour, with a live version on the Fan Club-only release The Official Bootleg.

  MACBETH

  In the spring of 1990, Brian was approached by theatre director Jane L’Epine Smith, who was about to undertake a stage production of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Keen to bring a younger crowd to the shows by adding music, she wanted a contemporary composer to record incidental music for the production. Brian agreed and promptly set about laying down some ideas on a computer at his newly installed home studio, Allerton Hill. Those tracks were later copied onto a cassette to be played over the PA system during live performances. Three different versions exist: the floppy disk version, the cassette version, and a ‘live’ version of the music being performed over the PA.

  In all, the performance is interesting though somewhat tedious, and becomes downright vexing at times, which Brian addressed at the time: “I’m very aware that the music could be irritating if not done well, and that a lot of people might feel that rock does not fit in with Shakespeare. But [he] was into making direct contact with his audience, the way Queen has always done.” The music is worth listening to since it is adventurous, but the listener would need to have a high tolerance for computerized music in order to actively appreciate it.

  MACHINES (OR ‘BACK TO HUMANS’) (May/Taylor)

  • Album: Works • B-side: 4/84 [3] • CD Single: 11/88

  As Brian explained of The Works in 1984, “A lot of the new album is a synthesis of the two kinds, almost a battle between machines and humans.” On no other track is this more evident than on ‘Machines (Or ‘Back To Humans’)’ – originally
titled ‘Machine’s World’ – the second collaborative effort between Brian and Roger, and certainly their most successful. “It’s a subject that’s been much sort of tried, but I mean it’s a sort of obvious thing,” Roger told Jim Ladd in 1984. “Brian wanted to make it a battle between the human side by using the real drums and guitars, etc., and a totally synthetic side – the machines, you know; the drum machines and the synthesizers and the Fairlights. So the thing is meant to be a battle between the two, with the idea of basically going back to humans.”

  Roger was the prime mover behind the song, with the basic construct reminiscent of ‘Radio Ga Ga’, and both ‘I Cry For You (Love, Hope And Confusion)’ and ‘Killing Time’ from his Strange Frontier album. The drummer tended to embrace technology more freely than the others, and the song is largely his (including several questionable lyrics: “It’s self-perpetuating a parahumanoidarianised”), though the song was heavily worked on by Brian, with the guitarist adding his own touches and constructing the song into something tangible. Whereas a lot of Strange Frontier rambles and loses focus, the tight focus on Roger’s songs on this album indicates that he was coming up with worthwhile ideas, but with just a little bit of assistance, those ideas became great songs. Despite its reputation as an of-its-time song, ‘Machines (Or “Back To Humans”)’ is one of the few experimental songs on an album where Queen was playing it safe after the horrifying reception to Hot Space.

  A superb instrumental version, mixed by Brian for the occasion, was issued as the B-side of the American release of ‘I Want To Break Free’ (other countries got the standard album version), incorporating instrumental bits from ‘Ogre Battle’ and ‘Flash’, plus parts of Freddie’s vocal from the 1972 recording of ‘Goin’ Back’. This unique mix was issued on the long-deleted UK-only 12” Collection companion disc as part of the 1992 Box Of Tricks, and should have been an obvious candidate for inclusion on The Singles Collection – Volume 2, but so far eludes any further release. The song was used as an intro for the 1984 and 1985 Queen Works! tours, and formed the basis for a synthesizer-dominated improvisational jam before Brian’s solo, but the song was never performed live in its entirety.

  MAD THE SWINE (Mercury)

  • CD Single: 5/91 [14] • Bonus: Queen

  Discovered when Hollywood Records archivists raided Queen’s vaults in search of bonus tracks for the impending US CD reissues, Freddie’s ‘Mad The Swine’ was recorded during sessions for the debut album in 1972, and was preliminarily placed between ‘Great King Rat’ and ‘My Fairy King’ before it was removed for reasons that have been hotly debated for years. The official reason is that there were disputes between band and producer over the drum sound and additional percussion, but an equally plausible counter-argument may be that it was a tad too religious for everyone’s liking, and, with an album already chock-full of songs with religious overtones (‘Great King Rat’, ‘Liar’ and ‘Jesus’), this was one song too many. Despite a superb band performance and the sweetly-sung lyrics, with Freddie already showing signs of the power his voice could possess, the song was cast aside. Upon its discovery, the song was remixed by David Richards and duly released on the CD single of ‘Headlong’ in May 1991, and then as a bonus track on Queen that same year – and again a decade later, on the deluxe edition of the debut album.

  MADE IN HEAVEN (Mercury)

  • Album (Freddie): BadGuy • A-side (Freddie): 7/85 [57] • Album (Queen): Heaven

  This centrepiece of Freddie’s debut solo album is a terse, doom-laden ballad, with moments of light and shade that sits at odds with the rest of the dance-oriented material on Mr Bad Guy. The song is more heartfelt and profound than the more frivolous songs, with Freddie accepting his natural-born status as a true romantic, despite the pain and misery it brings upon him. Released as the second single from the album with ‘She Blows Hot And Cold’ as the B-side, and an extended remix of the A-side on 12” vinyl versions, ‘Made In Heaven’ peaked at a disappointing No. 57 in the UK. The video is more well-known for displaying the extravagance Freddie was willing to expend on his solo career. Set in a north London warehouse to replicate the stage of The London Opera House, it was based on Stravinsky’s The Rite Of Spring and Dante’s Inferno. According to David Mallet, who directed the video in July 1985, “This was in the days before major special effects, so Freddie really was standing up there, and in fact he was very unhappy about it. He was standing on a disc about five feet round, and sixty feet up in the air. In the end, we put a harness on him; a very thin wire, because it became very obvious that he was getting serious vertigo up there.”

  Much like Queen’s reworking of ‘I Was Born To Love You’, ‘Made In Heaven’ was rescued from Freddie’s 1985 solo album, Mr Bad Guy, and drastically reworked to give it a genuine Queen treatment. Brian’s goal with Made In Heaven was to make it sound as if the band had actually recorded all the songs together in the studio, which, at this late stage in their career, was hardly the case. He achieved that effect most successfully with this song, and so pleased were John, Roger and Brian with the results that it became a fitting title for their final album. The song explodes into life with Roger’s thundering drums and then takes on a menacing pace, adding a sense of atmosphere with the introduction of keyboards and effects, the like of which wouldn’t have been an option back in 1985. The finest moment comes with the guitar solo. Brian redeemed several mediocre Queen tracks with his trademark Red Special, but he gives one of his most emotive performances here with a haunting slide guitar solo, a technique he used very rarely but to good effect, transcending the song to new emotional heights. In 2004, Brian wrote on his website that he was pleased with the album as a whole, but he was proudest of the title track, “which I think is possibly the best-sounding Queen song ever.”

  Though not released as a single, Virgin Radio ran a promotional campaign on 25 November 1996 in which all the songs from Made In Heaven were pressed as promotional singles. To commemorate the fifth anniversary of Freddie’s death, Virgin Radio held a ‘Queen Day’ and ran a competition by asking fans to call in and nominate their favourite track from the new album. One random caller per hour, for twelve hours, was selected to receive a 12” copy of their chosen song, thus making these among the rarest Queen singles ever. Unfortunately, the one caller who asked for ‘Made In Heaven’ was given a misprint of ‘Heaven For Everyone’; EMI had printed five copies of Roger’s song and none of Freddie’s, so ‘The Magnificent Seven’, as these discs (‘Heaven For Everyone’ [VIRGIN2], ‘A Winter’s Tale’ [VIRGIN3], ‘Mother Love’ [VIRGIN4], ‘Let Me Live’ [VIRGIN5], ‘You Don’t Fool Me’ [VIRGIN6], ‘It’s A Beautiful Day’ [VIRGIN7] and ‘I Was Born To Love You’ [VIRGIN8]) were collectively known, came and went without the standout title track.

  MAGIC IS LOOSE (Taylor)

  • Album (Roger): Fun

  Buried deep on side two of Fun In Space is this lovely gem of a song, a prime example of the light and shade methodology that Queen employed on their early albums. With a sparse introduction of glockenspiel and Roger’s disembodied vocals, the song kicks into high gear with a ringing acoustic guitar melody and an upbeat backing of a thunderous drum beat and a quivering, swirling synthesizer. Magic would be a recurring theme throughout Roger’s subsequent songs, and it would remain an intangible, inexplicable thing in almost all cases; what the magic is referring to here is anyone’s guess. Even Roger seems unsure himself.

  Unfounded rumours persist that the song was originally submitted during sessions for The Game in 1980, and that Freddie was particularly keen on the song, but it remained unreleased – or very possibly unrecorded. A sad but understandable loss: Roger was proving to be a prolific writer at the end of the 1970s, and it was inevitable that certain songs, no matter how high their calibre, would be tossed away in favour of other songs. While this would have made a superb Queen song, their loss was Roger’s gain, and made Fun In Space that much stronger a debut solo album.

  The song received its first-ever live airi
ng on 19 February 2000, at a gig by the SAS Band (fronted by former Queen and The Cross keyboardist, Spike Edney) at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire in London.

  MAN MADE PARADISE (Mercury)

  • Album (Freddie): BadGuy

  Not one of the better tracks from Mr Bad Guy, ‘Man Made Paradise’ was first worked on by Queen in 1982 for Hot Space, and then became an even likelier candidate for release on The Works, even appearing as the closing track on an early running list of the album. Queen’s version has been promised on the eventual release of their archival box set, though it’s hardly likely to deviate much from the officially released version. As it is, the song – originally titled ‘Paradise For Man’ (“or something”, as Freddie scribbled on the handwritten lyric sheet) – sounds much like an unreleased Queen song, with Paul Vincent providing a solo reminiscent of Brian May, who later expressed annoyance that Freddie had instructed Paul to perform the solo in his style. Closing with some impressive a cappella vocalizations from Freddie, the song isn’t a highlight of the album, but fits in nicely with the other dance-oriented material.

  MAN ON FIRE (Taylor)

  • A-side (Roger): 6/84 [66] • Album (Roger): Frontier • German CD single (The Cross): 11/90 • Live (The Cross): Bootleg, Germany • German CD single (The Cross): 8/91

  Most of Strange Frontier was mired in sociopolitical posturing, undoubtedly well-intentioned at the time, but for fans used to the usually apolitical Queen, Roger’s second solo album was off-putting at first. There are certain songs that balance out the politics, though, and ‘Man On Fire’ finds Roger back on familiar ground: written about a downtrodden, unemployed man searching for a solution to his financial strife, the song strikes a romantic, poignant tone in the bridge, where the narrator reveals the power of love is his main motivator.