Queen: The Complete Works (19 page)

Musicians
: John Deacon (
bass and rhythm guitars, synthesizer, piano and drum programming on ‘Cool Cat’
), Brian May (
guitars, vocals, synthesizer, synth bass on ‘Dancer’, piano
), Freddie Mercury (
vocals, piano, synthesizer, drum programming on ‘Body Language’ and ‘Staying Power’
), Roger Taylor (
drums, percussion, vocals, rhythm guitar on ‘Calling All Girls’, synthesizer
), David Bowie (
vocals on ‘Under Pressure’
)

Recorded
: June–August 1981 at Mountain Studios, Montreux; December 1981–March 1982 at Musicland Studios, Munich

Producers
: Queen and Mack (
‘Under Pressure’ produced by Queen and David Bowie
)

With the success of ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’ and ‘Another One Bites The Dust’, Queen were suddenly catapulted into a new realm. The stadium rock of
News Of The World
had been honed into a finely executed chart sound, and the band found themselves catering more to the hit parade than creating albums.

The more rhythmic side of
The Game
was explored in their next studio release, although they were certainly in no rush to start work on it. In what would become a trend for the remainder of their career, the band stayed out of the studios as much as possible so they could focus on their live shows. “In the studio it was difficult,” Brian said in a 2005 Capital Gold radio interview, “because we were all pulling in different directions with our own ideas, our own dreams we wanted to fulfil, so yeah, we had some pretty difficult times. The great thing which I think counts for us is that we never aired our dirty laundry in public. We never went out and slagged each other off in public. We settled our problems privately, and so we were able to move on.”

When the band returned for a brief break between their first South American tour and their autumn tour of Mexico, there were several issues to settle before they focused on their new album. They had started discussions for their first greatest hits package, which had been planned for Christmas 1980, but it was cancelled as it would have been their third album release that year, adversely flooding the market. It was decided that the compilation would be released instead in 1981, officially their tenth anniversary as a band.

They had also decided to film a series of shows and splice the best performances together for their first live video release. They had attempted this before with their November 1974 concerts at The Rainbow
and again in June 1977 at Earl’s Court Arena, but film from both of these (excellent) shows was scrapped for unknown reasons. After touring South America and Mexico in September, the band played their only North American shows in late November in Montreal for the film project, though the resulting footage wouldn’t be used for nearly three years.

Remaining was the issue of the new album. Just as they had done in 1979, the band started recording sessions with Mack in the summer of 1981 with no specific tracks in mind, jamming until ideas developed. The sessions unfolded discontinuously between June 1981 and March 1982: the first round of sessions took place between June and August, before the band broke for rehearsals and a tour of Mexico; the second was a two-week interval starting on 6 December; and the third commenced in the New Year, with Roger and John arriving on 18 January, and Freddie and Brian showing up five days later. This hinted at the band’s preference to record at a comfortable pace. “We don’t have a concept,” Roger told
Popcorn
in June 1981. “Most of the songs are already there, but the different effects and details come to life step by step. When the album is finished, we will surely go on tour again. And it will be a completely new show.”

“We moved out to Munich to isolate ourselves from normal life so we could focus on the music,” Brian told
Uncut
in 2005, “and we all ended up in a place that was rather unhealthy. A difficult period. We weren’t getting along together. We all had different agendas. It was a difficult time for me, personally – some dark moments.” The band had indeed changed into traditional rock stars. Freddie was content to explore the licentious side of Munich, and frequented nightclubs almost every night of the week. Brian and Roger, too, would go out partying with their own circle of friends, while John preferred to be with his family or go on holiday during lulls in recording.

The sessions were fraught with disagreements, with each band member pulling violently in different directions while trying to maintain a unified sound. In the studio, Mack was expected to make sense of the songs that the band was individually bringing to the table, with directives from each band member over the sound and feel of the songs. It didn’t help that Brian was digging his heels in to keep the band focused on their rock sound (indeed, of his three songs, only ‘Dancer’ dipped its toe into the dance/funk category) while John and Freddie desired the airiness of dance records. “As a group, we do not have a single direction,” Brian admitted in a 1984 interview with
Faces
. “We’re four very different people. I do feel we’re more democratic than any group I’ve come across. But that means there’s always compromise – no one ever gets his own way totally. We’re always pushing four different directions, not quite sure where the equilibrium position is, for balance. We fought about arriving at a sensible format for
Hot Space
, then decided to push into a very rhythmic and sparse area, disciplining out all the indulgences we’ve been used to putting in. We felt our fans would take it as another experiment. But we found we’d stepped out – at last! – from the music people felt they could expect from us.”

This signalled dark times for the guitarist, who found the distractions of Munich not entirely to his taste. “Emotionally, we all got into trouble [there],” he told
Mojo
in 2008. “‘Hey, let’s have a drink after the studio.’ It was nice to start with ... We’d go out after the studio and then we weren’t getting back until eight in the morning. So you don’t get much work done the next day ... and then it’s time to go out drinking again.” After a particularly boisterous evening at a club, an inebriated Brian came back to the studio and demanded that Mack fire up the tape machines with a whole load of echo applied, and barely squeezed out a guitar solo for ‘Put Out The Fire’.

Brian’s guitar was almost entirely absent from John’s and Freddie’s dance songs, which Brian later complained about: “Fred’s thing was: less is more, make it more sparse, and play less guitar.” John, who had a more rhythmic feel on guitar, was recruited to play on ‘Staying Power’, and insisted on playing on his own ‘Back Chat’. Dissatisfied with the latter title, Brian suggested a fiery solo to complement the argumentative feel of the lyrics – which, incidentally, brought the bassist and guitarist to verbal blows. “I remember John saying I didn’t play the type of guitar he wanted on his songs,” Brian later told
Mojo
in 1999. “We struggled bitterly with each other.”

Not that Freddie was entirely to blame for the guitarist’s frustrations: Peter “Phoebe” Freestone, the singer’s personal assistant, recalled an outburst that, while superficially full of frustration, was still laced with humour: “What the fucking hell do you want? A herd of wildebeest charging from one side to the other?!” Mack, who had the unenviable task of making sense of the songs, recalled, “Making
The Game
was the last time the four of them were in the studio together. After that, it felt like it was always two of them in one studio and two of them in another.
You’d come in one day and say, ‘Oh, where’s Roger?’ and someone would say, ‘Oh, he’s gone skiing’ ... It’s easier to conceive and give birth than it is to get this album finished.” In March 1982, just as the sessions came to a close, Mack’s wife Ingrid gave birth to their first child, John-Frederick.

Hot Space
was finally finished in late March 1982, and the band flew off to Canada to film a video for ‘Body Language’ as well as to rehearse for their upcoming world tour. There’s no doubt that recording had exhausted the band, and they hoped to find renewed energy in the live shows. “I enjoy the live stuff a lot more,” Brian lamented to
Guitar Player
in 1983. “There are moments in the studio I enjoy, but most of the studio is sheer misery. The writing and the arranging of material is such a painstaking process these days for us. I can get in and play a solo anytime, but that’s not the majority of the work that’s done. The majority of it is real soul-searching and wondering whether a song is right. It’s painful.”

The album was released in May 1982 after considerable delay (David Bowie, who guested on both ‘Under Pressure’ and ‘Cool Cat’, asked that his voice be removed from the latter, though he neglected to tell the band until the day before the album’s release), nearly two months after ‘Body Language’ and almost two years after
The Game
. Sales were adequate, especially remarkable considering that the first single reached only No. 25 in the UK charts, and the album peaked at No. 4. It must have been disappointing for the band though, since
The Game
had reached the top slot in both England and America, but their fans across the pond hadn’t embraced the new album as enthusiastically as had their British fans, and it reached only No. 22 in the US charts. This was the first Queen album since
Queen II
not to reach the Top Twenty, a steady decline in the band’s US popularity beginning here and deepening over the next decade. Subsequent albums would never again reach the Top Twenty in America.

“I haven’t found it that easy to accustom myself to the new stuff,” Brian said in 1982. “A lot of the music which Freddie and John want to do is more R&B-oriented, and it’s hard for me to do that because my playing is a reaction to that style, in a sense. I used to listen to people plucking away on Motown records, and I really didn’t like it. I always thought to myself, ‘That’s the kind of thing I don’t want to play. I want the guitar to be up there speaking’. So in a way the return to that was difficult to me. It was a discipline which I gradually worked into, but I find myself wanting to burst out of it all the time and make a lot of noise.”

“[It] is an attempt to do funk properly,” Brian cryptically explained in 1982. “It has a style of playing where you get in and get out quickly, hence the title.” Brian, ever the defender of Queen’s music, was himself unsure of the band’s sudden departure in style. He updated his stance more clearly in 1989, saying, “I think
Hot Space
was a mistake, if only timing-wise. We got heavily into funk and it was quite similar to what Michael Jackson did on
Thriller
a couple of years ago, and the timing was wrong. Disco was a dirty word.

“Possibly Freddie was then getting interested in other things,” Brian continued, “and a bit bored with being in the studio, because we did studios to death with the previous two albums, when we’d be in there for months on end, just working away, although we weren’t particularly inefficient, it was just that there was a lot to be done. We all felt we’d done enough of that for the time being, and wanted to get back to basics and do something simpler, but Freddie got to the point where he could hardly stand being in a studio, and he’d want to do his bit and get out.”

Reviews for the album were surprisingly positive ...
Record Mirror
: “New styles, and a whole new sense of values. You’ll love
Hot Space
, eventually.”
Sounds
: “Queen have never made particularly blinding albums, but you’ll have to agree that
Hot Space
shows more restraint and imagination than tripe like
Jazz
.” Even
NME
, who normally reviled everything Queen released, was (relatively) glowing: “The production of the whole album is really a peach.”
Rolling Stone
was mixed, praising ‘Back Chat’, ‘Calling All Girls’ and ‘Cool Cat’, though censuring the rest as “at best, routinely competent and, at times, downright offensive. ‘Give me your body / Don’t talk,’ sings Mercury in ‘Body Language’, a piece of funk that isn’t fun.” It was a viewpoint shared by most fans.

At several points throughout the
Hot Space
world tour, when introducing particular tracks from the new album, Freddie categorically denied that the band had lost their traditional sound, and even said during the Milton Keynes performance, “It’s only a bloody record! People get so excited about these things.” Perhaps, but the rest of the band disagreed, and while most of the songs got a regular workout in the live setting in 1982 (only ‘Dancer’, ‘Las Palabras De Amor (The Words Of Love)’ and ‘Cool Cat’ remained unperformed), ‘Under Pressure’ was the only one to remain in the set list after 1984. (‘Staying Power’ was played for the
first half of the
Queen Works!
tour in 1984, but was dropped and never reappeared after that.) There were no
Hot Space
tracks offered on the 1991 compilation
Greatest Hits II
, and only ‘Las Palabras De Amor’ was released on
Greatest Hits III
in 1999. ‘Body Language’ was issued on the 1992 US update of
Greatest Hits
, but the other singles have remained conspicuously absent from any compilation.

Brian was particularly critical of the album, while Roger, John and Freddie preferred to look on it as an experiment and nothing else. When asked if he was happy with the direction Queen were going in, Brian answered bluntly: “To be honest, no. I didn’t feel that this tour [the 1982
Hot Space
world tour] was making me very happy. I’ve often felt that in the studio, but that’s the first time I felt it on tour. I didn’t feel very happy until the last concert. The last night in Los Angeles, I felt quite cheered up. I was prepared to think, ‘Well, I don’t really want to do this anymore’. Somehow, when it got to the last one, Freddie was really on form and giving a million per cent, and I felt that I was going well. So the end of the tour finished on a good note for me. I felt like I did want to be out there doing it again sometime. But we are going to have a long rest.”

THE WORKS

EMI WORK1 EMC 240014 1, February 1984 [2]

Capitol ST-12322, February 1984 [23]