Queen: The Complete Works (66 page)

Bleeding over from the previous track, ‘Party’, the song isn’t exactly a highlight of
The Miracle
but is a welcome return to hard rock that would, unfortunately, be in a minority on the album. With all of the superior material recorded during sessions for
The Miracle
, ‘Khashoggi’s Ship’ would have been better suited as a B-side.

KILLER QUEEN
(Mercury)

• AA-side: 10/74 [2] • Album:
SHA
• B-side: 9/86 [24] • CD Single: 11/88 • CD Single: 10/95 [2] • Live:
Killers, Montreal

This paean to a high-class call girl combines witty lyrics with a jaunty melody, creating a fusion of sounds unheard of on the radio at the time: with Roxy Music and David Bowie cornering the glam rock market, and Pink Floyd and Yes going off on extended progressive rock journeys, the pure pop charts were in danger of being muddled by flash-in-the-pan, expendable drones like Gary Glitter, David Essex, Disco-Tex and the Sex-O-Lettes, and The Osmonds cluttering up prime real estate. (Essex’s ‘Gonna Make You A Star’ was the No. 1 single in November 1974, keeping ‘Killer Queen’ from achieving an all-important top spot.) Brian was concerned that the song would be too commercial, telling
Guitar For The Practicing Musician
in 1993, “When we put out ‘Killer Queen’, everybody thought it was the most commercial. I was worried that people would put us in a category where they thought we were doing something light.
Sheer Heart Attack
was, in my mind, quite heavy and dirty, and ‘Killer Queen’ was the lightest and cleanest track, and I was worried about putting it out. But when I heard it on the radio I thought, ‘It’s a well-made record and I’m proud of it, so it doesn’t really matter.’ Plus, it was a hit, so fuck it. A hit is a hit is a hit.” A few years later, he wasn’t as worried: “‘Killer Queen’ was the turning point. It was the song that best summed up our kind of music, and a big hit, and we desperately needed it as a mark of something successful happening for us.”

Meanwhile, its songwriter, didn’t even consider it single-worthy: “We’re very proud of that number,” Freddie told
Record Mirror
in 1976. “It’s done me a lot of proud. It’s just one of the tracks I wrote for the album, to be honest. It wasn’t written as a single. I just wrote a batch of songs for the
Sheer Heart Attack
album and when I finished writing it, and when we recorded it, we found it was a very, very strong single. It really was. At that time it was very, very unlike Queen. They all said: ‘Awwwwwww.’ It was another risk that we took, you know. Every risk we’ve taken so far has paid off.” Freddie’s modesty of it doing him a lot of proud wasn’t unfounded: in 1975, it was awarded four individual plaudits, with one each from
Record Mirror
(second best single) and
NME
(top single), a Belgian Golden Lion Award, and, most prestigiously, an Ivor Novello Award, the first of six the band would receive over the years.

Freddie told
Melody Maker
in December 1974, “Well, ‘Killer Queen’ I wrote in one night. I’m not being conceited or anything, but it just fell into place. Certain songs do. Now, ‘The March Of The Black Queen’, that took ages. I had to give it everything, to be self indulgent or whatever. But with ‘Killer Queen’, I scribbled down the words in the dark one Saturday night and the next morning I got them all together and I worked all day Sunday and that was it. I’d got it. It gelled. It was great.”

Even at an early stage in the sessions, the band knew it was a special song, with Roger recalling that particular attention was paid to it with its excessive takes and tracking. Despite his illness, Brian remembered fondly the recording of his suitable and cheeky solo, though he was more rueful of his indisposition and his inability to contribute to the productive initial sessions. “The first time I heard Freddie playing that song, I was lying in my room in Rockfield [Studios], feeling very sick,” Brian recalled. “After Queen’s first American tour I had hepatitis, and then I had very bad stomach problems and I had to be operated on. So I remember just lying there, hearing Freddie play this really great song and feeling sad, because I thought, ‘I can’t even get out of bed to participate in this. Maybe the group will have to go on without me.’ No one could figure out what was wrong with me. But then I did go into the hospital and I got fixed up, thank God. And when I came out again, we were able to finish off ‘Killer Queen’. They left some space for me and I did the solo. I had strong feelings about one of the harmony bits in the chorus, so we had another go at that too.” The song rightfully gained praise from the band, with Brian telling
Guitar For The Practicing Musician
, “There’s nothing cluttered about ‘Killer Queen’. There’s a fantastic amount going on, but nothing ever gets in the way of anything else. I was pleased that the solo went along with that. Everything is crystal clear. And when the three voices of guitars are all doing little tunes of their own, it feels almost accidental that they go together. I was pleased with how it came out.”

“People are used to hard rock, energy music from
Queen,” Freddie explained to the
NME
in 1974, “yet with this single, you almost expect Noël Coward to sing it. It’s one of those bowler hat, black suspender numbers – not that Noël Coward would wear that. It’s about a high-class call girl. I’m trying to say that classy people can be whores as well. That’s what the song is about, though I’d prefer people to put their own interpretation upon it – to read what they like into it.”

‘Killer Queen’ was the first single released from
Sheer Heart Attack
in October 1974, coupled with Freddie’s vicious ‘Flick Of The Wrist’ as a double A-side. However, it was this song that received the most attention, being performed on the Dutch TV show
Top Pop
on 9 December 1974, a performance broadcast in the UK on Boxing Day (26 December) and now recognized as the song’s ‘default’ performance video. The single peaked at No. 2 in the UK and No. 12 in the US, becoming a mainstay in the medley portion of the band’s show, performed at every concert between 1974 and 1980, and then only on a few dates in 1981 before being dropped for the 1982 tour, but brought back in 1984 and 1985. The song was released as the B-side on the ‘Who Wants To Live Forever’ and ‘Heaven For Everyone’ singles in 1986 and 1995, respectively, and the title has recently been given the honour of being applied to the villain in the
We Will Rock You
musical.

KILLING
(May)

• Soundtrack (Brian):
Furia

Another piece lasting just over a minute, ‘Killing’ distinguishes itself from the other pieces on the
Furia
soundtrack with a pulsating programmed bass drum and ends with a startling snippet of action from the film.

KILLING TIME
(Taylor)

• B-side (Roger): 6/84 [66] • Album (Roger):
Frontier

Opening the more experimental second side of
Strange Frontier
is this synthesized confection, envisioning a post-apocalyptic future devoid of the luxuries of the present: with the world bathed in a nuclear soup, and society just getting back on track, all its denizens can do is wait. Songs of boredom are typically uninteresting in themselves, the songwriter’s ennui seeping through in the lyrics and melody, but Roger keeps ‘Killing Time’ engaging, with scores of electronic drums and synthetic blasts of noise punctuating the abstract lyrics. An orchestral interlude has led to the unfounded rumour that Freddie co-wrote the song, perpetuated by Queen websites from the early 1990s, when such gossip was taken as substantiated fact. More plausible is the possibility that Freddie may have contributed backing vocals, and whether Roger was just that good at imitating his friend’s voice, or if Freddie actually is present, is not known, but it certainly sounds like him. To date, nobody has confirmed nor denied the contribution.

In addition to its prime spot as second side opener, ‘Killing Time’ was also released as the B-side of ‘Man On Fire’ in June 1984.

A KIND OF MAGIC
(Taylor)

• A-side: 3/86 [3] • Album:
AKOM
• CD Single: 11/88 • Live:
Magic, Wembley
• Bonus:
Wembley
• Live (Q+PR):
Return

In its original form, the title track for Queen’s twelfth studio album as written by Roger was described by Brian as being “quite lugubrious and heavy,” but was restructured to be more chart-friendly: “Freddie totally lightened it up to make it a commercially accessible kind of thing, putting in this [bass] kind of thing and making little sort of mantras out of it.” Roger agreed, saying, “Originally, it was much more filmic; in fact, it was used at the end of the movie [
Highlander
] as the closing credits, and it was much less sort of ‘bounce’-oriented, it had a much more broken-up tempo and it was a sort of grander concept. We then reworked it, and I know Freddie took an interest in the song; and we reworked it into a single, really.”

From its concept to the finished product, ‘
A Kind Of Magic
’ was destined to be a hit. With a universal lyric about the wonders of mankind, the song adheres to the theme of
Highlander
– mortality and existence – and even looks back to the earlier lyric of ‘One Vision’, also written by Roger. “Basically,” the drummer explained, “the song is an actual line from the movie, and that was where the song came from. It’s just sort of about an immortal, I suppose: ‘This rage that lasts a thousand years, Will soon be gone,’ and all that. It was written for the movie and it became very popular on stage, and I remember when we played it on the 1986 tour, it used to go down incredibly well.”

The track’s embryonic form, an edited version (3’23) which was played over the credits of
Highlander
(the full-length version, running to 4’08, later featured on the
Live At Wembley Stadium
DVD as background music for the photo gallery section), is taken at a slower tempo and lacks the distinctive bassline, though the
synthesizer effects and guitar work are intact. Freddie, sensing a great song buried within a good idea, took control of the song, borrowing a variation of the bassline from ‘Keep Passing The Open Windows’ and quickening the pace, turning the song into a poppy, chart-friendly single. When issued as a forerunner to the album in March 1986, three months ahead of the album, the single was a resounding success, peaking at No. 3 in the UK. Backed by Roger’s instrumental ‘A Dozen Red Roses For My Darling’, the single was housed in a sombre, blue-tinted sleeve accompanied by the image of Kurgan, the villain from
Highlander
. The single was released in the US in June 1986, peaking at No. 42 and becoming the last single to chart in America until ‘I Want It All’ in 1989. Legend has it that the single reached No. 1 in no less than thirty-five countries, but there hasn’t been any proof of the single reaching No. 1 anywhere in the world, though it did make the Top Ten in seven countries: UK, Ireland, Switzerland, the Netherlands, France, Germany and Australia.

A striking video for the single was filmed by Russell Mulcahy in March 1986 at the Playhouse Theatre. (“At that time, it was pretty much derelict, it wasn’t in use, and I think there was a question mark over its future,” Brian commented in 2003, “so it was a perfect time for us to go in and make it look even more derelict.”) With Freddie dressed as a magician and the others as vagabonds, the video is one of Queen’s more inventive, and used animation for the first time since the ‘Save Me’ video in 1980, with the characters from the
A Kind Of Magic
album sleeve brought to life. “We all thought it was a neat idea for Freddie to be a wizard and for us to be the guys he transforms from tramps into glamorous rock stars,” Brian explained in 2003. Glamorous rock stars they may be, but even fame and fortune couldn’t allow base comforts such as central heating, meaning that when the band look miserable and cold in the intro and outro shots, that’s not acting. “I remember discussing it with Russell Mulcahy in the Groucho Club,” Roger said in 2003, “and just saying how we want strange little things to happen. I remember saying that I wanted gargoyles winking and things like that and having this magic stuff flying all over the place. I think it worked nicely; it’s unpretentious.” The video was included on an innovative video single release late in 1986. Backed by ‘Who Wants To Live Forever’, the format was a world-first, but was rendered obsolete shortly after its release. The video remained otherwise unreleased until 1991, when it was issued on
Greatest Flix II
; the US release was a year later on
Classic Queen
, and it wasn’t until 2003 that the video received a major overhaul in terms of sound and vision on the
Greatest Video Hits 2
DVD.

The song was performed in the live setting for the
Magic
tour only. Placed between the first medley and ‘Under Pressure’, ‘
A Kind Of Magic
’ would regularly be extended well past its normal four-minute mark, allowing plenty of instrumental improvisation that was lacking from most other numbers, before ending in a typically big fashion. The first live version to be issued (taken from Queen’s Budapest concert on 27 July 1986) was in December 1986 on
Live Magic
: for the vinyl release, the song was edited down to 4’47, but on the CD release, the full-length version was included, bringing the running time up to 5’29. When the 12 July Wembley Stadium concert was issued in May 1992, that version became the definitive one, running at an epic 8’42, with the last two minutes consumed by Freddie’s vocal interplay with the crowd, while a second version from the previous night’s concert was issued as a bonus track on the June 2003 CD reissue of
Live At Wembley Stadium
.

Roger has remained partial to the song, including it in most of his set lists. Its first solo live airing was actually performed by The Cross at the Gosport Festival on 29 July 1993, and again at the following year’s performance, later being included in the set list for the Cowdray Ruins Concert on 18 September 1993, where the song was performed by Roger and John. Since then, it has become an integral inclusion in all of Roger’s live shows, and has often been performed by Brian and Roger at special occasions and one-offs. ‘
A Kind Of Magic
’ was originally supposed to be performed by Roger and Chris Thompson at the Concert For Life on 20 April 1992, but was dropped due to time constraints. It enjoyed a new lease of life when performed by the 2005/2006 Queen + Paul Rodgers touring band, with Rodgers singing lead. On the 2008
Rock The Cosmos
tour, vocal duties swapped between Paul and Roger, depending on the mood of the night, and while Paul’s performances were respectably received, it was Roger’s that gained an overwhelmingly positive response.