Queen: The Complete Works (22 page)

By this point, the band and their preferred producers had split into two coteries: Brian and Roger worked with David Richards on their songs, while John and Freddie worked with Mack. Richards, who had struck up a friendship with Roger in 1979 and helped the drummer record his two solo albums (even co-writing a handful of songs on
Strange Frontier
), was a familiar face to the band, and with Brian craving a change and sympathetic ear to his grandiose song ideas, the shift was natural. Freddie and John were more loyal to Mack, who saw his role decreasing greatly; he later lamented, “Everybody was doing their own thing now, in their own studios.”

Indeed they were. The credits would include only three studios – Townhouse in Hammersmith, Musicland in Munich and Mountain in Montreux – but a further four were used: Maison Rouge in Fulham, which had been used for ‘One Vision’; Abbey Road in St. John’s Wood, for orchestral overdubs with Michael Kamen; Sarm West in Kensington (only ten minutes from Freddie’s Garden Lodge mansion); and Milo Music in Hackney. Additionally, Freddie was committed to recording tracks for Dave Clark’s musical
Time
, with sessions held at Abbey Road Studios in October 1985 and January 1986, thus interrupting progress on the album further. Roger was engrossed in production duties with David Richards, working on Magnum’s
Vigilante
at Mountain Studios, while John formed an ad hoc band, The Immortals, to provide the main theme for the
Biggles
soundtrack. Brian engrossed himself in collaborations (writing, producing, and contributing guitar to ‘Golden Days’ and ‘Crazy Nights’, recorded by Japanese pop star Minako Honda and released the following year) and a silent fascination with Anita Dobson.

Work progressed steadily on the album, with each band member divided into teams and writing and recording his own songs to present to the others. Additionally, there was virtually no pressure this time to deliver a traditional-sounding Queen album since the band had progressed far beyond the limitations their earlier work demanded. Instead, synthesizers were brought to the fore; in addition, this was only the second studio album to feature outside musicians – and an orchestra. Spike Edney was used for keyboards on a few of the songs, adding flourishes to ‘A Kind Of Magic’ and ‘Don’t Lose Your Head’ – both, incidentally, written by Roger. As drum programming had finally progressed to the point where it sounded like actual drums as opposed to the tinny drum-machines first used on
Hot Space
, much of the album’s percussion was programmed, most notably on ‘Pain Is So Close To Pleasure’ and ‘Don’t Lose Your Head’.
A Kind Of Magic
is a far more experimental album than
Hot Space
was, but attracted far less derision because the music world had finally caught up to this kind of technology.

There are some duff tracks here and there, particularly Roger’s insipid ‘Don’t Lose Your Head’, and John’s ‘One Year Of Love’ is too saccharine for the average Queen fan’s tastes, and isn’t helped by the inclusion of a string arrangement and a saxophone solo by Steve Gregory. ‘Pain Is So Close To Pleasure’ allows Freddie the opportunity to try his hand at falsetto one more time, with the result being not unpleasant – though the single remix added some much-needed oomph to the song. However, the outstanding tracks – ‘A Kind Of Magic’, ‘Princes Of The Universe’, ‘Who Wants To Live Forever’ and ‘One Vision’ – make the album a worthwhile addition to Queen’s discography.

The album could have benefited from a few deletions and additions. Roger’s gorgeous ‘Heaven For Everyone’ was first recorded during these sessions and was originally offered to Joan Armatrading (thus accounting for her curious vocal credit on ‘Don’t Lose Your Head’, which was also offered to her but rejected). The band didn’t issue their version, and the song was instead re-recorded by Roger for his 1987 album
Shove
It. Freddie’s ‘Love Makin’ Love’, originally intended for his solo album, was also given a Queen treatment during the sessions and, if the solo demo is anything to go by, would have been a fantastic inclusion. ‘Friends In Pain’, ‘Back To Storm’, and ‘You’re The Only One’ were also recorded but remain unreleased; Roger’s ‘A Dozen Red Roses For My Darling’, essentially an instrumental reworking of ‘Don’t Lose Your Head’, became the B-side of ‘A Kind Of Magic’ in the UK and ‘Princes Of The Universe’ in the US, while Brian’s ‘Forever’, a haunting piano-based variant on ‘Who Wants To Live Forever’, became a bonus track on the 12” and CD versions of that single. ‘Butterfly’, based on variations of chords from ‘Save Me’, was heard during the In The Studio portion of
The Magic Years
, which chronicled the birth and completion of ‘One Vision’, though it’s unlikely that a complete band recording exists, and is little more than a doodle that Brian was working on at the time.

“We all have our own ideas of how a song should be done,” Freddie explained of the writing processes,
“because a song can be done in so many different ways depending on who’s doing it. But sometimes I feel that it’s not right, like in the case of Roger’s track, which is ‘Magic’, he did it in a totally different way, which was quite good, but I just felt there was another commercial streak and I knew he was going away to LA for a week, and I got a hold of it and I changed it around completely and when he came back I said, ‘Well, what do you think?’ and he said, ‘Oh, I like it!’ It’s a completely different song but sometimes you can see something else in other people’s songs. I don’t mind that they do that to my songs as well. We sort of help each other.

“I don’t know what Queen stand for,” Freddie continued. “I know by now, it’s four writers who write very different songs: John’s been writing quite a lot now, and he writes in that one area that he likes, which is a sort of Tamla Motown [sound], and I love to sing songs like that. So he’s very different; you could never call his songs heavy. I think Queen write just four very different types of songs. Brian writes from the guitar, so we have that element, and Roger writes from the drums, but he also crosses over a lot, so we have all kinds of things.”

“I don’t know where my motivation comes from,” Brian pontificated, “except we’re all trying to use this beast which Queen is as a vehicle to get our own ideas across. We all write very different kinds of songs, and it’s quite a challenge to get them through this machine and get them out. It’s hard to explain. For instance, myself: if I write a song which has a particular idea behind it and I can hear it in my head ... when I take it to the other three, they’ll see it totally differently and will want to do it in a different way. Some of their input will be very good and very necessary, and some of it will actually destroy the very meaning of the song. There’s always interaction going on all the time, and the motivation, the challenge, is to get something across in the right way that moves people.”

The singles selected from the album were either spot-on (‘A Kind Of Magic’, ‘Who Wants To Live Forever’) or complete misses (‘Princes Of The Universe’, ‘Pain Is So Close To Pleasure’). This was also one of the rare instances when Capitol flat-out refused to release the same singles as Parlophone; instead of ‘A Kind Of Magic’, which was issued as the second single in June, ‘Princes Of The Universe’ became the first US single from the album in April. ‘Pain Is So Close To Pleasure’ appeared in August, yet ‘Friends Will Be Friends’ and ‘Who Wants To Live Forever’ were UK-only releases. Only ‘A Kind Of Magic’ charted, peaking at No. 42 and indicating how far from grace Queen had dropped in the States. Back home, the singles performed much better, though only the title track reached the Top Ten, while ‘Friends Will Be Friends’ narrowly missed at No. 14. The third and final single, ‘Who Wants To Live Forever’, stumbled to No. 24, by which time any momentum from the
Magic
tour had dwindled.

The album was a quick seller in Europe and the UK, peaking at No. 1 in the latter.
Kerrang!
hit the nail right on the head, saying, “A potpourri of musical styles. And it’s quite possibly only a band of Queen’s stature and breadth of appeal who could put out an album of such diverse songs without disappointing a sizable portion of their fans.”
Record Mirror
stated, “Queen have been plying their trade profitably for so long that there’s really no point in becoming incensed at their one (lack of) vision. The only strong emotion Queen now evoke in me is a fervent wish that Brian May would cut his hair.”

Issued a day after the UK release, the album peaked at No. 46 in the US; the reviews, what few there were, were run-of-the-mill and mundane. Gone were the venomous and sarcastic notices, with the old wave of journalists replaced with even more apathetic critics, who were more interested in the burgeoning fascination of hair metal and cock rock than in Queen’s blend of histrionics and theatrics. Only
Rolling Stone
was typically caustic, saying that “the album, which might have been Queen’s crowning moment, is absolutely bankrupt of gauche imagination,” concluding that “dominated by barren slabs of synthscape and guitarist Brian May’s orchestral fretwork,
A Kind Of Magic
sounds like hard rock with a hollow core: it’s heavy plastic.” Clearly, the magazine hadn’t noticed the band’s contributions to
Highlander
, taking ‘Princes Of The Universe’ out of context: “‘We Are The Champions’ still sounds as insistent as a jackboot compared to this album’s boastful closer ... which veers into unintentional self-parody. The ‘world-is-my-oyster’ lyrics seem more lazy than arrogant, and the music is a mechanical thud rather than a metalized threat.”
People Weekly
was just weary of Queen: “There’s hardly a personal expression, let alone an intimate one, in this album, which includes a number of songs from the soundtracks of
Iron Eagle
and
Highlander
... Just about everything is done in such loud, sweeping arrangements it’s hard to listen to the LP without wanting to strike a noble pose for the close-
up ... When Queen applies its mastery of electronics to songs that someone from this dimension can relate to – try ‘I Want to Be Free’ [
sic
] from its album
The Works
– the group can be dazzling. In this case they’re just overbearing.”

If the reviews were less than ecstatic, it didn’t bother the band; after nearly breaking up the year before, each member was particularly philosophical. In an interview with Mary Turner for
Off The Record
, they individually discussed arguments, but there was a degree of optimism in their comments: “The only thing that is hopefully good about us is after the arguments we can actually still face each other the next day or the day after and talk about something else and sort of get over it,” John said. “The funny thing is I think we’re now getting to that sort of point of maturity that we at least have that confidence that we are a successful band, which is obviously a desire in the beginning, that’s why sometimes you want to be in a band and you want to be successful, so we now have that and now it’s sort of a harder thing, of where you go from here, because we still have a few ambitions left.”

“It’s a survival test,” Freddie countered. “Of course we could all just go away and say, ‘Okay, we’ve had enough,’ and live happily ever after, but that’s not what we’re in for ... we’re in it to make music and [besides], what else could I do? This is the thing that interests me most. You don’t know what it means when you write a song when people actually appreciate it and they say, ‘It’s a good song’. It’s a wonderful feeling ... I’ve never let the press worry me. In the early days you think about it, you go out and buy the papers and make sure you’re in it and all that, and now it’s a completely different set-up because it’s your music and basically what you worry about is the people that buy your product. That’s what keeps us going.”

LIVE MAGIC

EMI EMC 3519, December 1986 [3]

EMI CDP 7 4641 3 2, December 1986

Hollywood HR-61267-2, August 1996

‘One Vision’ (5’09), ‘Tie Your Mother Down’ (2’59), ‘Seven Seas Of Rhye’ (1’21), ‘A Kind Of Magic’ (5’29) (Vinyl: 4’41), ‘Under Pressure’ (3’49), ‘Another One Bites The Dust’ (5’50) (Vinyl: 3’36), ‘I Want To Break Free’ (2’41), ‘Is This The World We Created...?’ (1’31), ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ (4’41), ‘Hammer To Fall’ (5’20) (Vinyl: 4’18), ‘Radio Ga Ga’ (4’27), ‘We Will Rock You’ (1’33), ‘Friends Will Be Friends’ (1’09), ‘We Are The Champions’ (2’01), ‘God Save The Queen’ (1’19)

Musicians
: John Deacon (
bass guitar
), Brian May (
guitars, vocals, acoustic guitar on ‘Is This The World We Created...?’
), Freddie Mercury (
vocals, piano
), Roger Taylor (
drums, vocals, effects on ‘A Kind Of Magic’
), Spike ‘The Duke’ Edney (
additional guitar on ‘Hammer To Fall’, vocals, keyboards
)

Recorded
: 9 August 1986, Knebworth Park, Stevenage, Hertfordshire (
except ‘Is This The World We Created...?’ recorded at Wembley Stadium, London, 11 July 1986; ‘Hammer To Fall’ recorded at Wembley Stadium, London, 12 July 1986; ‘A Kind Of Magic’ (parts) and ‘Under Pressure’ recorded at Nepstadion, Budapest, Hungary, 27 July 1986
)

Producers
: Queen and James ‘Trip’ Khalaf

It’s hard to justify the existence of
Live Magic
without first reviewing the details. 1986 was a momentous year for Queen: despite mounting internal tension, Live Aid was a turning point and led to one of their most expansive and exhaustive tours ever. It would have been foolish not to release a souvenir of that tour; however, the result is less a gift and more of a booby prize.

It’s not that the performances are poor. As with every tour, there were varying degrees of success in terms of how a song was presented or how well the band meshed on a particular night, but the four nights represented on the album – two from Wembley Stadium, and one each from Budapest and Knebworth, the latter making up the bulk of the recordings – saw the band in fine form. The most displeasing aspect of the album lies in the slipshod editing, creating a product that should not have been released without some major fine-tuning. Such essential tracks as ‘Is This The World We Created...?’, ‘We Will Rock You’, ‘Friends Will Be Friends’ and ‘We Are The Champions’ were reduced to mere soundbites, while ‘Tie Your Mother Down’ and ‘I Want To Break Free’ were drastically cut by several verses. The only full-length tracks are ‘One Vision’, ‘Seven Seas Of Rhye’ (which was barely ninety seconds long on any given night anyway), ‘Under Pressure’, ‘A Kind Of Magic’, ‘Another One Bites The Dust’ and ‘Hammer To Fall’, and those last three were complete only on the CD release.