Queen: The Complete Works (73 page)

Opening with a delicate keyboard sequence, there’s a lot going on within the arrangement, as Brian explained: “It was very complex what we were doing – dozens of tracks, it was very carefully built up. It sounds very airy and light, but there’s a hell of a lot going on in it. It has these two transitions in the end, it goes into this sort of rock bit, then into the floaty, ‘that day will come’ mantra bit.” Roger concurred, saying, “It was an incredibly complex song, I loved the textures, and I know Freddie was particularly fond of this song – again, not my favourite song, but I love the textures and changes; they’re very clever. Very naïve lyric, in a rather sort of innocent, optimistic way. Not cynical enough for me, really.”

While Freddie was the main instigator behind the musical arrangement, the lyrics were decided by committee. “Actually I think that was one of the songs where we all contributed,” Freddie explained in a 1989 BBC Radio interview. “But lyrically, going back to ‘The Miracle’, I think the four of us really put everything into it because I mean somebody would come in with one line and say, ‘Oh, that’s terrible, I’ll change it.’ So in fact, in one way I hate it because I have to keep singing different lyrics every day until we sort of agree on the final one, but I’d say lyrically ‘The Miracle’ is a definite four-way split.”

“I’ve always loved this track,” Brian said in 2003. “I think it’s one of Freddie’s most magical compositions, and I remember the joy we had in the studio: it was one of those moments where we really did work together, all four of us, on the ideas, building it up, painting the picture, as if we all had brushes in our hands with different colours. But Freddie’s concept – and a very brave concept, because you’re talking about a man who knows he’s got a death sentence hanging over him, and he’s writing a song called ‘The Miracle’ – is very light, very joyful. I think it’s part of Freddie’s genius; it’s always been one of my favourites of his creations.”

Chosen as the fifth and final single from the album, ‘The Miracle’ was released in November 1989 and peaked at a disappointing No. 21 in the charts. “We got pasted to the wall for this in England,” Brian told MTV’s
Video Magazine
. “Everybody hated it, for some reason. It’s very uncool to be idealistic in Britain, I suppose, at the moment, and they said, ‘How can they talk about peace?’ and all that sort of stuff. Then, of course, China [Tiananmen Square] happened and everything. It seems very relevant to us.” Roger agreed: “In England, ‘idealism’ is ‘naivety’, which is wrong, it’s not. There’s nothing wrong with idealism. Nick Lowe wrote that great song, great title - ‘(What’s So Bad ‘Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding?’ [
sic
]. Yeah, and what is so bad about it?”

Although the full version was released in the UK, the single was not even considered for the hit parade in America, though that country did receive a unique edit of the song for the 1992 compilation
Classic Queen
, in which there are numerous edits, including the superfluous rock coda, making for a more concise and leaner listen.

A video was made for the single at Elstree Studios on 23 November 1989, directed by The Torpedo Twins yet again. Based on a concept by Freddie, the video shows four young look-alikes performing the song in Queen’s stead, with the star of the show, Ross McCall (who would later star in the US mini-series
Band of Brothers
), portraying an energetic Freddie, and perfecting his every move to such an extent that, when the band do appear at the start of the rock coda, Freddie himself was copying the copyist. “He certainly could strut,” Roger said of young McCall, while Brian elaborated further on the video: “This was a joy to make because of the kids, who put so much talent and effort into being us. We were knocked out by how great they were. We had such a laugh doing it, we were just smiling the whole time.”

MISFIRE
(Deacon)

• Album:
SHA

Clocking in at less than two minutes, ‘Misfire’ holds the distinction of being John’s first composition for Queen. Although the words are ambiguous, and may contain a thinly veiled reference to sex – or perhaps, just as graphically, equating love to Russian roulette – it’s set to an upbeat Caribbean backing (thus its original title, ‘Banana Blues’) that would set the pattern for many of John’s chart-friendly compositions through the years.

Written and recorded during the
Sheer Heart Attack
sessions, the song features its author on almost all guitars, suggesting that Brian was too ill to record any of the guitar parts except for a tasteful solo that concludes the song. ‘Misfire’ was never performed live.

MR BAD GUY
(Mercury)

• Album (Freddie):
BadGuy
• Compilations (Freddie):

Pretender, FM Album, The Solo Collection

This self-deprecating, tongue-in-cheek title track to Freddie’s debut solo album is a gloriously ambitious song, with the vocalist making light of his perceived tough guy image with an invitation to chase rainbows and trip on his ecstasy. While it revelled in the bombast of his earlier compositions, it made use of an element Freddie had wanted to do for a while: live orchestrations. “There are a lot of musical territories I wanted to explore,” Freddie told
Record Mirror
in 1984, “which I really couldn’t do with Queen. I wanted to cover such things as reggae rhythms and I’ve done a couple of tracks with an orchestra. It will have a very rich sound.”

In 1992, Brian Malouf remixed the song and, considering some of the remixes he had done for Queen in the past – ‘Fat Bottomed Girls’ and the Headbangers mix of ‘Hammer To Fall’ – it comes as no surprise that the song was completely restructured and given a more rock sound, unfortunately mixing the orchestration into the background. The main riff is instead played on guitar, and sounds like something that Queen would have turned the song into, especially if Brian were given the chance. While it’s not as strong as the original, the remix is definitely worth a listen.

An earlier version, recorded in May 1984 at Musicland Studios, was released on
The Solo Collection
, and finds Freddie using alternate lines that would be omitted from the final version. (One further early version, subtitled the “Bad Circulation mix”, was released on
Lover Of Life, Singer Of Songs: The Very Best Of Freddie Mercury
, and is largely redundant except for a completely new first verse and the replacement of “bad communication” with – you guessed it – “bad circulation”.) An instrumental version was also released on the box set, exposing the intricate orchestrations by Rainer Pietsch, as well as some previously obscured French horn arrangements during the choruses. A snippet of the orchestral outtakes was also issued, though it’s hardly essential listening.

MR TAMBOURINE MAN
(Dylan)

First recorded by Bob Dylan on his 1965
Bringing It All Back Home
album, ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ was performed by The Cross at the Gosport Festival on 30 July 1992 and later at the 1992 Christmas shows for the Fan Club.

MODERN TIMES ROCK ‘n’ ROLL
(Taylor)

• Album:
Queen
• Compilation:
BBC

Noted by
Rolling Stone
in a December 1973 review of Queen as “remarkably reminiscent of ‘Communication Breakdown’”, Roger’s first contribution to the Queen canon gave little indication of what he would eventually write in years to come, but, for what it is, ‘Modern Times Rock ‘n’ Roll’ is an enjoyable, though lightweight, composition heralding the arrival of a new kind of rock sound. It wasn’t ‘Roll Over Beethoven’, but it carried a similar message.

Set to a frantic backing track, Roger takes the lead in his first-ever vocal performance on record. The song would normally feature as an encore number with Freddie singing instead of Roger, generally as the show closer (until ‘In The Lap Of The Gods... Revisited’ became the conclusion in late 1974), between 1972 and 1975.

Two BBC recordings exist. The first, from 3 December 1973, is a fairly straightforward rendition of the song, with Roger’s added line, “It’s not that I’m bright, just happy-go-lucky”, distinguishing it from the original. The second was recorded on 3 April the following year, and was slowed down and extended to nearly three minutes, featuring some fun vocal interplay between Roger and Freddie, and the addition of a slide whistle. The first version was issued on
Queen At The Beeb
in the UK in 1989 (the US issue,
Queen At The BBC
, didn’t come out until 1995), while the second version has yet to be released.

MONEY (THAT’S WHAT I WANT)
(Berry/Gordy)

First recorded by Barrett Strong in 1959 and later covered by The Beatles on their second album,
With The Beatles
, ‘Money (That’s What I Want)’ was performed live by The Cross at the Gosport Festival on 30 July 1992.

MONEY CAN’T BUY HAPPINESS
(Mercury)

• Compilation (Freddie):
Solo Collection

An upbeat, reggae-inspired lament about the evils of money, ‘Money Can’t Buy Happiness’ was recorded on 10 February 1984 at Musicland Studios and was, at one point, shortlisted for inclusion on
Mr Bad Guy
, but remained uncompleted. Featuring little additional instrumentation other than a drum-machine and occasional synthesizer blasts, the song would have
been a terrific addition to the album had it been finished; as it was, it remained in the vaults until the release of
The Solo Collection
in 2000.

MONY MONY
(Bloom/Cordell/Gentry/James)

Originally performed by Tommy James and the Shondells, ‘Mony Mony’ was later covered to greater success by Billy Idol, though it was also performed live by Smile in 1969.

MORE OF THAT JAZZ
(Taylor)

• Album:
Jazz

The second of Roger’s contributions to
Jazz
wasn’t much better than ‘Fun It’, suffering from a plodding, knee-jerk rhythm and boring, uninspiring lyrics about being ... bored and uninspired. Paeans to ennui are rarely successful, and ‘More Of That Jazz’ is no exception; dragging on for over four minutes with a repetitive guitar riff (likely performed by Roger, though the absence of personnel credits on the album make it difficult to know for certain) and a thudding drum performance that holds the song back instead of propelling it. The only saving grace is Roger’s singing, which is inspired, and helps make the song only barely listenable. Its placement as the album closer, as a tie-in to the album title (and the awkward inclusion of clips of other album songs), brings
Jazz
to an undignified conclusion.

MOTHER LOVE
(Mercury/May)

• Album:
Heaven

If there was ever a song that combined the passion and driving force that Freddie demanded, ‘Mother Love’ was undoubtedly it. Written mostly by Brian and arranged by Freddie, the song is a highlight of
Made In Heaven
: centred around a sombre melody and propeled by a shuffling drum machine, the song is a vehicle for Freddie’s emotional vocal performance. Recorded in the last few months of his life in the spring of 1991, the song finds its shattered and broken narrator, his life draining from his body, pleading for the comfort and familiarity of mother. “Freddie, as normal, got to some point and said, ‘No, no, no, no, no, this isn’t good enough! I have to go higher here, I have to put more into this, have to get more power in,’” Brian recalled in 1995. “So he downs a couple of vodkas, stands up and goes for it, and you can hear the middle eight of ‘Mother Love’ just soars to incredible heights, and this is a man who can’t really stand any more without incredible pain and is very weak, you know, has no flesh on his bones, and you can hear the power, the will that he’s still got.”

Brian later remarked with poignant fondness that this was the most significant collaboration he’d ever had with Freddie, and that the lyrics were more or less made up on the spot as the vocalist sat on and nodded approvingly. The song was left in a half-finished state for the rest of 1991, before Brian, Roger, and John returned to it in 1994. The guitarist recorded an emotional solo, not on his Red Special, surprisingly, but on a Parker Fly. (“It was probably lying around in Montreux,” he recalled vaguely.) The song was then built up, with Brian adding the final verse and singing it himself. “It was never finished,” he remembered in 1999. “He never came back to do the final verse, but to the end, even when he couldn’t even stand, without propping himself up, he was just giving it his all. You can hear the incredible strength of his voice in that track, and the passion that he’s putting into it. And we’re making it up as we go along, you know, I’m scribbling words on pieces of paper and he’s grabbing them and saying, ‘Roll the tape. I’ll do this one.’ He knew that it might be the last time he was ever able to sing and, in that case, it was.”

“In the last few weeks of his life, [Freddie] would say, ‘Get me doing stuff. Write me more words, more words, more words. Give me stuff to sing, because when I’ve gone, you guys can finish it off,’” Brian told Virgin Radio in 2004. “Well, this song was almost finished. He said, ‘Look, that’s about as much as I can do.’ He’d had a couple of vodkas. He’d gone totally for the middle eight, which you’ll hear on this, which is phenomenal, and then he said, ‘Look. It’s okay, I’ll come back in a few days and finish it off.’ Well, that was the last time he was ever there, and so in the end I sang the last verse, because I didn’t want to mess with the format of it at all. I just wanted it to be as it was. And this was something which I sort of carried in my pocket for a couple of years – actually, probably more than that - until the time when we were able to make the
Made In Heaven
album. And it’s a long story. I mean there’s more than two years of my life certainly in trying to assemble that material around the vocals that he’d left, and we all worked very hard on it. But what I wanted was to preserve that moment the best way I could and tell the story, and that’s what you hear. There’s a piece in the middle which to me represents, you know, looking back on your life and stuff like
that. But there was no morbidity in singing it. It was a kind of joyful thing – that’s all I can say. It’s a fairly serious song but it was – there was great joy in Fred finding these notes, finding this performance. I think it’s superb.”