Queen: The Complete Works (91 page)

With ‘We Believe’ marking the only foray into sociopoliticial statements on
The Cosmos Rocks
, it was up to Roger to pick up the slack, and, while ‘The Unblinking Eye’ isn’t as ham-fisted as Brian’s power ballad, it’s just as lyrically clumsy, taking over six minutes to say a lot that we already know: there are pointless wars to drag on, the government is increasingly exercising their power to spy on its citizens, and nations are left broken and unfixable while its people are being taxed higher and higher. “We are directionless,” Roger seethed in the press release. “I’m pissed off – you should be, too.”

But Roger doesn’t sound pissed off; instead, he seems resigned, weary to constantly bleating on about the foibles and misdemeanours of government officials, and aware that he could write about it as much as he want, but corruption and greed will still exist. This works against the effectiveness of the song, an epic ballad that is masterfully performed by Roger (and including a Stylophone solo); if it had been married to an angrier arrangement, the song would have packed more of a punch, but as it stands, it’s a lumbering, lugubrious, albeit well-intentioned, ballad that merely hints at the vexation Roger was trying to express.

Released in November 2009 as a download-only single, ‘The Unblinking Eye (Everything Is Broken)’ was well-received in the fan community, though it eluded a wider audience. Released the same week as the
Absolute Greatest
compilation, Roger duly mentioned his new single a few times in promotional rounds, promising a physical release “eventually”. Unfortunately, the song was forgotten as quickly as it was released, and when it finally was released on CD in January 2010, not even the addition of a semi-instrumental mix and an in-the-studio video could entice the general public to purchase it. As a result, the single failed to chart, but if Roger was discouraged by its failure, he didn’t let on, and confirmed to the Queen Fan Club that he was working on a new solo album.

UNDER AFRICAN SKIES

Brian mentioned this title as an unreleased song from the 46664 sessions from March 2003 on his soapbox, which he had hoped to continue work on after the sessions were completed. Soon after, Brian was reminded about the 1986 Paul Simon track of the same name, and he sheepishly admitted to forgetting Simon’s track existed. Whether the song will be completed remains to be seen.

UNDER DISPUTE:
see
BANANA BLUES

UNDER PRESSURE
(Queen/Bowie)

• A-side: 10/81 [1] • Album:
Space
• Live:
Magic, Wembley, On Fire, Montreal
• CD Single: 11/88 • Compilation:
Hits2, Classic, WWRYHits
• A-side: 12/99 [14]

In July of 1981, following their first shows in South America, Queen found some semblance of peace at Montreux Studios. They reluctantly started work on their follow-up to
The Game
but, because they had just spent so much time recording not only that album but also
Flash Gordon
in late 1980, and then toured the world several times over in such a short amount of time, there was no real rush to get any product out. Besides, they were planning on releasing their first compilation album, which would do nicely until they came up with some new sounds.

But that didn’t stop them from getting a handful of songs in the can: skeleton versions of ‘Back Chat’, ‘Life Is Real (Song For Lennon)’, ‘Cool Cat’ and most likely ‘Put Out The Fire’ were started during preliminary sessions for the new album. Brian explained the story in the
Greatest Video Hits 2
commentary in 2003: “[It’s] complex, really. We just happened to be in the studio, and David [Bowie] dropped in and we started jamming. We went out for some food and thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great to do some original ideas.’ John came up with the riff that started it all off, and we all got into it.

“Then it came to what is this song about? David came up with the idea of us all going in one after the other and singing what we thought the tune should be – I think he’d done that with some other people – but we did that and then we sat down and chose bits of everything. It was really done in an odd way. So that gave you the tune, and at that point David started to feel very strongly about what he felt the song was about, so he wrote a set of lyrics – first of all, it was called ‘People On Streets’, but he wanted to revise it and make it slightly more abstract, so it became ‘Under Pressure’.”

“That was through David Richards, the engineer at the studio,” Bowie said of the collaboration. “David knew that I was in town and phoned me up and asked me to come down ... So I went down, and these things happen, you know. Suddenly you’re writing something together, and it was totally spontaneous, it certainly wasn’t planned. It was, er ... peculiar.”

Bowie was working on ‘Cat People (Putting Out Fire)’ with Giorgio Moroder when he ran into David Richards, who had previously engineered
“Heroes”
in 1977 and would go on to work on several of Bowie’s mid-1980s albums. The two struck up a conversation and Richards introduced Bowie to his new employers. The five musicians started jamming on old songs before it was suggested that they write their own. “Absolutely nothing was written,” Roger said in 2002, “and, in fact, all that we were doing was jamming and David came in one night, and we were just playing other people’s songs for fun and David said, ‘This is stupid, why don’t
we just write one?’ ... We took the multi-track tapes to New York and I spent all day there with David and mixed it that night. I remember we were fiddling about and we got the bassline, and then we went for a pizza! And when we got back, we couldn’t remember it, and somebody thought of it ... John did, yes.”

Prior to Bowie’s arrival, the band were working on their own improvisation, which was titled ‘Feel Like’; when Bowie showed up, they borrowed the piano line and came up with a completely new riff and lyrics. It’s easy to hear who wrote what parts: the scat introduction can be seen as a foreshadowing of Freddie’s 1985 single ‘Living On My Own’, while the “insanity laughs” section is more in the ambiguous vein of Bowie’s early 1970s hits. The finale from the middle eight, in which Brian’s guitar finally comes to the fore along with an astounding drum break, is pushed into heavy Queen territory, while the finger-clicking coda and “This is our last dance” recalls Bowie’s early single, ‘You’ve Got A Habit Of Leaving’.

It was a song that adhered to both artists’ styles and the results were splendid. Roger revealed that “We’d never actually collaborated with anybody before, so certain egos were slightly bruised along the way,” while Brian confirmed as much, saying, “To have his ego mixed with ours was a very volatile mixture ... it made for a very hot time in the studio.”

“He was quite difficult to work with,” Brian reflected in 1982 in
International Musician & Recording World
, “because it was the meeting of two different methods of working. It was stimulating but, at the same time, almost impossible to resolve. We’re very pigheaded and set in our ways and Mr Bowie is, too. In fact, he’s probably as pigheaded as the four of us put together. I think it was a worthwhile thing to do. But after ‘Under Pressure’ was done, there were continual disagreements about how it should be put out or if it should even be put out at all. David wanted to redo the entire thing. I had given up by that time because it had gone a long way from what I would have liked to see. But there is still a lot of good stuff in the song. There was a compromise: Freddie, David and Mack actually sat down and produced a mix under a lot of strain. Roger was also along to keep the peace to some extent, because he and David are friends.”

“David Bowie and Freddie and I have been friends for the past few years,” Roger said at the time. “‘Under Pressure’ was a spontaneous collaboration.” That spontaneity is obvious on the finished recording: the song sounds almost unfinished and is more of a rough mix state than a polished final recording. Bowie confirmed this: “It stands up better as a demo. It was done so quickly that some of [the lyric] makes me cringe a bit.”

Crystal Taylor revealed, “On the first night of recording ‘Pressure’, at the end of the evening Brian and myself went on a bit of a binge and ended up back at the studio with David Richards for a jam session. Once again we were out of it and Brian wanted to play, with him on guitar, David on piano and yours truly drumming, and let me assure you that I am the world’s worst drummer when I’m sober, so try to imagine this. David actually taped it, and years later we listened, and out of about an hour of playing there is actually ten minutes of good rock.”

With the song completed, EMI embraced the recording and wanted to release it. Since nothing else had been recorded (except for additional Bowie backing vocals on Freddie and John’s ‘Cool Cat’, a song Bowie asked them not to release), an outtake from
The Game
called ‘Soul Brother’ became the B-side and Queen were therefore accorded ‘top billing’. When it came time to film a promotional video for the single, the band were more or less indifferent to the notion and Bowie was unavailable, so, through the latter’s recommendation, director David Mallet was enlisted to come up with something suitable.

The result was as haphazard yet special as the recording itself. With numerous scenes of pressure (traffic jams, buildings being blown up, unemployment, the stock market crashing and so forth) culled from old newsreel footage intercut with scenes from silent movies starring Greta Garbo, John Gilbert and even Max Schreck’s
Nosferatu
, the promo was a superb portrayal of the lyric and became Queen’s first video not to feature them in any visual form. Unfortunately, scenes of an IRA car bombing had to be edited out in order for the video to be played on
Top Of The Pops
, but it was a small price to pay.

The single was released in October 1981 and became a smash, reaching No. 1 in the UK – Queen’s first since ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ and Bowie’s first since ‘Ashes To Ashes’ the previous year – while peaking at a more modest No. 29 in the US. The song was re-released several times over the next two decades, never more famously than in November 1999 when a remix was included on the barrel-scraping
Greatest Hits III
album. Normally, remixes were something that fans tended to shy away from, but since this
featured direct involvement from Brian and Roger (the latter was the prime mover in the remix), the results were more pleasing to the ear. Subtitled the ‘rah’ mix (which is what appears to be chanted following a brief, previously unreleased vocal improvisation from Bowie and Freddie about New York City), the song incorporated a more upbeat drum rhythm and some new guitar licks from Brian. Because its inclusion on the third greatest hits package was of little benefit, Parlophone reacted by releasing it as a single in support of the compilation, where it promptly reached No. 14 in the UK.

Notoriously, the song was sampled heavily by Vanilla Ice in 1990, who incorporated the bass riff and piano into his hit single ‘Ice Ice Baby’. Brian said of the situation in 1991, “I first heard it in the Fan Club downstairs. I just thought, ‘Interesting, but nobody will ever buy it because it’s crap.’ Turns out I was wrong. Next thing, my son’s saying it’s big here: ‘And what are you going to do about it, Dad?’ Actually, Hollywood [Records] are sorting it out because they don’t want people pillaging what they’ve just paid so much money for. We don’t want to get involved in litigation with other artists ourselves; that doesn’t seem very cool, really. Anyway, now I think it’s quite a good bit of work in its way.” Vanilla Ice himself appeared to hold no grudges, but was bewildered as to why everyone was making a big fuss out of it. In a VH-1 special in the late 1990s, interview footage was shown from the time of the single’s release in which he explained how the two songs were completely different merely because he threw an extra bass note and sampled cymbal splash into the riff.

‘Under Pressure’ became an instant crowd favourite, and was first performed at the November 1981
We Will Rock You
video shoot in Montreal, remaining in the set until August 1986. While Bowie didn’t incorporate the song into his own set list until 1995, the band embraced it, and it would often become one of the highlights of any given evening. The song would be given a rougher treatment, and the key lowered so that Freddie could sing both his own and Bowie’s parts (Roger would have the task of performing the higher-pitched vocals, naturally). A live version was included on the CD single of the ‘rah’ remix in 1999, while a superb version sung by Bowie and former Eurythmics vocalist Annie Lennox was performed at the Concert for Life on 20 April 1992.

“It wasn’t the best recording ever made,” Roger stated contrarily in 2003, “but it was one of the best songs we ever did. It sort of endured quite well – I love the last section. I found it very invigorating and interesting – a successful collaboration.”

UNIVERSAL THEME

Another unknown track, ‘Universal Theme’ was likely an original track by Wreckage, and was performed on 31 October 1969 at Ealing College Of Art.

UNTITLED

Written and recorded by Brian in 2001, this track, with the unofficial title of ‘Untitled’, is an anthemic doodle, with keyboards and the Red Special duelling nicely, on top of a bed of programmed drums and piano, though what destination Brian had in mind for this recording is unknown. The song was premiered in 2010 at the Queen Fan Club convention.

VAGABOND OUTCAST

Much like ‘So Sweet’, authorship of ‘Vagabond Outcast’ is not known, although it’s likely that it’s an original written by Freddie. Indeed, on the only recorded performance of the song, coming from The Sink Club, Liverpool on 9 September 1969, Freddie introduces the song as “one of our own.” It’s an enjoyable, if slight, song; unfortunately, the quality of the tape leaves much to be desired, and the lyrics are indecipherable.

VICTORY

In early 1983, after concluding the final tour in support of
Hot Space
, Freddie and his assistant Peter Freestone stopped by old pal Michael Jackson’s home, where the two vocalists recorded three tracks together: Freddie’s 1981 composition ‘There Must Be More To Life Than This’ and two duets titled ‘State Of Shock’ and ‘Victory’. The latter became the title of the 1984 album by The Jacksons, though it’s not known if a version was recorded by them, and ‘Victory’ remains the only song recorded by Freddie and Michael that isn’t regularly available on the bootleg market.