Queen: The Complete Works (68 page)

The song is a cry for help, pleading for life, love, and acceptance from the world, and features the distinction of having Freddie, Roger and Brian sing a verse each. They’re assisted by an assembled group of backing vocalists, with three-quarters having worked with at least one band member in the past: Gary Martin contributed vocals to ‘The Amazing Spider-Man’; Catherine Porter was a backing vocalist on Brian’s 1992/1993
Back To The Light
tour, and also sang on Roger’s ‘Everybody Hurts Sometime’ and ‘Old Friends’; and Miriam Stockley sang on Freddie’s and Montserrat Caballé’s ‘The Golden Boy’, one of the last gospel songs Freddie wrote in his lifetime. Only Rebecca Leigh-White was a newcomer, but was familiar to Pink Floyd fans as a backing vocalist on their most recent studio album,
The Division Bell
.

Chosen as the fourth single from
Made In Heaven
, ‘Let Me Live’ was initially banned from UK’s Radio One on the grounds that it was too ‘classic’ (whatever that means), but that didn’t harm sales at all, since it peaked at No. 9 in June 1996. Two CD singles were issued: the first featured
Jazz
album tracks ‘Bicycle Race’, ‘Fat Bottomed Girls’ and ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’ (which was the B-side on the standard, 7” vinyl version), while the second featured ‘My Fairy King’, ‘Doing All Right’, and ‘Liar’ from the
Queen At The Beeb
album. A sticker on the second CD proudly boasted “featuring tracks from the upcoming BBC Sessions release”, which sadly never materialized.

A video for the song was created in late 1995 by the British Film Institute. Directed by Bernard Rudden, the video shows a couple in the middle of a breakdown and unable to communicate with or relate to each other. This video was issued on the 1996 video compilation,
Made In Heaven: The Films,
and on
Greatest Flix III
.

LET ME LOVE YOU
(Jeffrey Rod)

Written by Jeff Beck and Rod Stewart (hence the credit to “Jeffrey Rod”), ‘Let Me Love You’ was originally performed by The Jeff Beck Group and released on their 1968 debut album,
Truth
. Wreckage performed the song as their set closer on 31 October 1969 at Ealing College Of Art.

LET ME OUT
(May)

• Album (Brian):
Starfleet
• Live (The Cross):
Bootleg
• CD single (Brian): 11/92 [19]

According to the liner notes of
Star Fleet Project
, ‘Let Me Out’ was an older, unrecorded song brought out of mothballs for the April 1983 sessions in Los Angeles. The first three minutes are dominated by Brian on vocals, singing about a constraining relationship, followed by a lengthy guitar duel between Eddie Van Halen and Brian which becomes the focal point of the next three minutes. The remainder is a lyrical coda, with Brian bringing the song to a close. The song received its first live performance on 7 December 1990 at the Astoria Theatre, when Brian guest-starred on guitar for the last four numbers of The Cross’ Fan Club gig. After ‘I’m In Love With My Car’, and as Roger walked off stage to rest, an epic eight-minute version followed, with Clayton Moss acting as a fine foil to Brian’s guitar antics. It was ultimately issued on the Fan Club-only release,
The Official Bootleg
.

Apart from a few rare performances on the
Back To The Light
world tour, the song received one additional airing on 7 July 2001 at Stravinski Hall (as part of the Montreux Jazz Festival), with Brian on guitars and vocals, Jon Clearly on piano, Chris Spedding on guitar, John Hatton on bass, Bernie Dresel on drums and Emily, Jimmy and Anita May providing backing vocals. The studio version received its first (and, to date, only) appearance on CD when it was issued as a bonus track on the ‘Back To The Light’ CD single in November 1992.

LET THERE BE DRUMS
(Nelson/Podolar)

• Live (Q+PR):
Return

A top ten hit for The Ventures in 1961, ‘Let There Be Drums’ was originally performed by session drummer Sandy Nelson on that record and earned him respect as one of the first drummers to bring that instrument to the forefront. Essentially an extended drum solo with a 1960s surf riff in the background, the song was performed on the 2005 tour as an introduction to ‘I’m In Love With My Car’, and showed that Roger could still deliver the goods, despite being particularly outspoken against drum solos.

LET YOUR HEART RULE YOUR HEAD
(May)

• Album (Brian):
BTTL
• B-side (Brian): 12/93 [51] • Live (Brian):
Brixton

Ever the busker at heart, inspired by the likes of Lonnie Donegan, Brian’s 1988 composition ‘Let Your Heart Rule Your Head’ was an unconscious update of his earlier song ‘’39’. Bordering on the genre of skiffle
with a countrified guitar solo, the song is an uplifting, upbeat moment on an album of otherwise bleak and melancholy songs, showing a bit of light to the comparable shade that is
Back To The Light
.

Confirming the connection with ‘’39’, the song served as an a cappella vocal introduction to ‘Let Your Heart Rule Your Head’ on the 1992/1993
Back To The Light
tour, and was resurrected for three dates (Hamburg, Offenbach and Tokyo) on the 1998
Another World
tour. A live version was included on the
Live At The Brixton Academy
album, and was also released as the B-side of the ‘Last Horizon’ single in December 1993.

LET’S GET CRAZY
(Taylor)

• Album (Roger):
Fun

Kick-started with a raucous drum workout, ‘Let’s Get Crazy’ is a highlight of
Fun In Space
, with a joyous vocal performance from Roger accentuated by a truly inspired and groovy bass line. Roger is really on fine form here, both vocally and instrumentally, but the outstanding feature is his drum work: this was one of the few songs in his extensive solo discography that featured the drums so prominently.

Chosen as a Japanese and American-only single in August 1981, ‘Let’s Get Crazy’, backed with ‘Laugh Or Cry’, didn’t chart, but remains one of the few songs from
Fun In Space
to be performed live. It was a regular in The Cross’ live set on their British and European tour between February and April 1988, but was bumped out of the set list once they acquired additional original material.

LET’S GET DRUNK

Not much is known about this song except that it was performed live by The Cross, with Peter Noone on vocals, during their inaugural 1988 tour – and suitably summed up the mood of the concerts.

LET’S TURN IT ON
(Mercury)

• Album (Freddie):
BadGuy
• Compilations (Freddie):
Pretender, FM Album, The Solo Collection

Opening up
Mr Bad Guy
is this jaunty dance song, sounding like an update of ‘Staying Power’. ‘Let’s Turn It On’ is a lightweight though energetic track, a perfect candidate to introduce the listener to Freddie’s first solo record, with an optimistic set of lyrics and busy instrumentation. With hints of Brian’s guitar work (most noticeable during the guitar solo, in which Paul Vincent makes his guitar sound almost exactly like The Red Special, orchestration and all), the song would have worked well as a Queen track – provided
Hot Space
had been better received, of course.

In 1992, the song was remixed by Jeff Lord-Alge, with additional production by Julian Raymond, for inclusion on
The Great Pretender
and
The Freddie Mercury Album
, two mediocre attempts to update Freddie’s solo work to varying degrees of success. The ‘Let’s Turn It On’ remix certainly wasn’t a highlight, replacing the joyful backing with an anonymous dance track that dates the song to the early 1990s – much like the original dated it to the 1980s.

LET’S TURN IT ON WITH SIDEBURNS

Mixed, or mashed up, much like ‘New York At Last’ (see that entry), ‘Let’s Turn It On With Sideburns’ (if ever there was an awkward song title, this is it!) was created some time after 2001, blending Freddie’s 1985 track ‘Let’s Turn It On’ with a track called ‘Sideburns’. The latter title was released in November 2001 as part of
Guitarist
magazine’s free CD and features Brian on guitar and Justin Shirley-Smith on programming. ‘Sideburns’ is an unofficial title and was more or less a demonstration by Brian, showing purchasers of the Burns guitar, the latest manufacturer to create a Red Special lookalike, what they could potentially do with their guitars. The mash-up transforms ‘Let’s Turn It On’ from an upbeat disco track into a mid-tempo, thrashing rock song and the result is surprisingly effective, although it’s far too short (just under three minutes), so that by the time the listener really gets into the song, it has already ended. Still, if one can find it, the track is more than worth it and warrants repeated listens.

LIAR
(Mercury)

• Album:
Queen
• Compilation:
BBC
• Bonus:
Queen
• CD Single: 6/96 [9]

The songs on the band’s first record were a collection of new material and old songs written in various incarnations by previous bands. The most well known was ‘Doing All Right’, which had actually been recorded by Smile with Brian, Roger and Tim Staffell; what’s not as well known is that ‘Liar’ started life as a song called ‘Lover’ in Freddie’s band, Ibex, and had been co-written with band mate Mike Bersin.
Queen was especially impressed with the song, and incorporated a restructured version of it, now retitled ‘Liar’, into their repertoire.

The song is an early example of Freddie’s use of oblique lyrical matter combined with his fascination of religion and theology. Reading less like a song and more like a confessional, ‘Liar’ is set to one of Queen’s most raucous and hard-rocking backings, complete with several pounding guitar solos and an extended percussion introduction. Clocking in at over six minutes, it was the longest song the band had recorded at that time, and features an uncharacteristic (and uncredited) appearance by a Hammond organ, thus adding to the religious textures Freddie was musically weaving.

Brian said of the song in 1992, “I had heard Wreckage play this track in a rehearsal, and particularly liked one riff, but the rest of the song was changed drastically by the four of us, using some of my own riffs and Freddie’s words. There is actually an interesting aside to this. ‘Liar’ was one of the first songs that we worked on together, and there was a moment when we discussed if we should all be credited in such cases. Freddie said, ‘As far as I’m concerned, the person who wrote the words has effectively written the song.’ It may not have been the most logical solution, but it was a workable rule which we used virtually unchanged right up to the last two albums, when we decided to share everything regardless of origin. The rule almost certainly discouraged us from co-operating on lyrics for a long time, and started a trend toward separateness in song-producing in general, which was acute at the time of the Munich records.”

Of the writing process, John explained the genesis of ‘Liar’: “The biggest factor of our music being lighter than in the early days is that Freddie has developed more interest in the piano ... ‘Liar’, from the first album, was written on guitar, and naturally goes into the hard rock extreme, as opposed to ‘Killer Queen’. Freddie is now surrounded by Japanese furniture and a grand piano, so the songs are written there. Simple, isn’t it? But I doubt Roger writes songs on the drums.”

“There was a classic case where everything got messed up on the first album,” Brian explained of the first album’s recording process in a June 1998 BBC Radio Two interview, “‘cos we did the first Queen album on basically dark time, in Trident Studios. In other words, you know, ‘Somebody’s just finished, boys. It’s four o’clock in the morning and you’ve got till five.’ ... We’d done a backing for ‘Liar’, and [Trident] said, ‘Oh, that’s alright boys, just overdub on this tape,’ which they pulled out. And it was the wrong tape. We only discovered weeks later and all the way through we were thinking, ‘This doesn’t sound right! What’s happened to this tape?’ So eventually we got to redo it again after a big fuss.”

The song was first recorded between September and December 1971 at De Lane Lea Studios during Queen’s first demo session, where it extends to nearly eight minutes and features several more improvised sections that were later excised from the final recorded version. (This demo recording was finally officially released in 2011, on the deluxe edition of the debut album.) In its original album form, the song is a whirlwind tour de force of powerful rock ‘n’ roll but, lacking foresight, Elektra issued ‘Liar’ as a US-only single in February 1974, editing the song down to three minutes and cutting most of the important bits out. More of a butchering than an edit, this version has eluded a CD release and was consistently labeled the worst record ever issued by Queen (certainly through no fault of their own; even the band disowned the release), at least until the multiple releases in 1996 of the ‘You Don’t Fool Me’ remixes. Speaking of remixes, a remix of ‘Liar’ appeared as a bonus track on the 1991 remaster of the debut album featuring more pronounced percussion but changing little else.

‘Liar’ was also played extensively in the set list from 1970 on, and was often shifted around in the repertoire; it was effective as both an opening and closing number, though by the mid-1970s it became an encore number. Dropped from the set in late 1978, it was reprised on a few one-off occasions (most notably during every April 1982 show), but was reintroduced into the set list in a medley with other early hits in 1984 and 1985, and was then used as an introduction to ‘Tear It Up’ during the
Magic
tour.

LIAR
(Noone)

• Album (The Cross):
MBADTK
• European A-side (The Cross): 7/90 • Live (The Cross):
Bootleg

The Cross had a habit of using titles already used by Queen in years past: ‘Bad Attitude’, released on Blue Rock in 1991, was originally titled ‘Tear It Up’, while The Cross’ version of ‘Liar’ bears no relation whatsoever to the original version released in 1973. Unbelievably, the song drew no comparison to Freddie’s masterpiece in contemporary reviews (probably because those who did actually review
Mad: Bad: And Dangerous To Know
didn’t give the album more than a cursory listen), and while it’s easy to say that The Cross’ song is inferior, it should be remembered that they are very different compositions. This version is somewhat danceable, with a scratchy guitar motif throughout which suggests that there’s an underlying reggae rhythm; the fashion in which Roger sings the song, however, is anything but.