Queen: The Complete Works (46 page)

BUSINESS
(May)

• A-side (Brian): 5/98 [51] • Album (Brian):
World

One of Brian’s hardest rockers, ‘Business’ features a great drum performance by the late Cozy Powell, and as the song chugs along at full throttle it allows Brian ample opportunities for guitar solos. The lyrics aren’t the strongest that Brian ever wrote, but his voice has certainly matured since his first album six years previously and his performance is credible. The song had a rather convoluted birthing process: in 1993, Brian was asked to provide the theme music for Frank Stubbs Promotes, a British TV show about a down-on-his-luck promoter coming to terms with his lot in life. Shown on ITV, the show ran between 1993 and 1994 but was ultimately cancelled due to poor ratings. ‘Business’, or ‘Hard Business’ as it was initially known, was provided as the theme music, and, listening to the original versions, it sounds as if little had changed between the first recorded version and the final version in 1998.

Released as the first single from
Another World
in May 1998, ‘Business’ peaked at No. 51 in the UK, despite considerable promotion and a special edition release featuring a pictorial and audio tribute to Cozy Powell, who died in a car accident on 5 April, merely weeks away before rehearsals for the upcoming
Another World
tour. Retitled ‘The Business (Rock On Cozy Mix)’, the single opened with Cozy’s isolated drum parts before kicking into the normal version, albeit slightly edited, and concluding with a thirty-second drum solo taken from
Live At The Brixton Academy
. Also included on the CD single was a track titled ‘Brian Talks’, which was Brian talking about Cozy, concluding with: “Cozy, if you’re listening, you were the best, and we all know it, and God rest you, mate – we love you.”

A specially enhanced section was also included on the single, which featured the song intercut with Brian talking about the genesis of the song and also Cozy’s death. “‘Business’ started off as the theme for a TV series, and all they wanted was little bits, so I did little bits first, but there was a complete song in my head,” Brian explained. “So eventually we put it all together, and Cozy was a big part of that. [He] would come in at a certain point, after I had programmed it and sorted it all out, you know, bits of arrangement, Cozy would come in and say, ‘Ah, yeah, yeah, I see what you mean’, and he would do his thing, and then suddenly the thing would start to come to life, because that’s a human thing. You can programme until you’re blue in the face, you know, but you never get that sort of thing that comes from real people interacting. Cozy would always be a great energy source, and I’m gonna miss him terribly, you know. He was a big part of most of the tracks on this album. It’s something which stirs your guts in, in a particular way, and you know, to see Cozy hit those things, you felt something, you know, it wasn’t just hitting things in time, it was like everything had a certain menace to it and a certain joy. Cozy was very up, very funny.”

BUTTERFLY

During the In The Studio segment of
The Magic Years
, Brian is seen (and heard) fiddling around on a piano, playing a variation on the chords from ‘Save Me’. When asked later what the name of that song was, he vaguely recalled it was called ‘Butterfly’, but it’s likely that a more complete version does not exist.

BYE BYE BIRD
(Dixon/Williamson)

This Willie Dixon song, covered by The Moody Blues and Eric Clapton, was played live by 1984.

C-LEBRITY
(Taylor/May/Rodgers)

• A-side (Q+PR): 9/08 [33] • Album (Q+PR):
Cosmos

• Live (Q+PR):
Ukraine

Queen gained the ire of critics in their formative years, having not only songs that aped the crunch-and-swagger of Led Zeppelin, but also rising quickly through the ranks with what appeared to be a minimum of effort. Instead of slogging around clubs
and pubs twelve months a year, building a loyal following, and then finally getting their big break after years of hard work, the band’s early shows were more infrequent, with at least Brian and John still uncertain that they would really “go” anywhere, while Freddie and Roger had more faith in their talents. Still, their collective focus wasn’t on progressing the band but on securing their futures through academics, while occasionally performing a gig or two to test the waters. Once music became the primary focus, however, they had attracted the attentions of record labels and studios alike, and their big break with ‘Seven Seas Of Rhye’ was a fluke: David Bowie dropped out of a
Top Of The Pops
appearance, and Queen were drafted as a back-up. The rest, of course, is history.

Fast forward thirty-five years after the release of Queen’s debut album, and the climate had changed drastically. Pop stars were created on television, their advancement determined by a panel of curmudgeonly record moguls and washed-up, drugged-out former musicians, and their success chosen by a call- or text-in campaign. Their fifteen minutes of fame would be drawn out over a few months, with the aftershock lasting only until their first record arrived, by which time, a new series had begun and the world moved on to the next Big Thing.

Roger, ever the outspoken wag, channelled his disbelief of instant success and media manipulation into ‘C-Lebrity’, a bitter recrimination on these fame-hungered stars. “It’s to do with the phenomenon of celebrity culture,” Roger told
Classic Rock
, “the desperation to get your face on the telly. The assumption that if somebody becomes famous they’ll also be rich is so naïve. It annoys me that there are so many famous, useless people.” Having once said his biggest fear was to become “old, rich and useless”, ‘C-Lebrity’ is a fitting diatribe from Roger, but his own status as a multi-millionaire who hadn’t created anything of worth (subjectivity notwithstanding) since 1998 – the last time he released an album’s worth of new songs – is more than a little hypocritical. Still, regardless of Queen’s own quick rise to fame, they worked hard to maintain their status and commercial standing, whereas contemporary stars are a one-and-done deal, and that no matter how good their follow-up albums may be, the fickle nature of the general public assures their success is ephemeral. “I think it’s an interesting lyrical idea, which came from Roger,” Brian said on the
Bob & Tom Show
in 2008. “It was his kind of comment on the ... yeah, the cult of personality, I suppose, and the cult of fame for its own sake, which to us is a very alien concept. I don’t think it really makes people very happy but it’s taken over the world for a little while.”

With a gritty guitar riff, a thundering drum performance, and a stop-start rhythm, ‘C-Lebrity’ is a welcome return to the rock ‘n’ roll sound so sorely lacking on latter-day Queen albums. Even Brian, who sounds like he’s sleepwalking through a lot of
The Cosmos Rocks
(and probably didn’t appreciate the less than subtle jab at the
We Will Rock You
musical), sounds convinced, his vocal harmonies just as prominent as Roger’s, with Taylor Hawkins also helping out – the only outside musician to assist on the album. Paul, meanwhile, is committed enough, but his leonine roar is wasted on the trivial lyrics, which might have been better suited for Roger’s voice. Despite its lyrical drawbacks, though, ‘C-Lebrity’ is a fine rocker, and rightly released as the lead single from the album in September 2008. While it reached No. 1 in the UK Rock Chart, it peaked at a respectable No. 33 in the UK singles charts, though it was inexplicably premiered five months before its release on the series two finale of Al Murray’s
Happy Hour
. This remained the only heavy promotion the single received, with its TV appearance serving as its promotional video – confirming that either the band had little confidence in the song to waste money on a video no one would watch (a drastic assumption), or that, more realistically, they believed success was a given in name recognition alone. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case, and the relative failure of ‘C-Lebrity’ was further ammunition for detractors and critics of the endeavour.

The song earned a well-deserved spot in the 2008
Rock The Cosmos
tour, and, along with ‘Cosmos Rockin” and ‘Say It’s Not True’, was performed at every show.

CALL ME
(Rodgers/May/Taylor)

• Album (Q+PR):
Cosmos

Harking back to the lighter margins of
Sheer Heart Attack
and
A Night At The Opera
, Paul’s ‘Call Me’ was praised by Roger as having a “sort of spontaneous spontaneity about it”. Laid down in one take, with Paul on acoustic guitar and Roger on drums, before Brian overdubbed a suitably over-the-top Red Special solo, the song serves as a refreshing chaser to the weightier ‘We Believe’, but just don’t try to pull it apart for any deeper meanings.

Stuck for a third single to promote the album, both ‘Call Me’ and ‘We Believe’ were serious contenders, with
promotional discs released to radio late in October 2008. Considering the other strong single-worthy material on the album, ‘Call Me’ was a surprising choice, but in the end it didn’t matter; no single was released commercially, hinting at increasing tensions between the three primary musicians while on the 2008
Rock The Cosmos
tour, and the world was deprived of a physical release of a song that contains little other than “Call me if you need my love” repeated twenty-one more times.

CALLING ALL GIRLS
(Taylor)

• Album:
Space
• Bonus:
Space

The second of Roger’s songs for
Hot Space
is this energetic new wave rocker about the discovery of love. While ‘Action This Day’ was the sole song on
Hot Space
to successfully combine funk with rock and not make it sound totally removed from Queen’s sound, ‘Calling All Girls’ proved that Roger had one ear to the current trends, and that new wave, while a passing fad, had kept his interest in faster songs alight. Not content with having played everything on his debut solo album, Roger played guitar on the song, which Brian confirmed in a 1982
On The Record
interview: “I think Roger did the feedback tracks near the end of the break. You never know where things come from. Roger played a lot of guitar. He’s always bursting to play guitar.” Released as a US-only single in July 1982, two days before the band’s North American tour started, the song peaked at an abysmal No. 60, despite being heavily featured in the set list. A live version from a November 1982 performance in Tokyo was released both on
Greatest Video Hits 2
in 2003 and again in 2011 on the reissue of
Hot Space
.

The song was accompanied by an interesting promotional video, directed by Brian Grant and filmed at the same time as ‘Back Chat’. Taking a cue from George Lucas’ first film,
THX-1138
, the video shows the band in a robot-dominated society as Freddie cavorts with his lover, an attractive young female, only to be thrown in a cell by the robots. It’s up to Brian, Roger, and John to rescue their friend, and the humans band together to destroy the robots and save civilization. Roger, on viewing the video over twenty years later, was bewildered as to its meaning, wondering why such a complex idea was given to a simple song about love. Despite his criticisms, though, it really is a fine video, and is a welcome departure from the traditional performance videos the band usually filmed.

CAN’T BE SO SAD
(Miller/Stevenson)

Moby Grape’s 1968 obscurity was performed live by Smile.

CAN’T GET ENOUGH
(Ralphs)

• Live (Q+PR):
Return

Originally released on Bad Company’s 1974 self-titled debut album, ‘Can’t Get Enough’ was released as that band’s first single and immediately became a hit. It’s not surprising, then, that Brian, Roger, Paul Rodgers and the 2005 touring band performed the song in their set lists, giving a typical Queen-like treatment to Rodgers’ distinctive vocals, turning Queen into a barroom blues band if only for a few minutes.

CANCER ON MY MIND
(Bulsara)

Another track written by Freddie, the song was part of the set lists of Wreckage’s live appearances, with two known performances on 26 and 31 October 1969 at Ealing College Of Art.

CELEBRATION

Rumors of the origin of this song bounce back and forth between it being an outtake from either
Strange Frontier
in 1983 or
Shove It
in 1987. The evidence in favour of both of these rumours is strong: it was included on a test pressing acetate of
Strange Frontier
, purchased in 1986, while Clayton Moss confirmed that it was written largely by Spike Edney, with outro vocal assistance from Peter Noone. Thus, no definitive answer can be given; whatever its origins, ‘Celebration’ is a strong composition, and didn’t deserve to be relegated to unreleased status.

CHAINS
(Goffin/King)

Originally performed by The Cookies, but later covered by The Beatles, this Gerry Goffin / Carole King song was played live by 1984.

CHINA BELLE
(May)

• Album (Brian):
World

Unlike
Back To The Light
,
Another World
featured more hard rock songs, and ‘China Belle’ is an interesting amalgamation of rock and humour that introduced a
lighter quality to the loftier songs on Brian’s second album. Starting off with a rollicking piano and guitar duet, the song kicks into high gear with some truly great drum and bass work from Cozy Powell and Neil Murray respectively. Brian’s guitar work is inspired and detailed, as expected; with a hint of Far East sound and humorous lyrics, it was presumably about a Chinese ‘lady of the night’, though Brian wouldn’t confirm this.

CHINESE TORTURE
(Queen)

• Bonus:
Miracle

Included as a bonus track on the CD version of
The Miracle
, ‘Chinese Torture’ started as a multi-tracked studio jam by Brian, and ended up as a released track thanks to Freddie’s enthusiasm. The composition is essentially an instrumental showcase for The Red Special and a harmony pedal, and would have been an ideal solo piece (even a perfect, atmospheric concert opener) if the band had toured in 1989.