Queen: The Complete Works (49 page)

DEAR MR MURDOCH
(Taylor)

• Album (Roger):
Happiness?
• CD single (Roger): 9/98 [45] • Download (Roger): 7/11

During the final years of Freddie’s life, he was constantly hounded by the tabloid papers, whose representatives camped out on his lawn awaiting a photo opportunity of the ailing vocalist while printing ludicrous statements in the dailies about his health. Roger took particular exception to
The Sun
, a paper owned by Rupert Murdoch, the controversial media mogul who also possessed a stranglehold over Fox television. At the end of Freddie’s life, the papers were still scrounging for outrageous and scandalous stories to print, forcing Roger to write an answer in the form of ‘Dear Mr Murdoch’.

Not since the days of ‘Death On Two Legs’ has any member of Queen sounded so vitriolic – compared to ‘Dear Mr Murdoch’, Freddie’s 1975 ode to their former managers sounds like a love song. The song was originally written for an aborted fourth album by The Cross, though a version was rumoured to have been worked on during sessions for
Blue Rock
in 1991; thankfully, the song wasn’t explored any further, causing Roger’s emotions to fester until he couldn’t take it any more. “I thought it was a gross intrusion on [Freddie’s] privacy,” Roger seethed at the time. “I felt outraged that his house was surrounded by these vultures when he was basically trying to die in peace.” Considered too personal for a Cross album, the song was abandoned and later resurrected for
Happiness?
.

Set to a slow, dirge-like backing, particular emphasis is given to Roger’s voice, which alternates between a slow, hissing calm and an angrier tone by means of a vocal processor (a similar effect was used on several songs from
Happiness?
in the live setting). The lyrics read like an open letter, as Roger lists several of Murdoch’s “accomplishments”, concluding that he’s polluting the world with his “jingoist lingo” and “nipples and bingo and sex crimes.”

As with most of
Happiness?
, the song is performed almost exclusively by Roger, though the minimal guitar work is courtesy of Jason Falloon. ‘Dear Mr Murdoch’ featured live on early dates of the
Happiness?
tour in 1994, and was even more relevant in September 1998 when it was revealed that Murdoch was proposing a takeover of Manchester United by way of BSkyB. Roger not only supported the Independent Manchester Supporters Association by donating start-up funds of £10,000, he also released a special edition of ‘Pressure On’ with ‘Dear Mr Murdoch’ as part of the release.

DEATH ON TWO LEGS

(DEDICATED TO ......
(Mercury)

• Album:
Opera
• EP:
First EP
• Live:
Killers
• CD Single: 11/88

Queen’s legal troubles in the latter part of 1974 and most of 1975 were well publicized at the time. Unfortunately, as Brian put it, the band discovered that they were “virtually penniless” despite all those successful records and tours. Freddie was especially angry, and wrote the scathing ‘Death On Two Legs (Dedicated to ......’ in the autumn of 1975 as a two-fingered salute to Norman and Barry Sheffield, who had been depriving the band of their hard-earned money. “‘Death On Two Legs’ was the most vicious lyric I ever wrote,” he told
Circus
magazine in 1977. “It’s so vindictive that Brian felt bad singing it. I don’t like to explain what I was thinking when I wrote a song. I think that’s awful, just awful. When I’m dead, I want to be remembered as a musician of some worth and substance.”

The track, originally titled ‘Psycho Legs’, was the cause of a lawsuit when Trident Productions saw red: despite no specific mention of Queen’s management, the Sheffields concluded that it was about them, and a slanderous dedication at best. Queen were taken to court, tying up the band’s intentions to work on
their fourth album (“It affects your morale,” Brian moaned to
Sounds
in 1975. “It dries you up completely ... We couldn’t write at all that summer.”), while a re-recording of ‘Keep Yourself Alive’ from July 1975, intended for a US-exclusive single release, got tied up in the legal issues, and was abandoned. The lawsuit was settled out of court, with a £100,000 severance and one percent royalties on Queen’s subsequent six albums.

With some gorgeous harmonies and an acidic vocal performance from Freddie, ‘Death On Two Legs (Dedicated to ......’ is an early highlight and gets the band’s pivotal fourth album off to a gleefully vicious start. The song appeared on
Queen’s First EP
in May 1977 and became a live favourite, played for the first time that same month, and becoming a regular part of the medley between late 1977 and 1981, but was dropped before the second leg of the Gluttons For Punishment tour – intriguingly, at the same time that the Sheffields’ one percent deal as part of their severance ended.

DEEP RIDGE

In the summer of 2004, an alleged confidant of Brian ‘revealed’ that
Queen II
was originally meant to feature thirteen songs instead of eleven, and that the demo recordings of all the songs were to appear on the still-unreleased anthology box sets. The tipster named the two extra unreleased recordings as ‘Deep Ridge’, reportedly written by Brian, and ‘Surrender To The City’, written by Freddie. While the existence of these two songs is unlikely, it still paints an interesting image of Queen fans with little else to do but make up stories about tracks that don’t exist. However, if ‘Deep Ridge’ and ‘Surrender To The City’ do exist, then I shall be the first in line to eat my hat.

DELILAH
(Queen)

• Album:
Innuendo

Freddie was living on borrowed time by the time sessions for
Innuendo
were underway, but he knew that the band were making one of their finest albums since the days of
A Night At The Opera
. That’s why ‘Delilah’ sits at odds beside the other finely produced and arranged tracks: much like ‘All God’s People’, this song sounds like a demo with additional guitar overdubs from Brian. Though ‘Delilah’ is a quirkily playful ode to Freddie’s cat of the same name (thereby becoming the first and only Queen song to directly reference urination, albeit of the feline variety), the overall sound is tinny and out of place among the rest of the album.
Innuendo
would have survived without it.

DINER
(May)

• Soundtrack (Brian):
Furia

Another sombre keyboard piece from the Furia soundtrack, ‘Diner’ lasts just over one minute and, like some of the other shorter pieces on the album, serves merely as incidental music. It’s also one of the few pieces to end with dialogue from the film.

DIRTY MIND
(Edney)

• Album (The Cross):
Blue
• Live (The Cross):
Germany

‘Dirty Mind’ tackles the embarrassing topic of lust, which can be tolerable if handled right, but considering that Roger was just about to turn forty-two, with Spike not too far behind, the song is cringe-inducing as Roger screams, “I want a lover with a dirty mind!” One plus is that it returns the band to its rock roots, making it an acceptable addition to The Cross’ set list in 1991, with a live version appearing on the 1992 Fan Club-only bootleg,
Live In Germany
.

DOES YOUR CHEWING GUM LOSE ITS FLAVOUR?

(Donegan)

An interesting rendition by an apparently double-tracked Brian (though it may be a duet with an unknown musician), the recording origins of Lonnie Donegan’s ‘Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavour?’ are uncertain, but the evidence – or what little there is of it – seems to point to the early 1990s.

DOG WITH A BONE
(Queen)

Two versions of this interesting blues track exist, both recorded on 15 April 1988: the first is a “straightforward” recording, clocking in at under five minutes, while the second version is extended past six minutes and includes an in-song greeting from each band member to Fan Club members who attended the 1988 Fan Club convention. Though ‘Dog With A Bone’ was never intended for
The Miracle
, the preliminary sessions from which this song originates, it would have been a fun diversion as a B-side release, but its uniqueness to the Queen Fan Club remains special – so much so that it still has yet to surface on an official release.

DOING ALL RIGHT
(May/Staffell)

• Album:
Queen
• Compilation:
BBC
• CD Single: 6/96 [9] • Compilation (Smile):
Ghost Of A Smile

When Queen started work on their debut album in the summer of 1972, the Brian May/Tim Staffell co-write from Smile ‘Doin’ Alright’ was a well established live favourite by this time, and was deemed worthy enough to sit alongside newer compositions. (“It never struck me as a particularly brilliant song,” Tim Staffell later said, “though the royalties did help out in a bind!”) Set over a delicate piano introduction, played by Brian, and a gorgeous vocal from Freddie, ‘Doing All Right’ (as it was retitled) soon turns into a fully-fledged rocker, with The Red Special in great form, reverting to a ballad for the conclusion. The harmonies are perfect, and the band performance is a major accomplishment considering their infancy.

A version for the BBC was recorded on 5 February 1973 and released on
Queen At The Beeb
in 1989, though the actual performance uses the album backing track with a re-recorded vocal. This performance is unique in that Roger sings the last verse, providing a stark, harsher contrast to Freddie’s angelic tones.

DON’T LOSE YOUR HEAD
(Taylor)

• Album:
AKOM

An exercise in the banal, synth-pop dreck that clogged up the charts in the mid-1980s, Roger’s abysmal ‘Don’t Lose Your Head’ only further confirms that, while the singles on
A Kind Of Magic
are outstanding, the remaining songs remain unknown for a reason. The majority of the song is repetitive, especially the lyrics, which are directly related to the
Highlander
film, but, on another level, urge love-torn couples to keep cool in tense situations. Brian and John have been pushed to the side in favour of a tinny-sounding synthesizer, while the programmed drums threaten to overpower a strong vocal performance from Freddie that is the only saving grace of the song. Joan Armatrading assists on vocals, but her contribution is minimal, begging the question: why did she bother?

Incidentally, the line “Don’t drink and drive my car / Don’t get breathalysed” was inspired by a drunk driving incident in 1985 involving the mild-mannered John and a Porsche. The bassist, who normally fancied Volvos, bought a Porsche for himself and visited Phil Collins at one of his London concerts. The two went out to celebrate afterwards, and when John was pulled over on the way home, the officer gave him a sobriety test, which he failed, earning John an expensive ticket. ‘Don’t Lose Your Head’ quite rightly faded into obscurity, only to be released as the B-side of the US issue of ‘Pain Is So Close To Pleasure’ in August 1986, and on the European ‘One Year Of Love’ single that October.

DON’T SAY NO
: see
BANANA BLUES

DON’T STOP ME NOW
(Mercury)

• Album:
Jazz
• A-side: 1/79 [9] • Live:
Killers

• CD Single: 6/96 [9] • Bonus:
Jazz

After hiding behind little ditties and songs of faeries, ogres and bicycles, Freddie wrote a thinly-veiled autobiographical song that would sadly be overshadowed by his other achievements. ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’ is, perhaps, the vocalist’s finest song, a joyous call to arms for fellow partygoers everywhere, and is a highlight of the
Jazz
album. Brian, for once, wasn’t convinced: “It’s very much Freddie’s pop side and I remember thinking, ‘I’m not quite sure if this is what we should be doing.’ I think there was also a feeling that it lyrically represented something that was happening to Freddie which we kind of thought was threatening him, and probably it was in a sense. But having said that,” he conceded, “it’s full of joy and optimism...” It very well may also have been the decided lack of guitar that got under Brian’s skin, though this was rectified with the emergence of a long-lost guitar mix from the sessions, duly released on the 2011 reissue of
Jazz
.

When issued as a single in January 1979 with John’s ‘In Only Seven Days’ as the B-side, it became a Top Ten hit, peaking at No. 9 and charting higher than ‘Fat Bottomed Girls’ / ‘Bicycle Race’ had in October 1978. The American release, coming a month later with Roger’s ‘More Of That Jazz’ as the flip, peaked at a disappointing No. 86. Accompanied by a standard performance video directed by Dennis DeVallance and shot during soundchecks in Brussels on 26 January 1979, the single became a fan and live favourite, and was performed at every date on the
Jazz
European and Japanese tours, as well as during the
Crazy
tour and
Crazy
tour of London in late 1979, but was dropped by the following year. In 2005, viewers of
Top Gear
voted ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’ as “The Greatest Driving Song Ever”, and co-host James May duly flew out to Sardinia to present Roger with an award (“The cheapest, nastiest trophy they could find”).

DON’T TRY SO HARD
(Queen)

• Album:
Innuendo

A melancholy chaser to the joyful ‘I Can’t Live With You’, ‘Don’t Try So Hard’ is a fantastic and underrated ballad featuring a magnificent vocal from Freddie. Debate has raged as to the actual writer of the song: rumours circulated for years that John was the creator, while David Richards recently revealed that the song was the work of Brian and Freddie. Nobody from the band has responded, so until an official confirmation from Brian or anyone else comes forth, it will remain a Queen composition with a question mark.

The message of the song is not to reach too far for success, as “it’s only fools [who] make these rules.” With an understated instrumental performance, atmospheric use of keyboards, and otherworldly vocal performance from Freddie, ‘Don’t Try So Hard’ is a fantastic latter-day Queen song, truly one of the most outstanding non-single album tracks to have been written since the late 1970s, when the emphasis was on presenting an album as a cohesive piece instead of as a collection of songs. The UK vinyl release featured the song after ‘Delilah’ on the second side, with ten seconds inconsequentially edited out.