Queen: The Complete Works (64 page)

Released as the third single from the album in July 1984, with Brian’s and Freddie’s ‘Is This The World We Created...?’ on the B-side, the song peaked at a modest No. 6. For 12” versions of the single, an extended remix was included which remained mostly faithful to the original, only adding an a cappella vocal section and repeat of the guitar solo. While the trend of the day was to drastically rearrange a single until it either barely represented its original recording, or to saturate it with effects and superfluous noises, this extended
version is tasteful and subtle.

The music video, directed by Tim Pope in June 1984 (who also directed Roger’s ‘Man On Fire’ video the previous month) at Arri Film Studios in Munich, has been met with derision and scorn by three of the four band members; only Freddie was pleased with the video, which isn’t surprising, considering his prominent role. Brian, as ever, diplomatically reasoned that it was an indulgence of Freddie’s and they were happy to humour him, but one look at John and Roger grumbling at each other and rolling their eyes suggest that some band members were more willing to mollify than others. That’s not to say they didn’t get their shots in at the singer, who, upon appearing on set in a ridiculous wig and a red skin-tight leotard covered in large eyes, was immediately labeled a giant prawn. Regardless of ridiculous costuming, the video is a fine adaptation of the lyrics, with Freddie starring as the tortured protagonist, desperately in search of love while surrounded by meaningless material possessions. Brian, clearly relishing his role as a sinister messenger of doom, wields a skull guitar, which later led to wild rumours of the instrument being played on the record. Brian addressed this in a 1997
Pop Of The Line
interview: “It’s more of a prop than anything else. You can just about play it, but it was made especially for the video. But it was made more for the looks than anything else. Yes, I have played it, but you won’t find it on any record, I’m afraid.”

The song was performed live, sans skull guitar, on the 1984/1985
Queen Works!
world tour, but wouldn’t return for the 1986
Magic
tour.

IT’S AN ILLUSION
(Taylor/Parfitt)

• Album (Roger):
Frontier

One of the few songs on
Strange Frontier
to not be entirely about a nuclear holocaust or an uncertain future, ‘It’s An Illusion’ is a simple lament of the loss of the American dream, which, in the Cold War era, became a standard of living to justify conspicuous consumption and sexual reproduction. While the baby boomer generation pushed for civil, political, and women’s rights movements in the 1960s and 1970s, the liberal progressives had, by the 1980s, stagnated; with kids of their own and a responsibility to provide for their family, the young conservatives took over, heralding a decade of trigger-happy Reaganites whose mission was to crush the American dream in order for them to progress. Socialism gave way to cynicism, and the 1980s were lost in a mire of greed and financial excess that America is still trying to fix. Back in 1984, the lunacy was just beginning, which Roger witnessed while traveling across the States on the 1982
Hot Space
tour.

Written with Status Quo’s Rick Parfitt, who also provides guitar and response vocals, the song is a highlight of the
Strange Frontier
album, with a muscular, exuberant rhythm section that also included John Deacon on bass. Of all the songs on the album, ‘It’s An Illusion’ practically begged to be performed live, and when Roger formed his own touring band three years later, it became a mainstay of their 1988 and 1990 repertoires.

IT’S GONNA WORK OUT FINE
(McCoy/McKinney)

Originally performed by Ike and Tina Turner, The Reaction played ‘It’s Gonna Work Out Fine’ live.

IT’S IN EVERY ONE OF US

On the
Time
musical soundtrack, ‘It’s In Every One Of Us’ is performed by Cliff Richard, but when Freddie appeared at the Dominion Theatre on 14 April 1988 to take part in a four-song set, he was asked to duet with Cliff on this track, which was more suited for Freddie’s voice.

IT’S LATE
(May)

• Album:
World

The sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle of rock stars is romanticized to the point that the reality is lost in a murky haze of groupies and endless soundchecks. Brian’s displeasure with being on the road constantly while trying to maintain a homelife was the subject of many of his greater songs throughout the 1970s, and even though the band rarely wrote while out on tour, their road-weary songs, channelling the frustrations and trappings of success, were surprising enough to make aspiring musicians think twice about their avenue of career. In 1974, while on Queen’s first North American tour in New Orleans, Brian became infatuated with a woman known only to legend as Peaches, and he struggled with the morality of this temptress while his long-term girlfriend, Chrissy, waited patiently for his return back home. He alluded briefly to the encounter in ‘Now I’m Here’, and when Queen returned to Louisiana for the album launch for
Jazz
in 1978, the guitarist abandoned the hedonism
of the party and drove around the city in search of Peaches: “I didn’t find her, but she found me later on,” he recalled in a 2008
Mojo
magazine interview. “God, I still feel a little tug on the heartstrings when I go to that city.”

It’s difficult to say what other Peaches-inspired songs Brian wrote, but most of his traveling songs allude to forbidden temptation, with ‘It’s Late’ an admission of guilt in the form of an epic Greek tragedy. “It’s another one of those story-of-your-life songs,” Brian said in a 1989
In The Studio With Redbeard
interview. “I think it’s about all sorts of experiences that I had, and experiences that I thought other people had, but I guess it was very personal, and it’s written in three parts; it’s like the first part of the story is at home, the guy is with his woman. The second part is in a room somewhere, the guy is with some other woman that he loves and can’t help loving, and the last part is he’s back with his woman.”

The song was played only a handful of times between 1977 and 1979, and was out of the set list by the conclusion of the
Jazz
Japanese tour. The middle section, preceding the third scene, was a launching pad for improvisation and would take the band into strange and wonderful territories. The guitar solo also included a tactic which Eddie Van Halen would later make popular: tapping. “That was actually hammering on the fingerboard with both hands,” Brian told
Guitar Player
in 1983. “I stole it from a guy who said that he stole it from Billy Gibbons in ZZ Top. He was playing in some club in Texas, doing hammering stuff. I was so intrigued by it, I went home and played around with it for ages and put it on ‘It’s Late’. It was a sort of a double hammer. I was fretting with my left hand, hammering with another finger of the left hand, and then hammering with the right hand as well. It was a problem to do on stage; I found it was a bit too stiff. It’s okay if you’re sitting down with the guitar. If I persevered with it, it would probably become second nature, but it wasn’t an alleyway which led very far, to my way of thinking. It’s a bit gimmicky.” A version was also recorded on 28 October 1977 at Queen’s final session for the BBC, with the middle section replaced by a bizarre interpretation of the ‘seduction sequence’ from ‘Get Down, Make Love’, complete with distorted vocalizations and harmonizer effects.

Overlooked for single release in the UK, since it was considered too weighty for the hit parade, it was released in April 1978, in lieu of ‘Spread Your Wings’ and with ‘Sheer Heart Attack’ as the B-side, in the US and Japan. The US release featured the full six-minute-plus cut, while the Japanese release received a unique three-minute edit, excising the second “scene” and most of the middle instrumental section. The single charted at No. 74 in the US, which accounts for its exclusion from any
Greatest Hits
package; to date, the single edit remains a rarity.

IT’S SO YOU
(Mercury)

• Compilation (Freddie):
Solo Collection

Another soulful track recorded on 3 February 1987 at Townhouse Studios (like many of the other tracks recorded during this period, including ‘Holding On’, ‘I Can’t Dance / Keep Smilin”, ‘Horns Of Doom’ and ‘Yellow Breezes’, this track was not intended for
Barcelona
), ‘It’s So You’ was revisited later in February and again in March, but ultimately remained unreleased until
The Solo Collection
in 2000. A shame, since it features a gorgeous and soaring vocal performance, as well as some R&B piano playing from Freddie.

JACK OF DIAMONDS
(Donegan)

This Lonnie Donegan song was played live by 1984.

JAILHOUSE ROCK
(Stoller)

• Live:
Montreal

Elvis Presley’s 1957 hit single became a live favourite of Queen’s, and was played from virtually the very first concert (Freddie even played it in his pre-Queen bands). Receiving about 350 performances between 1970 and 1985, though certainly not performed every night, ‘Jailhouse Rock’ would usually be placed in the list as an encore number, although it did become the show opener during the
Crazy
tour of 1979 and the
Game
tour in 1980. The song was recorded during sessions for
Queen
in 1972, with a 10” acetate cut and prepared for release, but remains unreleased.

JEALOUSY
(Mercury)

• Album:
Jazz

Separating ‘Fat Bottomed Girls’ and ‘Bicycle Race’ is this delicate, understated ballad from Freddie, a gorgeous confessional of a broken man, shattered by jealousy and begging for forgiveness, if only the pain would go away. With one of the simplest backings on
Jazz
of bass, drums (but not, interestingly, bass drum, which was reinstated on the 2011
Jazz
remaster), and
piano, and an acoustic guitar solo for good measure, ‘Jealousy’ is a superb ballad, and, with the exception of ‘It’s A Hard Life’, one of the last truly love-torn ballads that Freddie would submit for a Queen album.

An instrumental version was played by Greg Brooks at a Fan Club convention, with an additional forty-five-second bridge that was later excised and shoehorned into ‘Play The Game’ two years later. ‘Jealousy’ was issued in April 1979 as a the third and final single from
Jazz
in the US, with ‘Fun It’ as the B-side, but promotion was minimal and the single failed to chart.

JESUS
(Mercury)

• Album:
Queen
• Bonus:
Queen

Written from the perspective of an astonished bystander witnessing the Lord’s power as an elderly leper pleads for healing, ‘Jesus’ is a prime example of Freddie’s early fascination with religion, which would be either written directly about or alluded to in his songs on the debut album; one other especially religious song, ‘Mad The Swine’, was originally planned for inclusion but was dropped – not because of subject matter, but because of drum sound disputes. As befits its title, though, ‘Jesus’ is the most overly religious song that Freddie would write, but he would focus instead on fantasy tales for the next album and abandon any thoughts on theology, only occasionally mentioning it in a song here or there afterwards. The bulk of the song consists of a raucous instrumental section with a piercing guitar orchestration from Brian, before calming down for the conclusion of the track, fading out in an echo-drenched choir and leading nicely into the instrumental closer, ‘Seven Seas Of Rhye...’.

A five-minute demo version, which omits the acoustic guitar and piano in favour of a more aggressive electric guitar, is taken at a slower pace, though it features a more hurried instrumental improvisation, and was recorded at De Lane Lea Studios between September and December 1971. After appearing on countless bootleg albums, the demo recording was finally released on the 2011 deluxe edition of
Queen
. ‘Jesus’ was included in the set list between 1971 and 1972, though no tapes of the song’s performance exist, and was out of the set list by the following year. One intrepid fan attempted to resurrect the song in November 1978 during Freddie’s customary audience request segment of the show, which the singer momentarily considered before dismissing it with, “That’s from the first album. We’ve forgotten that. We wanna do something new!”

JUST ONE LIFE
(May)

• CD single (Brian): 11/91 [6] • Album (Brian):
BTTL

This emotive ballad, recorded for Brian’s
Back To The Light
album in 1990, might be construed as a tribute to Freddie but was actually written for actor Philip Sayer. “I wrote that after going to a memorial concert for an actor [Sayer], a friend of my lady friend whom I’d never met,” Brian explained in
Guitar World
in 1993. “I’d never even seen his work, though he was pretty well-known in England. But by the end of the evening, I felt that I knew the guy. I wrote the song around that and realized that it related very closely to the stuff I was searching for in my solo work. So it became another germ which grew into a piece of the album.”

Sayer was a West End actor who appeared in adaptations of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
,
Deathtrap
and
Rocky Horror Picture Show
before transitioning to the small (and later big) screen with
Crown Court
in 1976. He starred later in
Xtro
,
The Hunger
and
Shanghai Surprise
(as well as a 1983 TV series titled, incidentally,
Dead On Time
), before he died on 19 September 1989 of lung cancer. ‘Just One Life’ was written shortly thereafter, and is a poignant panegyric for an actor who possessed so much potential but was so rudely cut down in his prime.

The song was released on the CD single of ‘Driven By You’ in November 1991, albeit in an altered version: Brian’s shimmering vocals were instead replaced by The Red Special, and has suitably been labelled the ‘Guitar Version’.

KALINKA
(trad.)

This traditional Russian folk song was inserted into Brian’s nightly guitar solo while in Moscow, in November 1998.