Queen: The Complete Works (20 page)

Capitol CDP 7 46016 2, February 1984

EMI CDP 7 46016 2, December 1986

Hollywood HR-61233-2, November 1991

‘Radio Ga Ga’ (5’48), ‘Tear It Up’ (3’26), ‘It’s A Hard Life’ (4’09), ‘Man On The Prowl’ (3’27), ‘Machines (Or “Back To Humans”)’ (5’10), ‘I Want To Break Free’ (3’20), ‘Keep Passing The Open Windows’ (5’23), ‘Hammer To Fall’ (4’28), ‘Is This The World We Created...?’ (2’17)

Bonus tracks on 1991 Hollywood Records reissue
: ‘I Go Crazy’ (3’42), ‘Radio Ga Ga’ (
extended version
) (6’53), ‘I Want To Break Free’ (
extended version
) (7’19)

Musicians
: John Deacon (
bass guitar, rhythm guitar and synthesizer on ‘I Want To Break Free’
), Brian May (
guitars, vocals, synthesizer and harmony vocals on ‘Machines (Or “Back To Humans”)’, acoustic guitar on ‘Is This The World We Created...?’
), Freddie Mercury (
vocals, piano, synthesizer on ‘Radio Ga Ga’ and ‘Keep Passing The Open Windows’
), Roger Taylor (
drums, percussion, vocals, synthesizer on ‘Radio Ga Ga’, vocoder and synthesizer on ‘Machines (Or “Back To Humans”)’
), Fred Mandel (
piano finale on ‘Man On The Prowl’, synthesizers on ‘Radio Ga Ga’, ‘I Want To Break Free’ and ‘Hammer To Fall’, programming on ‘Radio Ga Ga’
), Mack (
Demolition Fairlight programming on ‘Machines (Or “Back To Humans”)’
)

Recorded
: August 1983–January 1984 at The Record Plant, Los Angeles, and Musicland Studios, Munich

Producers
: Queen and Mack

The
Hot Space
world tour had been a strain on the band; tensions were starting to mount on the road for musicians who, after all, could have retired, unworried about their financial future. Thankfully, Queen were still eager to express their collective creativity, even if it meant they’d be together, as Freddie put it, “until we fucking well die.” They deserved a break, however, both from each other and from the music industry. So, following their final show at Seibu Lions Stadium on 3 November 1982, the band agreed on a year’s hiatus, a well-deserved opportunity to relax and enjoy their success while they still had the chance.

“After the relatively unsuccessful
Hot Space
album,” John said in 1984, “there was a little bit of dissatisfaction there, and we toured and didn’t enjoy it so much, and we decided to take a long time off. It was quite a long time before we actually went into the studio, which gave us all a chance to get a break from each other and try new things as well. It has resulted in Brian doing some solo work, Roger doing another album, Freddie starting an album, and in the end I think it was good for us as well, and now that we’re back together, we’re more committed as a group.”

While Brian, Roger and Freddie started separate solo projects during their time apart, John rested in the interim, though he did admit that the long, unproductive period often caused bouts of depression. “We’re not so much a group anymore,” he told Martin Townsend in 1985. “We’re four individuals that work together as Queen but our working together as Queen is now actually taking up less and less of our time. I mean basically I went spare, really, because we were doing so little. I got really bored and I actually got quite depressed because we had so much time on our hands...” Salvation came in July 1983 when he and Freddie flew to meet with director Tony Richardson in Los Angeles, where discussions were in progress for Queen to contribute music to the big screen adaptation of John Irving’s 1981 novel
The Hotel New Hampshire
. While in the States, the two also decided
to record the next album at the famous Record Plant studios; the following month, the band assembled for their first recording sessions together in almost eighteen months.

As in previous group sessions, the time spent together was not without incident, as Brian explained to
Q
’s Phil Sutcliffe in 1991: “We did hate each other for a while. Recording
The Works
, we got very angry with each other. I left the group a couple of times, just for the day, you know. ‘I’m off and I’m not coming back!’ We’ve all done that. You end up quibbling over one note.” Despite their differences, which always seemed to produce interesting music, the sessions proved fruitful: nearly twenty songs were recorded for the album, comprising the nine that were selected for release (including the non-album track ‘I Go Crazy’), as well as several songs which would remain unreleased. An early handwritten line-up for the album ran as following: ‘Tear It Up’, ‘Whipping Boy’, ‘I Want To Break Free’, ‘Machines’, ‘Man On Fire’, ‘Take Another Little Piece Of My Heart’, ‘It’s A Hard Life’, ‘Your Heart Again’, ‘Man On The Prowl’, ‘Radio Caca’ (
sic
), ‘Hammer To Fall’, ‘Keep Passing The Open Windows’ and ‘Man Made Paradise’. ‘Whipping Boy’, a song that originated during sessions for
Hot Space
, has been speculated to be ‘I Go Crazy’, while ‘Your Heart Again’ was recorded three years later by EastEnder actress Anita Dobson as ‘Let Me In (Your Heart Again)’. ‘Take Another Little Piece Of My Heart’, meanwhile, was a jam with Rod Stewart and Jeff Beck, and surfaced in 1995 as ‘Let Me Live’. ‘Man On Fire’ was saved for Roger’s
Strange Frontier
, ‘Man Made Paradise’, which had started life as a
Hot Space
outtake, was finally released on Freddie’s
Mr Bad Guy
, and ‘Is This The World We Created...?’ was a last-minute addition. Further outtakes include ‘There Must Be More To Life Than This’ and ‘Love Kills’, both of which were released as Freddie solo projects.

The vocalist explained the writing process of
The Works
in 1984: “Every album that’s ever come out of Queen, we’ve come up with a batch of songs, and we really pick the best, and if I have songs that I feel are better than somebody else’s – if I have five songs that are better than one of Roger’s songs, I’ll say we won’t have his one song. I can remember that Roger actually wrote about three or four songs and, as far as I was concerned, [they] weren’t good enough, so I said, ‘Go back and write some more.’ Then Roger will come up with something like ‘Radio Ga Ga’ and it’s perfect!”

During the recording sessions, the band also concocted several songs for
The Hotel New Hampshire
but were disappointed when the producers decided to cut costs by using pre-recorded classical tracks instead, effectively nudging Queen off the project. The band didn’t let the experience sour their attitude; instead, they incorporated at least one track, Freddie’s epic ‘Keep Passing The Open Windows’, onto their new album.

The band spent eight weeks in Los Angeles, recording basic tracks and jamming with anyone who happened to stop by the studios. While out in the west coast city of excess, the band wracked up enormous bills hiring rental cars and partying after sessions, but the discouraging news of Richardson’s soundtrack-killing decision forced them to recoup their losses and head back to Munich to finish up the album. It was there that their old demons returned: Freddie once again hit the nightclubs (not that he had behaved himself in Los Angeles: he met a biker known as Vince the Barman, who was always referred to by Freddie’s friends with wistful sighs and earned the reputation of being “the one that got away”) and Brian, Roger and John all drank too much and missed their families. One day, the bassist, burned out on recording, went on an impromptu trip to Bali without telling the others.

The band were recording more as a band this time, though tensions were still frayed. Brian and John once again clashed over techniques, with John insisting that guest keyboardist Fred Mandel, who had accompanied the band on their 1982 Rock ‘n’ America and Japanese
Hot Space
tours, record the solo on the Roland synthesizer. Mandel was taken aback: “This was controversial, as no one did solos apart from Brian.” Mack was convinced that the solo would remain a placeholder, but Freddie and John both insisted it remain; Brian relented, but not before adding a few touches on The Red Special to beef up the sound. The sour mood of Brian’s insistence on a guitar solo on ‘Back Chat’ hadn’t dissipated, and while all would maintain that contrasting viewpoints made for better results, it was still an uneasy compromise.

When sessions concluded in early January 1984, the band – particularly Brian – were pleased with the results. The guitarist explained, “I think our next album is damn good, much better than anything we’ve done for a while. It’s going to be called
The Works
. And it really is! There’s all the Queen trademarks: lots of production and arrangements and harmonies. We’ve experimented in the past and some of the experiments didn’t work. Our last album was one big experiment and a lot of people totally hated it. And it didn’t sell
very well – not compared to earlier stuff, anyway.

“I always got the most enjoyment out of the harder material,” he continued. “Actually, our new album is a lot harder, but I did fight to get it that way. We’ve done some fantastic over-the-top harmonies and a lot of heavy things that we haven’t done for years. The pressure has always been against me, because not everybody in the band is into the same stuff as I am. I get the most pleasure out of things that I can hammer down and really get some excitement out of. Basically, I’m just like a little boy with the guitar, I just like the fat, loud sound of it. But that’s not important to the others, and I agree with this, the songs come first. That’s where the common ground ends and the arguments begin. The result is always a compromise.”

With this album, the band had finally perfected the synthesizer sounds they had dabbled in on the previous three studio albums, successfully incorporating them not as a main instrument but as a vehicle to broaden the overall sonic scope of the songs. “The synthesizers changed when we changed,” Brian noted in 1984. This integration is most successful on tracks like ‘Radio Ga Ga’ and ‘Machines (Or ‘Back To Humans’)’, which were admittedly written on the synthesizer as opposed to the usual, more conventional instruments. The band had finally achieved the fine balance between synthesized and natural sounds, which enhanced the overall delivery of the album; indeed, the band had released their first cohesive album in quite some time.

The Works
was released as Queen’s lucky thirteenth album (including
Live Killers
and
Greatest Hits
), and returned them to near the top of the UK charts in February 1984. With the assistance of ‘Radio Ga Ga’, a UK No. 2 hit, the album entered the charts at a similar position, and stayed in the Top Ten for four consecutive weeks, returning later in April and again in August – thanks to the ‘I Want To Break Free’ single and the announcement of their UK tour, respectively. In the US, the album struggled into the charts at No. 58, and peaked at No. 23 – a disappointing result, considering the effort the band went to to make it more digestible to their fans. Brian was happy enough, telling
Faces
, “Now,
The Works
is doing very well, but I myself am starting to wonder: does that mean we played it too safe? I really do think you need to take the musical risks, to be comfortable with yourself.”

Indeed, while the album returned the band’s standing back to positive with the fans and critics, there was an overwhelming sense of safe playing. The only two adventurous tracks – and, indeed, the longest – are ‘Radio Ga Ga’ and ‘Machines (Or “Back To Humans”)’, both of which explore the human versus technology elements that Brian and Roger especially enthused about in interviews. The rest of the album is Queen lite, with nearly every song referencing arrangements past: Brian’s ‘Tear It Up’ and ‘Hammer To Fall’ reaffirmed the band as a loud guitar band in the styles of ‘Now I’m Here’ or ‘Tie Your Mother Down’ (intriguingly, Brian contributed no ballads to the album, a rare instance indeed), while Freddie’s ‘It’s A Hard Life’ was a superior update to ‘Play The Game’, and ‘Man On The Prowl’ a third-rate ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’ knock-off. ‘Keep Passing The Open Windows’ and ‘I Want To Break Free’ were both delightful slices of pop, and ‘Is This The World We Created...?’ a tender acoustic ballad written after witnessing a documentary on third-world poverty. But there wasn’t anything that pushed the boundaries (disco and funk excursions were both deliberately avoided), and while it may have been a more traditional Queen album in terms of songwriting and arrangements, there was nothing particularly outlandish or cutting-edge; no ‘Mustapha’s or ‘Good Company’s.

The reviews, surprisingly, were generally positive; even the unsparing
Rolling Stone
gave the album three stars out of five, saying, “Granted, the messages have all been heard before and practically cancel each other out: love is all you need; let’s get physical; machines have feelings, too; be an individual, stand your ground. Instead, the revelations are in the music ...
The Works
is a royal feast of hard rock without that awful metallic aftertaste; as such, it might turn out to be the
Led Zeppelin II
of the 1980s. Not such a depressing prospect at that.”
Record Mirror
said of the album, “The comfortable yet demanding ‘Radio Ga Ga’ is brought down to earth by the hot and oily ‘Tear It Up’, with its cat scratch fever guitar. Another jewel in the crown.” And
Sounds
uncharacteristically gushed, “It’s all there, I can assure you: spurious social commentary in ‘Machines’, slight Fred ballad via ‘Is This The World We Created...?’, and even a nip of the old Brian May metal with the excellent ‘Hammer To Fall’.”

1984 also saw the band immerse themselves in producing videos for the album’s singles, a project Roger disliked: “Now you’ve gotta make a mini-film! And often it’s more expensive, and the record doesn’t always suit the visual medium.” When asked about the danger of video depriving the listener of their own imagination, Roger responded, “It can in a way. That was something that ‘Radio Ga Ga’ was about: you
used to make your own pictures in your mind, but now there’s a video, and you immediately think of those visual ideas that have already been thought of by somebody else.” John was more optimistic: “It’s a very important aspect of a group. And we’ve also all changed our looks over the years, but it’s something that I don’t tend to get involved with as much as the others.”