Queen: The Complete Works (23 page)

Perhaps the worst editing blunder is in ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, a track which should not have been tampered with, especially considering that it was the band’s initial decision to keep it full-length. In a
misguided effort to fit everything onto one disc, the opera section of the song was omitted, creating an unexpected and unpleasant transition from the soaring guitar solo to the heavy metal thrash. It should have been a case of all-or-nothing: if the song was worth including, surely it would have been more propitious to omit one of the shorter songs in order to present the full version of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. If that wasn’t feasible, why not just omit the song altogether and substitute one of the lesser-known tracks performed on the tour? Certainly, ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’ – a popular mainstay of the live set since November 1979 – would have been a worthy inclusion since it would have been the first time it was released on a live album.

Little about the album made sense, including the cover art – a disparate collection of images resembling a jigsaw puzzle, with several ‘pieces’ repeated to suggest the physical movement in a live show. Unsurprisingly, given the success of the tour, it was a huge seller, reaching No. 3 in the UK charts upon its release in December 1986 – certainly a lucrative strategy since the band hadn’t been off the road for even four months when the album was issued.
Live Magic
wasn’t even considered for release by Capitol in the States, angering the band’s still-loyal fans, who were forced to import the album at great expense. It was finally issued on CD by Hollywood Records in August 1996, in an attempt to capitalize on the success that
Made In Heaven
afforded Queen, but it predictably failed to garner any attention.

Live Magic
was superseded in 1992 by the release of
Live At Wembley ’86
, which presented a full account of Queen’s epic homecoming performance in Wembley Stadium on 12 July 1986; after that, few fans felt compelled to track down the edited fifteen-track original.

THE MIRACLE

Parlophone PCSD 107, May 1989 [1]

Parlophone CDPCSD 107, May 1989 [1]

Capitol C1-592357, June 1989 [24]

Capitol CDP 592357, June 1989 [24]

Hollywood HR 61234 2, October 1991

‘Party’ (2’24), ‘Khashoggi’s Ship’ (2’48), ‘The Miracle’ (5’02), ‘I Want It All’ (4’33), ‘The Invisible Man’ (3’56), ‘Breakthru’ (4’08), ‘Rain Must Fall’ (4’23), ‘Scandal’ (4’43), ‘My Baby Does Me’ (3’22), ‘Was It All Worth It’ (5’46)

Bonus tracks on CD issue
: ‘Hang On In There’ (3’46), ‘Chinese Torture’ (1’45), ‘The Invisible Man’ (
extended version
) (5’28)

Bonus tracks on 1991 Hollywood Records reissue
: ‘Hang On In There’ (3’46), ‘Chinese Torture’ (1’45), ‘The Invisible Man’ (
extended version
) (5’28), ‘Scandal’ (
extended version
) (6’34)

Musicians
: John Deacon (
bass guitar, rhythm guitar on ‘Party’ and ‘Rain Must Fall’, keyboards on ‘Rain Must Fall’ and ‘My Baby Does Me’
), Brian May (
guitars, vocals, keyboards on ‘I Want It All’, ‘Scandal’ and ‘Was It All Worth It’
), Freddie Mercury (
vocals, piano, keyboards on ‘Party’, ‘Khashoggi’s Ship’, ‘The Miracle’ and ‘Was It All Worth It’
), Roger Taylor (
drums, percussion, vocals, keyboards on ‘The Invisible Man’ and ‘Breakthru’, electronic drums on ‘Rain Must Fall’
), David Richards (
programming, keyboards
), Brian Zellis (
computer programming
)

Recorded
: January 1988–February 1989, Olympic and The Townhouse Studios, London; Mountain Studio, Montreux

Producers
: Queen and David Richards

The years between the conclusion of the
Magic
tour in August 1986 and the release of
The Miracle
in May 1989 were three of the most prolific for the band, and yet they only spent one third of that time together as a collective unit. The
Magic
tour had been an exhausting trek, especially for Freddie. “At the end of [that tour], the biggest tour we’d ever done, Freddie said, ‘I don’t want to do this anymore,’” Brian said. “It was kind of uncharacteristic because he was always up for everything and very strong, very optimistic. The fact that he was quite definite about the fact that he didn’t want to do it was something different. We thought maybe it was just a stage he’s going through, or maybe there’s something wrong. I remember having that thought in my head, but you push that thought aside.”

Unfortunately, Brian had more immediate problems on his mind. The tour had been a particular strain on his marriage, and he found consolation by working with other musicians and artists, the least likely being EastEnders actress Anita Dobson. Brian had been approached by her manager about producing her debut record, eventually released as
Talking Of Love
; after an initial meeting with Anita, the two hit it off and romance flowered. Because Brian was still married, he attempted to keep the
new relationship discreet for the sake of his children, though that didn’t stop the press from publishing the rumours. John’s marriage was also going through a rough patch; he and wife Veronica decided it would be best to work on the marriage and, in a move that would become characteristic of John, took extended skiing vacations to Biarritz.

According to Brian, “We said, ‘Right, we’re going to take a little break’ – we didn’t split up, but we needed space for ourselves - ‘and when the time is right, we’ll make the album, rather than somebody saying we’ve gotta make one.’ So, we waited and we did various other things: Freddie and Roger both did solo projects, and I’m halfway through one, and I did a lot of producing.”

The band finally reconvened at Olympic Studios in London to start preliminary work on their follow-up to
A Kind Of Magic
, though they had a different plan this time. As with previous albums, each member would work separately on his own songs and then present virtually completed demos, into which the others would introduce their own ideas. “We made the decision,” Brian said in a 1991 Canadian radio interview, “that no matter who came up with the idea for the song, it would be credited to Queen, and not individuals, and I think it’s the best single decision we ever made. I just wish we made it twenty years ago instead, because it makes such a difference to the creation process. I would recommend it to anyone, anyone who is actually a proper group.”

“Co-writing every song was a big step for us,” Brian told the
Chicago Tribune
in June 1989. “In the past, it got to the point where there’d only ever be one or two members of us in the studio at a time, so Queen wasn’t really functioning as a group, as far as recording went. But this time, it was like the old days, with all of us there and plenty of arguments, but constructive ones. There’s still a lot of musical friction, because we’ve gone off in very different directions. But personally, we’re getting on much, much better than we used to.”

“We seem to work together better now than we did before,” Roger said in 1989. “We’re fairly up and down characters, and we’re all very different with different tastes in many ways. And we used to have lots of arguments in the studio, but this time we decided to share all the songwriting, which was a very democratic and good idea. Then you get decisions made on artistic merit, rather than financial or ego grounds.” Though it was a good idea to credit all the songs as Queen tracks, there were still clues as to who wrote what for careful listeners: Roger, still buzzing from fronting his own band, penned ‘The Invisible Man’ and most of ‘Breakthru’, while Brian contributed ‘I Want It All’ and ‘Scandal’. John and Freddie co-wrote ‘My Baby Does Me’ and ‘Rain Must Fall’, while Freddie stuck the opening of a work-in-progress to the beginning of ‘Breakthru’. The rest – ‘Party’, ‘Khashoggi’s Ship’, ‘Was It All Worth It’, and the title track – were true collaborations, musically initiated by Freddie but with all contributing lyrics. (The exception being ‘Party’, which was written and recorded without Roger.)

“It’s basically the four of us,” Brian said in 1989. “If we ever deviated from that, then we certainly came back to that. There’s guitars, bass, drums and vocals, and nowadays there are a few synthesizers and samples and stuff thrown in. But we made a very conscious decision that the technology wasn’t going to take us over, and we were going to keep the human element as far to the front as we could and use the technology to preserve and augment that. A lot of it’s a very techno-aware album, but hopefully there’s a lot of humanity in there as well – we think so, we think it’s very exciting. We enjoy what we’re doing, and the sounds reflect us as a group more so than the last few albums. It’s not like, sit down with a drum-machine and a synthesizer. We played together and we evolved things that seemed to excite us, and then built everything around that.”

Sessions kicked off in January 1988, meetings more devoted to planning and to creating demos than to the actual recording of songs. John explained of those initial sessions: “The first few weeks of recording, we did a lot of live material, a lot of songs ... Ideas came up, some jamming, we had a few ideas that were already prepared. ‘I Want It All’ was one of the few songs that was actually written before we went in.” Roger continued, saying, “Yes it is our first album since 1986
(laughs)
. I think the reason for the delay was that we wanted to sort of go away and recharge our batteries – quite logical really – and just sort of generate some new energy and enthusiasm for being Queen. We [initially] went into the studio and enjoyed it very much, but we still didn’t have any material. So we decided to go in for a longer time.”

“We spent the whole of January in the studio and have been recording the first parts of the new album,” Roger told University Radio Bath in March 1988, while on tour with The Cross. “So far there’s twenty-two songs and it’ll be the best album that Queen have done in ten years, easily. It’s more back to the old style. I mean it’s almost like echoes of Led Zeppelin and everything in there. It’s great and it’s all live in
the studio, which is great. It gives it more spark and energy I think. No machines – so far we haven’t time to do overdubs anyway, so there’s little synthesizer on it actually. It’s basically bass, guitar and drums with some piano.”

Sessions alternated between The Townhouse, which had been used previously on
A Kind Of Magic
, and the legendary Olympic Studios. Recording was frequently put aside for other endeavours: Freddie was still working on
Barcelona
, and Roger had a UK tour scheduled for February and March. On 14 April, Freddie appeared on stage in the
Time
musical at London’s Dominion Theatre, despite his dislike of the medium. However, it was a special charity performance, and he was gently persuaded to do so by his friend Cliff Richard. Along with singing ‘In My Defence’ and the title track, which he had recorded years before, he performed two other numbers: the emotive ‘It’s In Every One Of Us’ and the crowd-rousing chant of ‘Born To Rock ‘n’ Roll’. It was shaping up to be a good year for the band.

On 2 June, Brian’s father died, which hit the guitarist very hard. He and his father had been exceptionally close and, along with the disintegration of his marriage, this marked a low point in Brian’s life. “The two worst things I ever did in his eyes were: one, give up my academic career to become a pop star,” Brian recalled to
OK
magazine in 1998, “and two, live with a woman ... [He] was always trying to stop me going into the rock business but he built my guitar – the thing that propelled me into it.” He went through several bouts of depression, and admitted years later that he entertained thoughts of suicide. A deeply confused man, he poured his emotions into a new composition, ‘Too Much Love Will Kill You’.

After considerable time off, the band resumed sessions towards the end of that summer, this time recording at Mountain Studios; the album was completed by Christmas of 1988, though further overdubs and mixing meant that the sessions dragged on until February 1989. “After we did the tour in 1986, which was a very big European tour, we were all absolutely exhausted and shattered and we basically didn’t want to work together or see each other for a while,” John said. “Towards the end of the second year [off], we sort of met up and Freddie suggested, ‘Perhaps we should try some time in the studio.’ And then the third we spent making the album, so in a way it was a two-year gap for us rather than a three-year gap.”

The band certainly do sound refreshed on the album, exhibiting a renewed enthusiasm for the music they were coasting through on their two previous albums. There were more chart-friendly songs too, as Queen were keeping a keen eye on the charts, and at least the first three singles (‘I Want It All’, ‘Breakthru’ and ‘The Invisible Man’) were the right selections. Unfortunately, the album’s negatives outweigh its positives. Despite the jubilation in the opener, ‘Party’, it’s a poor stage-setter for what would follow: synthesized, programmed rock with few surprises and even fewer highlights. Queen exhibited faulty judgement by repeating a formula instead of advancing it, even slightly. While they had back-pedalled with
The Works
, there was a sense of urgency to deliver the goods due to the backlash against
Hot Space
, and
A Kind Of Magic
had been born out of a soundtrack, but there wasn’t much advancement between 1986 and 1989.
The Miracle
is a logical extension of
A Kind Of Magic
, yes, but why could it not have been a logical progression?

There’s little to applaud here, but what is good is as good as anything on
The Works
or
A Kind Of Magic
. ‘I Want It All’ is a welcome return to the rock format, while ‘Breakthru’ and ‘The Invisible Man’ are upbeat and enjoyable. Even in a song like ‘Rain Must Fall’, Queen are showing that they want to experiment and want to expand their music, but their good intentions are muddled among the lesser tracks like ‘Party’ and ‘My Baby Does Me’. The most Queen-like song finally comes at the end of the album, after nearly forty minutes of bouncing between quality and mediocrity. ‘Was It All Worth It?’, the single that should have been, closes the album and is the only song in the traditional Queen manner. If the entire album had been like this song, it would have been infinitely better; as it is, it’s an indifferent collection that doesn’t offer anything to set itself apart from Queen’s other mid-1980s releases.