Queen: The Complete Works (48 page)

The vocalist’s description of his song indicates that it was intended from the beginning to be a simple, almost throwaway song. Times had definitely changed: Queen had entered a phase in the summer of 1979 which would later prove to be their most successful, and it was all due to this record. Deliberately stripping back their approach and recording style, the band started writing songs more focused on rhythm and ‘feel’, as opposed to presenting the expansive sonic scope that distinguished so many of their early songs.

The actual recording process didn’t take long at all, as Brian explained: “The guys put down the backing track for that one when I was out doing something in Munich, where we were working ... I came back and thought, ‘Oh my God, it’s almost finished. Let me put some guitar on it before they stick it out.’ Fred plays the rhythm acoustic guitar. All I really did was add a kind of ersatz rock and roll solo and some backing harmonies and it was done.” Recorded with a sparse backing track of Freddie on acoustic guitar, John on bass and Roger on drums, the song was completed within a few takes; all Brian added was an appropriate solo on an old Fender Telecaster that belonged to Roger, and the song was completed.

“‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’ was very untypical playing for me,” explained Brian of his performance. “I’d never used a Telecaster on record before, and a Boogie amplifier, which I’d never have considered using. It’s a very sparse record, and it was done with Elvis Presley in mind, obviously. I thought that Freddie sounded a bit like Elvis, but somebody’s done a cover of it who sounds absolutely like Elvis, and the whole record sounds like a Jordanaires/Elvis recreation.”

Freddie said of his first experience playing guitar on record: “I wrote ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’ on guitar and played rhythm on the record, and it works really well because Brian gets to play all those lead guitar fills as well as his usual solo. I’m somewhat limited by the number of chords I know. I’m really just learning, but I hope to play more guitar in the future.”

Adopting an Elvis-style vocal as a tribute to The King, who had passed away two years before, Freddie’s impression is so convincing that many thought it was a long-lost recording by Elvis himself – or, at the very least, that Queen were covering an old, forgotten song by The King. “It’s not rockabilly exactly but it did have that early Elvis feel,” Roger commented in a 1984 interview with
Sounds
, “and it was one of the first records to exploit that. In fact I read somewhere – in
Rolling Stone
, I think it was – that John Lennon heard it and it gave him the impetus to start recording again. If it’s true – and listening to the last album [
Double Fantasy
] it certainly sounds as if he explored similar influences – that’s wonderful.”

‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’ was released as a UK single with the fast live version of ‘We Will Rock You’ from
Live Killers
in October 1979, and peaked in the charts at No. 2, the band’s highest placement there since ‘We Are The Champions’ in 1977. Originally, the band hadn’t intended to release the song in the US, but radio stations started picking up the song as an import and demand for the single became massive. Elektra issued the song with ‘Spread Your Wings’ from
Live Killers
in December 1979, and by the next month, the single flew to the top of the charts, earning the band their first No. 1 there. “We’re not a singles group,” Brian said in 1980, “we don’t stake our reputation on singles and we never have done, but I think it’s brought a lot of younger people to our concerts. No doubt there are those who hate the new single but like what we’ve done in the past. But I think that tends to happen with whatever you put out, unless you’re totally predictable. You lose some and gain some. But the actual live show gives a good crossover, so I don’t
think anyone’s disappointed with that.”

A video was shot on 22 September 1979 at Trillion Studios. Directed by Dennis DeVallance, the video shows Queen decked out in leather and performing the song as Freddie prances around, a gorgeous blonde in his arms as he hops onto a motorbike; he struts to the front, surrounded by four professional dancers (two females and two males; this was the first, but not last, time the band would use dancers in a video), and one of the females tears his shirt down the front. Freddie is clearly the star of the show here, and the band are pushed to the sidelines; however, it seemed most comfortable for them, even if the leather didn’t appear so.

The song became a staple in the set list, and was performed at every show between November 1979 and August 1986, with Freddie always on acoustic rhythm (1979–1982) or electric rhythm (1984–1986) guitar. He would usually precede the song with a crack about his lack of guitar skill (“OK, everybody knows I can’t play the fucking guitar,” he said in 1986; “About ten years ago I knew only three chords on guitar. Now, in 1982, I know only three chords on guitar,” he quipped in 1982) before dedicating the song to “anybody who’s crazy out there.” The song offered the chance for extended improvisation, often stretching the song well beyond its original two and a half minute running time, and allowing the band – but especially Brian – free rein to jam. Live versions of the song appear on
Live At Wembley Stadium
(with one version from the complete gig from 12 July 1986, and a bonus track on the 2003 reissue from the night before), though it wasn’t released on
Live Magic
, and a great version appears on the 2004 DVD and CD release of
Queen On Fire: Live At The Bowl
. Robert Plant performed an appropriate version (in the style of his own song ‘Darlene’ from Led Zeppelin’s 1982 album
Coda
) at the Concert For Life on 20 April 1992.

On 7 October 1979, Freddie appeared with the Royal Ballet at the London Coliseum to take part in a charity gala ballet, organized to benefit the City of Westminster Society for Mentally Handicapped Children. Rehearsing his parts with principal dancers Derek Dene and Wayne Eagling at the London Dance Centre earlier in the week, the visibly nervous vocalist appeared on stage, providing the encore with ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ and ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’. When he urged the audience to sing along with him on the latter number, it must have slipped his mind that the song had been in the shops for only two days, so it’s doubtful that anyone except the few staunch Queen fans in attendance would have known the words. Roger, who came along for moral support, said afterwards, “I was more nervous than he was. I mean, I wouldn’t do it – that’s just not my scene. I’d like to see anyone else have the courage to do that, and carry it off as well as he did. He had a lot of balls to go on that stage. He loves all that stuff.”

CROSSROADS
(Johnson)

Undoubtedly Robert Johnson’s best-known song, later famously covered by Cream, becoming Eric Clapton’s signature tune for most of his early career, Ibex performed a version of the song at The Sink Club, Liverpool, on 9 September 1969.

CYBORG
(May)

• Album (Brian):
World

One of the most unorthodox songs to be written by Brian, ‘Cyborg’ “was a quick job I did for a computer game [
Rise Of The Robots
, though it wasn’t used until the sequel,
Rise 2: Resurrection
],” Brian explained in 1998. “And it obviously cried out to be a proper guitar thing, so I went for it. These days I’m using my fingers to pick more. Because there are a lot of things you can do by plucking the strings in different directions. And it also links into tapping, because your right hand isn’t holding a pick, so it’s free to go up on the fret board. I’m not heavily into tapping, but there are certain things you can do where the [right hand] finger can also hit a fret and get little transition notes, which can be really nice.”

The song was initially recorded in 1995 and boasts a set of lyrics taken from the cyborg’s point of view; an update of ‘Machines (Or “Back To Humans”)’ for the 1990s, the mechanized villain begs the protagonist to “come play with me”, with the hero pleading, “I don’t want to / I don’t need to / But I must fight again.” Brian later told
Music Scene Magazine
, “Right after I got asked for a song by this ‘gang’, I tried to think myself into the mind of this robot, that’s a very interesting thing to do, because it triggers off something in yourself. At the beginning I wrote the song for the robot, at the end it was a song for me. I began to give the robot my emotions.” His voice is electronically lowered to give it a more sinister quality for the cyborg’s voice, and his thin, reedy voice for the hero’s parts contrasts nicely with the menace of the villain. Several alternate versions, each sounding more disturbing than the previous one, would later surface as instrumentals on
the Director’s Cut edition of
Rise 2: Resurrection
. “I’m fascinated with sequencing and loops and all those things,” Brian said. “But this is a romp as well. It’s a science fiction thing, and I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be fun to put the robot’s point of view, for a change, you know, the robot’s emotions,’ and that’s where it started. Again, you can find other stuff in there, because the robot’s like the rest of us, you know? Well, this one is, anyway!”

Taylor Hawkins plays drums on the track, one of the few songs on
Another World
that didn’t feature Cozy Powell. Brian explained, “Taylor was with Alanis Morrisette when Roger introduced me to him. He did a great job there, but he was kind of in the wrong place, and he’s a totally explosive young guy, with incredible energy, and he found his proper place in the Foo Fighters. Well, we’re Foo Fighters fans, we like them a lot, and been to see a couple of their gigs, and it turns out that they are big fans of us, and they say, ‘Well, Queen’s the Bible for us, you know, we learn a lot of our stuff from listening to you guys,’ so I just said to Taylor, ‘Would you like to come down here and do one?’, and he went, ‘Yeah!’”

Unfortunately, the song is completely out of place on
Another World
, thus reinforcing the slapdash manner in which the album was constructed, and would have been better off on a completely different project. It’s hard to imagine how the song would help Brian find the “True Direction and freedom of the Spirit” (according to his liner notes for Another World), though it does fit the idea that “things are never quite what they seem.”

DANCER
(May)

• Album:
Space

Centred around a pulsating drum-machine beat and bubbling synth bass (both provided by Brian), ‘Dancer’ is Brian’s own attempt to keep up with the funk. “We were thinking about rhythm before anything else,” Brian told the BBC in 1982, “so in some cases, like ‘Dancer’, the backing track was there a long time before the actual song was properly pieced together. We would experiment with the rhythm and the bass and drum track and get that sounding right, and then very cautiously piece the rest around it, which was an experimental way for us to do it.” Lyrically, the guitarist addresses his own awkwardness with the genre, which is evident in the performance. Though not the best track on
Hot Space
, it is still far better than Freddie’s contributions to the first side, and features several blistering guitar solos.

DANCING IN THE STREET
(Gaye/Hunter/Stevenson)

Originally performed by Martha and the Vandellas, ‘Dancing In The Street’ was played live by 1984.

DANCING QUEEN
(Andersson/Andersson/Ulvaeus)

A fitting song to play live, The Brian May Band included ABBA’s incredibly popular ‘Dancing Queen’ as an encore during their concert in Stockholm in 1998, sung by Suzi Webb and Zoe Nicholas. Incidentally, when not on tour with Brian, the two women fronted an ABBA tribute band called FABBA.

THE DARK
(May)

• Album (Brian):
BTTL
• Live (Brian):
Brixton

Released on Brian’s 1992 debut solo album,
Back To The Light
, as an atmospheric opener, ‘The Dark’ was recorded during sessions for
Flash Gordon
in 1980 at Anvil Studios with orchestrations from Howard Blake, and it’s been rumoured that Queen recorded their own version. If the song exists, it’s not known in what capacity it would have been used since it doesn’t fit the themes of the
Flash Gordon
album, but in the confines of
Back To The Light
, ‘The Dark’ couldn’t be more appropriate.

DEAD ON TIME
(May)

• Album:
Jazz

A breathless rocker that rolls faster than any live rendition of ‘Sheer Heart Attack’, Brian’s ‘Dead On Time’ is an astounding if underrated song. The song’s pace supports the lyrics about a man rushing through his life until the concluding cry of “You’re dead!” Roger’s drumming is frantic as Brian riffs heavily alongside a fat bass line. Freddie’s vocal performance is stunning, and the exclusion of this song from the live set is inexcusable, if understandable; the band’s sets in 1978 were averaging two and a half hours a night, and were already physically demanding, especially for Freddie. ‘Dead On Time’ was doomed to obscurity despite a gloriously over-the-top ending with a crashing finale credited to God Himself (the thunderclap was later used between 1979 and 1981 as the introduction for Queen’s concerts).

“That was something I was quite pleased with, but really nobody else was,” Brian said of the song in a 1982
On The Record
interview. “It’s something which
nobody ever mentions very much. ‘Fat Bottomed Girls’ I thought was okay, but fairly banal. I thought people would be much more interested in ‘Dead On Time’, but it didn’t really get that much airplay. The explosions at the end are a real thunderstorm which occurred when we were in the south of France. We put a tape recorder outside.”

DEAR FRIENDS
(May)

• Album:
SHA
• EP:
Five Live
• B-side: 4/93 [1]

An exquisite and understated performance, Brian’s brief ‘Dear Friends’ is a gorgeous piano ballad (played by Brian) that languished for years alongside the more experimental second side of
Sheer Heart Attack
, serving as a refreshing chaser between the frantic ‘Stone Cold Crazy’ and jaunty ‘Misfire’. Although the song enjoyed wider exposure when it was released as the B-side of the live ‘Somebody To Love’ from the Concert for Life in 1993, ‘Dear Friends’ was never aired in the live setting.