Queen: The Complete Works (77 page)

It was written and arranged entirely by Freddie, even the guitar riff, as Brian explained to
Guitar World
in 1998: “Freddie also wrote ‘Ogre Battle’ which is a very heavy metal guitar riff. It’s strange that he should have done that. But when Freddie used to pick up a guitar, he’d have a great frenetic energy. It was kind of like a very nervy animal playing the guitar. He was a very impatient person and was very impatient with his own technique. He didn’t have a great technical ability on the guitar but had it in his head. And you could feel this stuff bursting to get out. His right hand would move incredibly fast. He wrote a lot of good stuff for the guitar, a lot of it was stuff which I would not have thought of, because it would be in weird keys. He had this penchant for playing in E flat and A flat and F, and these are not places that your hand naturally falls on when playing the guitar, so he forced me into finding ways of doing things which made unusual sounds. It was really good.”

The “unusual sounds” Brian mentioned are present within the first sixty seconds of the song. A whooshing sound effect is used to fade into distorted (and backwards) guitars and drums, an early sign of Queen’s desire to experiment in the studio. “That was a bit of a miracle, actually,” Brian told
Guitar Player
in 2008. “They had this massive gong in the studio that Roger hit. When we turned the tape over, the gong sounded great backwards and that sound was going to be at the beginning of the track. That got us wondering what the rest of the track would sound like backwards. Well, it sounded very similar. The riff is palindromic; it sounds the same forwards and backwards. So we decided to run the entire track backwards in the intro and then we seamlessly crossfaded it with the forwards track. I don’t think it’s even a crossfade; I think it’s a butt edit and you can’t even tell. I used my fingerboard pickup and bridge pickup out of phase for that tone.”

‘Ogre Battle’ was performed live as early as 1972, and remained in the set list until June 1977 at Earl’s Court, though a one-off performance followed in Philadelphia on 23 November 1977. A BBC version was recorded on 3 December 1973 and is a completely new recording, though the versions released on
Queen At The Beeb
and
Queen At The BBC
were both edited. Somehow, the master tape was damaged, and the first minute or so of the song, basically consisting of sound effects and guitar loops, had to be excised from the albums since it was considered to be of sub-par quality. A remix was released on the 1991 reissue of
Queen II
and was presented in the style of its BBC counterpart; what’s most interesting about the remix is the addition of wah-wah guitar in the intro, along with other guitar effects, plus the splendid use of a slide guitar during the solo.

Bizarrely, the title was used for a Nintendo 64 video game in 1997; titled
Ogre Battle 64: Person Of Lordly Caliber
, a follow-up was planned to be called
Ogre Battle 2: The March Of The Black Queen
.

OLD FRIENDS
(Taylor)

• Album (Roger):
Happiness?
• B-side (Roger): 11/94 [32]

Featuring the only full-band performance on
Happiness?
, Roger’s ‘Old Friends’, like the rest of the album, is dedicated to Freddie. With poignant lyrics written specifically for his friend, ‘Old Friends’ glides along at a mid-tempo pace, with programmed conga drums providing most of the rhythm. The song even features a Brian May-type solo courtesy of Jason Falloon, though it wouldn’t be difficult to imagine Brian providing his own take on the song. A perfect counterpart to Brian’s numerous tributes to Freddie, the song touchingly concludes with “The best thing I can say after all this time/You were a real friend of mine.”

The song was rumoured to have been chosen as Roger’s solo vocal performance for the 1992 Concert For Life, but was cut, along with rendition of ‘
A Kind Of Magic
’, due to timing constraints. Regardless, the song was performed exclusively on Roger’s 1994 and 1995
Happiness?
tour. A live version appeared on the 12” version of ‘
Happiness?
’, recorded at Shepherd’s Bush in London, but the charm and magic of the song is best experienced with the studio rendition.

OLD MEN (LAY DOWN)
(Taylor)

• Album (The Cross):
MBADTK

Opening with a nearly two-minute keyboard introduction, Roger’s epic ‘Old Men (Lay Down)’ is one of the highlights on
Mad: Bad: And Dangerous To Know
and certainly packs a punch. While the title may sound like a poke at the older generation, the lyrics target politicians and their misuse of power, as well as the senselessness of war. Roger lampoons the dusty old men, calling into question their fashion sense, closed-mindedness and even their hygiene. The lyrics are juvenile at times, though the line “They own newspapers/And they own me” is chilling; unsurprising, however, given that Roger would write a similar diatribe the following year in ‘Dear Mr Murdoch’. The power of the song, however, comes not from the lyrics but from the instrumental performance. Set to a terse backing, the guitar and bass take a back seat as the drums gallop like a marching crowd, coming to an abrupt conclusion mid-beat. That Roger was able to keep a song of this quality for his solo project only speaks of the calibre of the material he was submitting to Queen at the time.

OLYMPIC THEME

In 1988, both Roger and Brian were individually approached by Thames Television, each of them being asked to compose the theme music for the company’s coverage of the Olympic Games. Roger’s track, which lasts four minutes and features John Deacon on bass, is the stronger of the two compositions, sounding like a cross between ‘Killing Time’ and ‘Vultan’s Theme’, with driving drums, triumphant timpanis, and a savage synthesizer motif.

Brian’s composition is more well-known and was leaked recently, with keyboards and drums (surprisingly) dominating as the guitar takes a back seat. Both would have been appropriate, but Thames Television ultimately went with a theme composed by Eric Clapton, leaving Roger’s and Brian’s efforts to languish unreleased.

ON MY WAY UP
(May)

• Album (Brian):
World

An enjoyable acoustic rocker released on
Another World
in June 1998, ‘On My Way Up’ was originally recorded in 1994 for the second season of Frank Stubbs Promotes (see the entry for ‘Business’), a programme shown on ITV and starring Timothy Spall. When asked by the producers if he would provide the themes for the show, Brian responded with both ‘Business’ (then titled ‘Hard Business’) in the first season and ‘On My Way Up’ in the second. At the time, these were short clips of the songs, but Brian had also recorded full versions since he no doubt felt they were good enough for future use.

The songs were given a final mix in 1997 and ultimately issued on
Another World
. ‘On My Way Up’ is optimistic, though fairly uncharacteristic of Brian. Judging from his explanation, however, he found parallels between Frank Stubbs and himself: “The central character of this song is someone who is basically a loser, you know, but he has total belief, and a kind of insane optimism, and he’s going somewhere. ‘Man, I’m on my way,’ and that’s what this song is. And again, it became imbued with different things once I got going on the song, so it could be a few other things as well.” The instrumental performance is jaunty, with Brian providing all the instruments, including a rare appearance on bass, while the drums are merely programmed.

The song was included on Brian’s 1998
Another World
tour, and was released as a Holland-only single in June 1998. A live version was included on the Japanese-only mini-album,
Red Special
.

ONE NIGHT STAND
(Taylor)

• Download (Roger): 9/98

Upon the release of
Electric Fire
in September 1998, a campaign ran on Roger’s official website: listeners who entered the final words heard on the album would get a special internet-only download. The resulting song, ‘One Night Stand’, was an outtake from the
Electric Fire
sessions and chugs along with a heavy emphasis on the guitars and bass. The lyrics, those which can be deciphered, deviate little from “I wanna one-night stand”. Individual tracks of the song were also made available on Queen’s official website, with a competition guaranteed to whet the appetites of aspiring bedroom sound engineers: fans who submitted alternate mixes of the song got the chance to meet Roger and have his or her submission professionally mixed in his home studio. Unfortunately for those involved, the competition came and went without a winner, either indicating Roger’s ambivalence toward it, or nobody submitted a good enough mix.

ONE MORE TRAIN

This song’s authorship is unknown, but it’s likely an original number from Wreckage, and was performed on 31 October 1969 at Ealing College Of Art.

ONE RAINY WISH
(Hendrix)

• Compilation (Brian):
In From The Storm
• Album (Brian):
World

Jimi Hendrix had long been a source of inspiration to both Freddie and Brian. In Freddie’s case, it was the guitarist’s experimentation in stereo that opened the vocalist’s eyes to production methods and taking full advantage of the studio, while Brian admired him as a guitarist and lyricist. In 1994, he was asked if he wanted to contribute a track to a Hendrix tribute album arranged by the late guitarist’s former producer, Eddie Kramer; Brian agreed and chose a rather unorthodox song, ‘One Rainy Wish’, originally from Hendrix’s 1967 album
Bold As Love
.

“Somebody asked me to do a tribute to Hendrix,” Brian explained in a contemporary interview for
Another World
, “and I think they asked me to do something like ‘Burning The Midnight Lamp’ or something, and I thought, ‘Oh please – how can I possibly do it when it’s been done perfectly by the master?’ So I said, ‘Can I choose my own track?’ and they said okay. So I chose ‘One Rainy Wish’ because I think it was done really quickly by Jimi Hendrix – it’s something he put down in ten minutes, and the lyric, I think, is genuinely a dream. That’s the way I hear it. I’ve written stuff from dreams before, and I think Hendrix had this dream. And you know it sounds like ‘golden rose’? Everybody thinks it’s a golden rose, like a rose made of gold, but there’s a little scrap of paper which is in one of the Hendrix biographies, where he’s written down his dream, and he says, ‘Gold and rose, the colour of the dream I had’.

“So I thought, ‘That’s what it’s about,’ you know, it’s about these colours, and it always sends shivers up my spine, ’cos it’s so real – it’s like he drifts off into his dream, so I wanted to recreate that, and make it a bit more spacey, in the modern way you can do, with production. So I just really enjoyed doing it, and it’s a big challenge doing a Hendrix song. Me and Freddie used to listen to Hendrix albums, and sort of go round to the speaker here, and say ‘Well, a piece of guitar appears over here, and then it sort of comes over here.’ You know, all these little secret things that you don’t realize at first. And there’d be a bit of backwards guitar and a backwards vocal and if you played your record backwards it would say something different.”

While the result is inspiring and worthy of inclusion on
In From The Storm
, it certainly doesn’t capture the magic and innocence of the original. Further remixed for
Another World
, the song sits more comfortably among the other songs, though as a remnant of the abandoned
Heroes
project, it would have been better consigned as a non-album B-side.

ONE VISION
(Queen)

• A-side: 11/85 [7] • Album:
AKOM
• CD Single: 11/88 • Bonus:
AKOM
• Live:
Magic, Wembley
• Compilation:
Hits2, Classic
• Live (Q+PR):
Ukraine

After Live Aid, Queen discovered a renewed enthusiasm for the music industry – John later said, “It was the one day I was proud to be involved in the music business; a lot of days you certainly don’t feel that!” – and for each other. Their initial plan was to take the remainder of 1985 and all of 1986 off, and possibly come back with a new album and tour in 1987. Instead, after a six-week break, the band reconvened at Musicland Studios in Munich at the beginning of September with the intent of creating their first song since ‘Thank God It’s Christmas’ more than a year before.

“Freddie was on the phone and he wanted to go back into the studio and do some more recording,” John explained in 1985. “So in the end we went back into the studio and we actually recorded another single. It was his idea, really, that we could go in and actually write a song together. In fact, I was late getting to the recording sessions because I was on holiday at the time, but it’s credited as a Queen composition, but to be honest, I would say it was mainly Roger, Brian and Freddie that did most of the writing for it.”

‘One Vision’ was the result of those sessions, and was a welcome return to form: crunching guitars, idealistic lyrics and a grandiose approach to production and performance. Opening with swirling synths, played by Freddie and Brian, the song also features slowed-down vocals – not heard since the days of ‘Bring Back That Leroy Brown’ and ‘Lazing On A Sunday Afternoon’ – saying “God works in mysterious ways” and then just “mysterious ways” (Freddie ‘sang’ the first line and Brian provided the second) before leading into a catchy guitar riff. The original words were courtesy of Roger, who provided a world-weary look at the state of society in the mid-1980s, with “visions of one sweet
union.” The lyrics were tweaked by Freddie and Brian, and several of Roger’s original lines – including “one God damned religion” and “just one politician” – were deemed too controversial and toned down.

Roger said in a 1986 interview, “The original words were actually about Martin Luther King Jr and now I haven’t got a clue what it’s about! Somebody said it was about Bob Geldof, but I don’t think it is.” When asked if he knew the meaning of the original lyrics, he retorted, “No, not any more! Well, they changed my words!” adding, when asked who did the changing, “That rotter Freddie!”