by Georg Purvis
Although the full version was released in the UK, the single was not even considered for the hit parade in America, though that country did receive a unique edit of the song for the 1992 compilation Classic Queen, in which there are numerous edits, including the superfluous rock coda, making for a more concise and leaner listen.
A video was made for the single at Elstree Studios on 23 November 1989, directed by The Torpedo Twins yet again. Based on a concept by Freddie, the video shows four young look-alikes performing the song in Queen’s stead, with the star of the show, Ross McCall (who would later star in the US mini-series Band of Brothers), portraying an energetic Freddie, and perfecting his every move to such an extent that, when the band do appear at the start of the rock coda, Freddie himself was copying the copyist. “He certainly could strut,” Roger said of young McCall, while Brian elaborated further on the video: “This was a joy to make because of the kids, who put so much talent and effort into being us. We were knocked out by how great they were. We had such a laugh doing it, we were just smiling the whole time.”
MISFIRE (Deacon)
• Album: SHA
Clocking in at less than two minutes, ‘Misfire’ holds the distinction of being John’s first composition for Queen. Although the words are ambiguous, and may contain a thinly veiled reference to sex – or perhaps, just as graphically, equating love to Russian roulette – it’s set to an upbeat Caribbean backing (thus its original title, ‘Banana Blues’) that would set the pattern for many of John’s chart-friendly compositions through the years.
Written and recorded during the Sheer Heart Attack sessions, the song features its author on almost all guitars, suggesting that Brian was too ill to record any of the guitar parts except for a tasteful solo that concludes the song. ‘Misfire’ was never performed live.
MR BAD GUY (Mercury)
• Album (Freddie): BadGuy • Compilations (Freddie):
Pretender, FM Album, The Solo Collection
This self-deprecating, tongue-in-cheek title track to Freddie’s debut solo album is a gloriously ambitious song, with the vocalist making light of his perceived tough guy image with an invitation to chase rainbows and trip on his ecstasy. While it revelled in the bombast of his earlier compositions, it made use of an element Freddie had wanted to do for a while: live orchestrations. “There are a lot of musical territories I wanted to explore,” Freddie told Record Mirror in 1984, “which I really couldn’t do with Queen. I wanted to cover such things as reggae rhythms and I’ve done a couple of tracks with an orchestra. It will have a very rich sound.”
In 1992, Brian Malouf remixed the song and, considering some of the remixes he had done for Queen in the past – ‘Fat Bottomed Girls’ and the Headbangers mix of ‘Hammer To Fall’ – it comes as no surprise that the song was completely restructured and given a more rock sound, unfortunately mixing the orchestration into the background. The main riff is instead played on guitar, and sounds like something that Queen would have turned the song into, especially if Brian were given the chance. While it’s not as strong as the original, the remix is definitely worth a listen.
An earlier version, recorded in May 1984 at Musicland Studios, was released on The Solo Collection, and finds Freddie using alternate lines that would be omitted from the final version. (One further early version, subtitled the “Bad Circulation mix”, was released on Lover Of Life, Singer Of Songs: The Very Best Of Freddie Mercury, and is largely redundant except for a completely new first verse and the replacement of “bad communication” with – you guessed it – “bad circulation”.) An instrumental version was also released on the box set, exposing the intricate orchestrations by Rainer Pietsch, as well as some previously obscured French horn arrangements during the choruses. A snippet of the orchestral outtakes was also issued, though it’s hardly essential listening.
MR TAMBOURINE MAN (Dylan)
First recorded by Bob Dylan on his 1965 Bringing It All Back Home album, ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ was performed by The Cross at the Gosport Festival on 30 July 1992 and later at the 1992 Christmas shows for the Fan Club.
MODERN TIMES ROCK ‘n’ ROLL (Taylor)
• Album: Queen • Compilation: BBC
Noted by Rolling Stone in a December 1973 review of Queen as “remarkably reminiscent of ‘Communication Breakdown’”, Roger’s first contribution to the Queen canon gave little indication of what he would eventually write in years to come, but, for what it is, ‘Modern Times Rock ‘n’ Roll’ is an enjoyable, though lightweight, composition heralding the arrival of a new kind of rock sound. It wasn’t ‘Roll Over Beethoven’, but it carried a similar message.
Set to a frantic backing track, Roger takes the lead in his first-ever vocal performance on record. The song would normally feature as an encore number with Freddie singing instead of Roger, generally as the show closer (until ‘In The Lap Of The Gods... Revisited’ became the conclusion in late 1974), between 1972 and 1975.
Two BBC recordings exist. The first, from 3 December 1973, is a fairly straightforward rendition of the song, with Roger’s added line, “It’s not that I’m bright, just happy-go-lucky”, distinguishing it from the original. The second was recorded on 3 April the following year, and was slowed down and extended to nearly three minutes, featuring some fun vocal interplay between Roger and Freddie, and the addition of a slide whistle. The first version was issued on Queen At The Beeb in the UK in 1989 (the US issue, Queen At The BBC, didn’t come out until 1995), while the second version has yet to be released.
MONEY (THAT’S WHAT I WANT) (Berry/Gordy)
First recorded by Barrett Strong in 1959 and later covered by The Beatles on their second album, With The Beatles, ‘Money (That’s What I Want)’ was performed live by The Cross at the Gosport Festival on 30 July 1992.
MONEY CAN’T BUY HAPPINESS (Mercury)
• Compilation (Freddie): Solo Collection
An upbeat, reggae-inspired lament about the evils of money, ‘Money Can’t Buy Happiness’ was recorded on 10 February 1984 at Musicland Studios and was, at one point, shortlisted for inclusion on Mr Bad Guy, but remained uncompleted. Featuring little additional instrumentation other than a drum-machine and occasional synthesizer blasts, the song would have been a terrific addition to the album had it been finished; as it was, it remained in the vaults until the release of The Solo Collection in 2000.
MONY MONY (Bloom/Cordell/Gentry/James)
Originally performed by Tommy James and the Shondells, ‘Mony Mony’ was later covered to greater success by Billy Idol, though it was also performed live by Smile in 1969.
MORE OF THAT JAZZ (Taylor)
• Album: Jazz
The second of Roger’s contributions to Jazz wasn’t much better than ‘Fun It’, suffering from a plodding, knee-jerk rhythm and boring, uninspiring lyrics about being ... bored and uninspired. Paeans to ennui are rarely successful, and ‘More Of That Jazz’ is no exception; dragging on for over four minutes with a repetitive guitar riff (likely performed by Roger, though the absence of personnel credits on the album make it difficult to know for certain) and a thudding drum performance that holds the song back instead of propelling it. The only saving grace is Roger’s singing, which is inspired, and helps make the song only barely listenable. Its placement as the album closer, as a tie-in to the album title (and the awkward inclusion of clips of other album songs), brings Jazz to an undignified conclusion.
MOTHER LOVE (Mercury/May)
• Album: Heaven
If there was ever a song that combined the passion and driving force that Freddie demanded, ‘Mother Love’ was undoubtedly it. Written mostly by Brian and arranged by Freddie, the song is a highlight of Made In Heaven: centred around a sombre melody and propeled by a shuffling drum machine, the song is a vehicle for Freddie’s emotional vocal performance. Recorded in the last few months of his life in the spring of 1991, the song finds its shattered and broken narrator, his life draining from his body, pleading for the comfort and familiarity of moth
er. “Freddie, as normal, got to some point and said, ‘No, no, no, no, no, this isn’t good enough! I have to go higher here, I have to put more into this, have to get more power in,’” Brian recalled in 1995. “So he downs a couple of vodkas, stands up and goes for it, and you can hear the middle eight of ‘Mother Love’ just soars to incredible heights, and this is a man who can’t really stand any more without incredible pain and is very weak, you know, has no flesh on his bones, and you can hear the power, the will that he’s still got.”
Brian later remarked with poignant fondness that this was the most significant collaboration he’d ever had with Freddie, and that the lyrics were more or less made up on the spot as the vocalist sat on and nodded approvingly. The song was left in a half-finished state for the rest of 1991, before Brian, Roger, and John returned to it in 1994. The guitarist recorded an emotional solo, not on his Red Special, surprisingly, but on a Parker Fly. (“It was probably lying around in Montreux,” he recalled vaguely.) The song was then built up, with Brian adding the final verse and singing it himself. “It was never finished,” he remembered in 1999. “He never came back to do the final verse, but to the end, even when he couldn’t even stand, without propping himself up, he was just giving it his all. You can hear the incredible strength of his voice in that track, and the passion that he’s putting into it. And we’re making it up as we go along, you know, I’m scribbling words on pieces of paper and he’s grabbing them and saying, ‘Roll the tape. I’ll do this one.’ He knew that it might be the last time he was ever able to sing and, in that case, it was.”
“In the last few weeks of his life, [Freddie] would say, ‘Get me doing stuff. Write me more words, more words, more words. Give me stuff to sing, because when I’ve gone, you guys can finish it off,’” Brian told Virgin Radio in 2004. “Well, this song was almost finished. He said, ‘Look, that’s about as much as I can do.’ He’d had a couple of vodkas. He’d gone totally for the middle eight, which you’ll hear on this, which is phenomenal, and then he said, ‘Look. It’s okay, I’ll come back in a few days and finish it off.’ Well, that was the last time he was ever there, and so in the end I sang the last verse, because I didn’t want to mess with the format of it at all. I just wanted it to be as it was. And this was something which I sort of carried in my pocket for a couple of years – actually, probably more than that - until the time when we were able to make the Made In Heaven album. And it’s a long story. I mean there’s more than two years of my life certainly in trying to assemble that material around the vocals that he’d left, and we all worked very hard on it. But what I wanted was to preserve that moment the best way I could and tell the story, and that’s what you hear. There’s a piece in the middle which to me represents, you know, looking back on your life and stuff like that. But there was no morbidity in singing it. It was a kind of joyful thing – that’s all I can say. It’s a fairly serious song but it was – there was great joy in Fred finding these notes, finding this performance. I think it’s superb.”
The song concludes with a reverse timeline of Freddie’s life: the ending segment starts with a vocal impromptu from Wembley Stadium in 1986, then moves onto a brief clip of every officially released Queen song compressed into ten seconds, and concludes with one of Freddie’s first vocal performances from ‘Goin’ Back’ in 1972. And what a fitting conclusion it is: “I think I’m going back, to the things I loved so well in my youth.”
MUSTAPHA (Mercury)
• Album: Jazz
Without a doubt one of Freddie’s most bizarre compositions, ‘Mustapha’ is a song that has hardly any English words, but contains enough caterwauling from Freddie that its meaning becomes secondary. Opening the Jazz album in a confusing manner, the song, nonetheless, features a fine vocal performance from its author but the words are the main drawback: apparently written for a friend of his from school back in Bombay, the words are a mixture of Arabic, Parsi and (a little) English blended together to create a weird yet entertaining end result.
‘Mustapha’ was performed live between 1978 and 1980, usually as the medley opener, but mostly as an introduction to other songs (on the 1980 tour, as well as during some 1981 shows, the song was performed in its entirety). It created a minor sensation when it was issued in 1979 as a single from Jazz in Bolivia, Germany, Spain and Yugoslavia.
MY BABY DOES ME (Queen)
• Album: Miracle
This collaboration between John and Freddie is an average track from The Miracle that serves as an unfulfilling lead-in to ‘Was It All Worth It?’ Despite being a cool slice of the funk the pair were so adept at creating (‘Cool Cat’ and ‘Pain Is So Close To Pleasure’), with an emotional, wailing guitar contribution from Brian, the song is too faceless to really make an impression. More mundanely, the song was originally recorded as ‘My Baby Loves Me’, with a demo slipping out in recent years – yes – featuring the word “does” replaced with “loves”. Interestingly, the drum machine pattern used on this song was also used for the unreleased ‘I Guess We’re Falling Out’, itself a far superior song to this one.
“That song stemmed from John and myself,” Freddie said in a 1989 BBC Radio One interview. “I seem to remember I wanted something a little more relaxed than the way the other songs were getting. I felt that we didn’t have something that was a little more clear-headed, and not too involved. And so we decided we should have something very easy, very listenable.”
MY BOY (May)
• Compilation (Brian): Lullabies For A Difference
Originally recorded by Brian in 1980 as part of a trio of demos (‘The Dark’ and ‘I’m Scared’ were the other two, though these were ultimately re-recorded in 1988 and issued on his first solo album, Back To The Light, four years after that), this delicate ballad was recorded during sessions for Hot Space in 1982 but was kept unreleased; it’s obvious why, when one hears it in tandem with the other songs on that album. It’s a shame about the loss, since it’s easily one of Brian’s most tender piano ballads and would have been an ideal closer for the album. The original 1980 demo was later issued on the 1998 compilation album Lullabies For A Difference, compiled by Joan Armatrading.
MY COUNTRY I & II (Taylor)
• Album (Roger): Fun • A-side (Roger): 6/81
While Roger would shy away from denigrating politicians and lambasting jingoism on Queen records, his solo albums were fair game. His first, Fun In Space, was largely apolitical, but the major saga on it was ‘My Country I & II’, an epic, seven-minute rocker that decries the futility of war and politicians’ plight to further a winning ticket instead of enrich their constituents’ lives. The song was well timed given the outbreak of war between Britain and Argentina over control of the Falkland Islands. Because ‘Under Pressure’ was topping the Argentinean charts at the time, the government there concluded that the song was British propaganda cooked up for the event and promptly banned the record from the airwaves. Roger seethed, “In Argentina, we were Number One when that stupid war was going on and we had a fantastic time there, and that can only be for the good. Music is totally international.”
The first part of the song is a leisurely stroll, with Roger and some sweetly-sung chorus vocals proclaiming his conscientous objection. The second part, however, is an impressive display of power chords and clattering drums, as Roger all but howls his beliefs. The concluding coda, where Roger croons “You don’t get me” repeatedly, fades out then back in before finishing abruptly. Truly a masterpiece.
‘My Country I & II’ was chosen as the second single from Fun In Space in June 1981, but unfortunately fell victim to the record company’s decision to edit the track to a more radio-friendly running time. Clocking in at just under four minutes, the song is disjointed and almost immediately kicks into the second, drum-oriented part of the song; unsurprisingly, the song failed to chart.
MY FAIRY KING (Mercury)
• Album: Queen • Compilation: BBC • CD Single: 6/96 [9]
Concluding the first side of Que
en is Freddie’s exquisite ‘My Fairy King’, a song which revealed the vocalist’s fascination with mythical (and mystical) creatures and stories, subjects he would explore deeper on subsequent songs. Written later in original Queen bassist Barry Mitchell’s waning days as a band member, the song was inspired by Robert Browning’s poem ‘The Pied Piper’, even borrowing directly the lines “And their dogs outran our fallow deer / And honeybees had lost their stings / And horses were born with eagles’ wings”. More significantly, the reference to Mother Mercury inspired Freddie to finally change his name from Bulsara, thus completing the first stage of his metamorphosis.
Driven by Freddie’s piano, ‘My Fairy King’ marked the first time that the band even knew of his mastery of the instrument. “He’s virtually a self-taught pianist,” Brian later recalled, “and he was making vast strides at the time, although we didn’t have a piano on stage at that point because it would have been impossible to fix up. So in the studio was the first chance Freddie had to do his piano things and we actually got that sound of the piano and the guitar working for the first time, which was very exciting. ‘My Fairy King’ was the first of these sort of epics where there were lots of voice overdubs and harmonies. Freddie got into this, and that led to ‘The March Of The Black Queen’ on the second album and then ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ later on.”
“‘My Fairy King’ was a number Freddie wrote,” John said in 1976, “which ... was built up in the studio. Whereas there are other numbers which are essentially live songs, basically just the track and then just a few backing vocals and guitar solos over the top and that was it.” The complexity of this song made it impossible to perform live, though Freddie obviously held some affection for it: he would occasionally slip the melody into improvisations on the 1982 Hot Space and 1984/1985 Queen Works! tours. It was presented, however, on the first BBC broadcast by Queen, albeit in a rougher fashion. Even though the BBC version merely takes the master track of the song from the Trident album sessions, the vocals were recorded on 5 February 1973; this version was released on the 1989 UK compilation Queen at the Beeb, and again six years later on the US equivalent, retitled Queen at the BBC.
