Queen: The Complete Works (25 page)

In terms of unreleased songs, there were plenty to make collectors happy. ‘Self-Made Man’, ‘My Secret Fantasy’ and ‘Robbery’ (written, respectively, by Brian, John and Roger) have been widely circulated since first being heard at the Queen Fan Club Convention in 2000, while a fourth track, a ten-minute epic titled ‘Face It Alone’ and written by Freddie, had eluded casual fans, until it finally emerged in 2011. Apart from ‘New Dark Ages’, an early version of Roger’s 1994 solo track ‘Freedom Train’ was also worked on during these sessions, as well as a rumoured track titled ‘Assassin’, the existence of which has been questioned for years, although Queen’s archivist Greg Brooks has stated it definitely exists. ‘Lost Opportunity’, long believed to be an outtake from the
Innuendo
sessions, was actually recorded in January 1991 at Freddie’s insistence to record songs for B-sides.

“We went to Switzerland, where we have our own little studio,” Roger explained, “and worked there with
co-producer Dave Richards for a couple of weeks just to see what came out. That’s usually what we do. We often find it’s very good to play together without too many fixed ideas to begin with. We very seldom have a lot of material when we go into the studio – there are ideas but they don’t actually get formed until we get to work on it. We usually have two or three days just playing, finding sounds, getting the feel of each other again. We keep the multitrack running and seem to find that there’s little bits that really seem to gel.”

One of the jams that was deemed worthwhile became the title track and, although a jam suggests spontaneity, the resultant ‘Innuendo’ was polished up into an epic reminiscent of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ and ‘The Prophets Song’. Indeed, the band as a collective unit may have realized the mistakes of
The Miracle
and decided to rectify them on their new album. Certainly, the sessions took over a year to complete, though, as Roger explained to Rockline syndicated radio in 1991, “What we’d do is we’d go into the studio, work for about three weeks and take two weeks off. The album was really a happy album to make – they’re not all happy. It sort of wrote itself. We didn’t have any problems with it at all, and I think it shows in the end result. The material has depth and maturity to it, and it just runs well, I think, and in some ways it does remind us of the
A Night At The Opera
days.”

“It’s quite a complex album,” Brian said in 1991. “Some of the tracks are more along the lines of the mid-period stuff we did, like
A Night At The Opera
, where there’s a lot of overdubs and complexity. It just takes a long time – you can’t take short cuts.”

The twelve songs do indeed hark back to the style presented on their 1975 masterwork: ‘Innuendo’ is very much a carbon copy of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, while ‘I’m Going Slightly Mad’ and ‘Delilah’ represent the lighter, care-free numbers like ‘Lazing On A Sunday Afternoon’ and ‘Seaside Rendezvous’. Surprisingly, rock songs are back in full force, with ‘Headlong’, ‘The Hitman’, ‘Ride The Wild Wind’ and even ‘I Can’t Live With You’ reminding the fans of a yesteryear when Queen weren’t afraid to rock. “I think it’s the best [album] for quite a long time,” Brian told
Vox
in 1991. “There’s nothing I’m embarrassed about. Often you put out an album and you think, ‘But I wish we’d done this.’ This one I feel quite happy about, and I can listen to it without any problems. I like it a lot. I think it’s nicely complex and nicely heavy, and there’s a lot of invention on there.”

One element happily absent from this album was the disco sound Queen had employed on all their LPs since
Jazz
. There weren’t any immediately groovy songs – not on the same level as, say, ‘Another One Bites The Dust’ or
Hot Space
– and drum-machines were used only minimally, the band preferring to work as a collective whole for the first time in many years. “As much as possible, we’ve done it live in the studio, with three or four of us playing at one time,” Brian told
Vox
. “There’s a fair bit of new technology. Sometimes we would start off by programming something and working around it, but in almost every case we replaced original material with real stuff as we went along. With the digital [recording] gear you can allow yourself to do that more freely, because if you make copies you don’t lose quality. What I’ve always said about digital is that you can preserve the ‘liveness’. In the old days, you would say, ‘That’s very nice as a demo, but we’ll now do it properly.’ Now, you can say, ‘That’s great as a demo; we’ll use this piece and incorporate it into the finished product.’ So you use the first take of a vocal, for instance, and it’s there, sparkling and clear on the final mix.”

‘I Can’t Live With You’ was built around the demo, and Roger was entirely absent from the recording, which ruffled enough feathers a few years later to warrant the drummer persisting in having another go at it for the
Queen Rocks
compilation, while the first-take vocal of ‘The Show Must Go On’ was used on the final recording, producing a fresh feel that had been noticeably lacking on previous albums.

Unsurprisingly, the lyrical themes were more melancholy and poignant than before. Freddie had told the band during the sessions that he was dying of AIDS and, though shocking to all three, he insisted that business remain as usual and that his condition not be brought up again. Inevitably, there’s less jubilation and carelessness in the words, and the band sound far more mature than they ever have before. Freddie, meanwhile, sounds completely committed to what he’s trying to convey, though, true to form, he graces some of the more serious moments with humour – as on ‘I’m Going Slightly Mad’, a song possibly inspired by AIDS-related dementia.

Despite the inevitable black cloud regarding Freddie’s health, the album was still an enjoyable one to make, partly because of the writing process (“I think, more than anything,
Innuendo
shows evidence of the four of us consciously trying to use each other to the maximum and writing together,” Brian said) but mostly because of the renewed enthusiasm of their US
record company. Queen’s history with both Elektra and Capitol was not harmonious, starting off on a high note but quickly deteriorating into apathy (Elektra) or neglect (Capitol). The band negotiated their way out of their Capitol contract and started to shop around for a superior deal; in a neat bit of irony, Elektra made an offer, though Queen weren’t willing to play that game again. Rykodisc was also a prime candidate, though that record company specialized more in back catalogue discographies (especially for the likes of David Bowie, Frank Zappa and Jimi Hendrix) and not in new releases. While negotiations with Rykodisc were initially positive, in the end, the best and biggest offer came from Hollywood Records, a branch of the Walt Disney corporation, reportedly offering around £10,000,000 for the rights to Queen’s back catalogue and any new music. The band signed with them in September 1990, and plans were set in motion for a major campaign to signal the band’s official twentieth anniversary the next year.

“We’re very, very happy to be with [Hollywood Records],” Brian said on Rockline, “and I don’t think we’ve ever been so close to a record company in our lives. They have a very good attitude – very open – and it corresponds to our way of doing things. They always want to do things different, they don’t want to do anything through the established channels. Up until now, I think we’ve benefited more in the last two or three months of being with Hollywood than the last five years anywhere else. It’s a great relationship.”

Whether this deal remained rosy in the end is a matter of opinion, but Hollywood did do a good job of reinstating Queen in the charts: when
Innuendo
was released in February 1991, it went gold in the US, a result that thrilled the band. To assist with sales, Hollywood threw a lavish party aboard the Queen Mary (Disney-owned and moored in concrete in Long Beach, California), attended only by Brian and Roger from Queen itself. Back home, the album peaked at No. 1 (no surprise, since the band’s every studio album since
The Works
had soared effortlessly into the top position), but Queen were now more focused on their status in the States. Instead of issuing ‘Innuendo’ as the first single, ‘Headlong’ became the premier single of the album, reaching an impressive No. 3 in the rock radio charts. ‘Innuendo’ followed in March, reaching No. 17, while ‘I Can’t Live With You’ peaked at No. 28 in June.

It was clear that the band were once again in tune with their American audiences, though, for the record, none of the
Innuendo
singles charted at all in the Billboard Top 200. To assist with promotion, Brian (and eventually Roger) travelled Stateside to conduct a series of radio interviews. These elicited great enthusiasm from fans, who called in to ask when the band would be back on the road. The party line remained that Freddie still didn’t feel up to a tour, but Brian promised on Rockline that “the signs look good. But we still have to persuade Freddie that he actually wants to be here.”

The reviews were typically caustic at home.
The Times
once again trashed a Queen album, saying, “In twenty years Queen have lost none of their appetite for music of the most grandiose banality.
Innuendo
, the album, is kitsch on a boggling scale. It recognizes few frontiers of style, let alone barriers of taste, as it sweeps from mock-flamenco interludes in the title track through Muppet-style heavy metal in ‘Hitman’ to the pseudo-spiritual lilt of ‘All God’s People’ ... Only once does the burlesque pause long enough to reveal a human heart at work. ‘These Are The Days Of Our Lives’, a shamelessly soppy, middle-aged paean to the passing of youth, is a song which will touch a chord with the more mellow breed of Queen fan and possibly even beyond.”
Vox
wasn’t impressed either: “Queen have survived the changes since their debut in the days of glam better than any of their contemporaries. And, by and large, they survived by not giving a monkey’s what anybody else was doing. However, their pop sensibility, quirkiness and sense of humour are largely missing here. After the title track you get ‘I’m Going Slightly Mad’, a pleasant enough refrain, and it’s followed by ‘Headlong’, an ode to blasting down the highway with no particular place to go. But this is the sort of thing Dave Edmunds could do in his sleep; unfortunately, Queen sound like they are asleep. Even given the lush, chocolate-box production that drenches this album like syrup, you’d think they’d realize that rockabilly requires a bit of rough.”

In North America, with so much riding on the album, the critics were equally unimpressed.
Rolling Stone
gave
Innuendo
a thrashing, calling it “so lightweight you’ll forget it as soon as it’s over – which, with this band, should go without saying”, adding, however, that “there’s nothing cynical about it” and “these old entertainers sound like they’ve decided to stop trying so hard, like they’re finally satisfied with their lot in life.” Baton Rouge’s
The Advocate
seethed xenophobic: “What bombast. What vocals. What a bunch of pretentious twits ... The recording
quality is fantastic. It should be nominated for next year’s Grammys in the category of ‘Best Engineered Recording By A Pretentious Bunch Of Twits’. English twits, at that.” “Queen’s third album since its albums stopped going gold (
The Works
being the last) is attracting the type of attention the band hasn’t experienced in quite a while,”
The Dallas Morning News
wrote. “Unfortunately,
Innuendo
does little more than serve as a reminder of why interest waned. The theatrical pomposity of Freddie Mercury’s over-tracked vocals, the metallic noodlings of Brian May’s guitar, the operatically sprawling arrangements, the lyrical twaddle, all the signifying extravagances of the Queen sound remain intact and omnipresent through songs like the title track. At the center is the breathy cooing of Mr. Mercury. If he isn’t singing a love song to his cat (highlighted by Mr. May’s meowing, cat-scratch guitar), he is burbling on that ‘I’m Going Slightly Mad’. The band can work up some undiluted momentum (as on ‘The Hitman’), but the relentlessly anthemic grandiosity of Queen’s approach generates all the passion and intensity of a
Flash Gordon
sequel.”

Some reviews were actually positive, with
People Weekly
opining, “Queen is to rock and roll what the comic-book
Superman
is to Nietzsche’s Superman: one big rock ’em-sock ’em, colorful, way-larger-than-life, out-of-control exaggeration of an exaggeration. With its craving for overproduced musical bombast that crashes through your speakers like the Man of Steel bursting through a brick wall, Queen would never be called a subtle group. Still, as easy as it is to make fun of this sort of overbearing stuff,
Innuendo
is so over-the-top it’s enjoyable. The album is a homecoming of sorts for Queen, a return to the mid-’70s glory days of such tunes as the infamous ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. The band’s recent releases have pursued a more mainstream rock route with zero success, so it’s nice to hear this reversion to the old exaggerated ways ... If this is cartoon rock and roll, at least it’s good and brazenly cartoonish.” “The boys are back with a lot less pomp this time,”
The Cincinnati Post
proclaimed. “Freddie Mercury still has a taste for luridly melodramatic vocals, but rockers like ‘Headlong’ and ‘Ride the Wild Wind’ make up for it. For old fans, there are plenty of the group’s trademark chorale vocals and headphone-mixed sounds, but Mercury’s ballad [
sic
], ‘These Are The Days Of Our Lives’, actually sounds restrained.” The
LA Times
was less complimentary: “Given the bombast and harsh assault of Queen’s biggest hits, it’s a shock to find that the heart of the British quartet’s sixteenth album,
Innuendo
, is made of soft, sweet, sticky, sentimental goo ... It’s typical Queen, full of theatrical sound and fury with massed choruses of whooshing voices and treated guitars, all huff and puff. You know, the sort of bollocks the Sex Pistols quite rightly told us to never mind.” The
St. Petersburg Times
was more positive: “With
Innuendo
, the band’s twelfth studio album, Queen attempts to reacquaint itself with record buyers. Most of the songs have a nineties feel while maintaining that distinctive sound. ‘I Can’t Live With You’, with its blaring four-part harmonies, could be an outtake from the classic album
Jazz
, but it still sounds fresh.”