Queen: The Complete Works (33 page)

Musicians
: Roger Taylor (
vocals, guitar
), Spike Edney (
keyboards, backing vocals
), Peter Noone (
bass guitar, backing vocals
), Clayton Moss (
guitars, backing vocals
), Josh Macrae (
drums, backing vocals
)

Recorded
: The Philipshalle, Düsseldorf, 22 October 1991

Producers
: The Cross

Recorded on the fifth night of The Cross’ brief tour of Germany during October 1991,
Live In Germany
is a Fan Club-only release, much like
The Official Bootleg
, and has been heard only by a lucky few (this author not among them). This fifty-nine-minute recording comes from The Cross’ October 1991 concert in Düsseldorf, with a set list derived heavily from
Blue Rock
, and includes only three older songs – ‘Man On Fire’, ‘Power To Love’ and ‘Top Of The World, Ma’ – making it the first tour not to feature any of Roger’s Queen compositions.

The cassette tape was released to the Fan Club in early 1992, and has eluded any official release since, making it the most obscure and little-heard Queen-related recording in existence.

BRIAN MAY

BACK TO THE LIGHT

Parlophone PCSD 123, September 1992 [6]

Parlophone CDPCSDX 123, September 1992 [6]

Hollywood HR 61404 2, February 1993 [159]

‘The Dark’ (2’20), ‘Back To The Light’ (4’59), ‘Love Token’ (6’04), ‘Resurrection’ (5’19), ‘Too Much Love Will Kill You’ (4’28), ‘Driven By You’ (4’10), ‘Nothin’ But Blue’ (3’31), ‘I’m Scared’ (3’59), ‘Last Horizon’ (4’11), ‘Let Your Heart Rule Your Head’ (3’51), ‘Just One Life’ (3’38), ‘Rollin’ Over’ (4’39)

Musicians
: Brian May (
vocals, guitars, keyboards, programming, bass guitar and anything else around
), Cozy Powell (
drums
), Gary Tibbs (
bass guitar on ‘Back To The Light’, ‘Let Your Heart Rule Your Head’ and ‘Rollin’ Over’
), Neil Murray (
bass guitar on ‘Love Token’ and ‘I’m Scared’
), John Deacon (
bass guitar on ‘Nothin’ But Blue’
), Geoff Dugmore (
drums on ‘Let Your Heart Rule Your Head’ and ‘Rollin’ Over’
), Mike Moran (
piano on ‘Love Token’ and ‘Rollin’ Over’, keyboards on ‘Last Horizon’
), Don Airey (
extra keyboards on ‘Resurrection’ and ‘Nothin’ But Blue’
), Miriam Stockley and Maggie Ryder (
backing vocals on ‘Back To The Light’ and ‘Rollin’ Over’
), Suzie O’List and Gill O’Donovan (
backing vocals on ‘Back To The Light’ and ‘Let Your Heart Rule Your Head’
), Chris Thompson (
co-lead vocals and backing vocals on ‘Rollin’ Over’
)

Recorded
: Allerton Hill, Surrey; Mountain Studios, Montreux; Sarm East Studios, Aldgate; Mono Valley, Monmouth; Marcus and Townhouse Studios, London, 1988–1992

Producers
: Brian May and Justin Shirley-Smith

Rumours of a true solo record from Brian May had persisted ever since he stepped into The Record Plant in April 1983. Fans weren’t satisfied with
Star Fleet Project
, and Brian had promised that he would start working on a solo album whenever Queen weren’t the priority. Working with Bad News and Anita Dobson wasn’t enough for the guitarist, though he enjoyed both projects immensely. So, in 1988, just before Queen went back into the studios to work on
The Miracle
, Brian started to demo a handful of songs that would ultimately end up on his first full-length project.

“Most of the time I’ve been working on my own,” he told
Record Collector
in 1989. “The solo project is mainly about getting all the stuff I’ve had in my head onto tape, but I’ve found that some of my ideas ... have ended up on the Queen album. I think that the best ideas should really be concentrated towards the group, because it’s still the best vehicle I can find – as the group is so good!” At least five songs were known to have been recorded in 1988: ‘Back To The Light’, ‘I’m Scared’, ‘Let Your Heart Rule Your Head’, a cover of The Small Faces’ ‘Rollin’ Over’ and ‘Too Much Love Will Kill You’, the latter written around 1986 and then recorded during sessions for
The Miracle
, though ultimately rejected.

Instead of an instrumental guitar album, one that might have been generated by, say, Jimmy Page or Brian’s blues hero Jeff Beck,
Back To The Light
was an attempt to create a thematic album, showcasing a whole range of emotions Brian had been dealing with. “This isn’t a ‘guitar virtuoso’ album,” he told
Gold Compact Disc
magazine in 1992. “It’s an album of songs designed to feature a lot of guitar.” The Red Special is in full force and Brian sounds more sure of his guitar-playing than on recent Queen albums, conveying the emotions not only through his singing but also through his strings. “For me, this album was a sort of divide, a crossroads,” he explained to
RCD Magazine
. “In the beginning, I wanted to get back to basics and make an album on my own just to see what would happen. Now, in the end, I’ve put out something because I actually do have something to say, and it’s worth saying. Over these five years, my
life and feelings underwent a catastrophic change, and the music throughout this record reflects the entire process.”

Lyrically, Brian was a confused man, which he even admitted in the liner notes for the album. “The song that begins the album,” he explained to
Guitar World
, “‘The Dark’, has a lot of [guitars] built up like a wall. At the beginning, I’m trying to give the impression of a very frightened child faced with a very impossible wall. So there’s a lot of guitars on there ... First, there’s total blackness, and then there’s light at the end of the tunnel, and points where you see inspiration in someone else’s life. If the album is appreciated by people who are into what I’m into, then that will be enough. Everything else will be a bonus.”

That blackness was spurred by a deep depression that started in 1987, following what turned out to be Queen’s final tour. With the band off the road, his marriage in a shambles due to an increasing preoccupation with
EastEnders
star Anita Dobson, and his father dying of cancer in June 1988, Brian poured his confusion into song, enlisting the help of professional songwriters and friends to help him make some semblance of sense. The songs written during this period expressed a whole range of emotions, and dealt with the pain and confusion of a failing relationship, and the sadness and emptiness of loss. Even the comedic, lighthearted numbers – ‘Love Token’ and ‘Let Your Heart Rule Your Head’ – betray the façade, and are tinged with traces of real-life experiences, be it domestic discord in the former or meaningful advice to trust emotions over logic in the latter.

“I’m a bit wary of explaining things, but throughout the whole album you can hear this person who is very confused, confronted by different situations as they roll past him,” Brian attempted to clarify in
Guitarist
. “So I started off with the idea that there’s this little baby in the cradle, he’s completely in the dark and the dark is something really frightening. It was convenient that it was ‘We Will Rock You’ because here was this nursery rhyme and the version Queen did was very big and macho. Total opposites.”

Songs for
Back To The Light
were tried out during sessions for
The Miracle
and
Innuendo
, and vice versa: Brian later revealed that ‘Headlong’ and ‘I Can’t Live With You’ were intended for
Back To The Light
, while ‘Too Much Love Will Kill You’ was to be on
The Miracle
. In 1991, between sessions for what would ultimately become
Made In Heaven
, Brian continued work on his album, with ‘Driven By You’, ‘Just One Life’ and ‘Love Token’ recorded and completed by the end of the year. In November, it became evident that ‘Driven By You’ had the most potential to be a hit, and was duly released the day after Freddie’s death, which Brian initially worried would be seen as a callous cash-in, but it in fact had the vocalist’s blessing: “Tell him he must do it. What better publicity could he have?”

“It’s a real strain doing solo projects,” Brian lamented in 1989 to
Record Collector
, “because you are on your own. You can bring in other musicians, but it’s not like being in a group situation where the responsibility is shared. At the end of the day, I’m left sitting in the studio with an engineer, saying, ‘Is this worth it or not?’, and it’s very hard to make those judgments. Most of what I like is spontaneous, and most of the songs I write I like in a very rough form, so they don’t sound as if they’ve been produced. So these solo tracks are difficult to take to record companies, because there is no obvious hit, and the material is not produced to sound like Queen records. Left to my own devices, I like to do things which are quite off the beaten track, then I wonder why they aren’t hits! It’s basically my own fault because I don’t like the ‘hit’ format.”

Nevertheless,
Back To The Light
and its five singles – ‘Driven By You’, ‘Too Much Love Will Kill You’, ‘Back To The Light’, ‘Resurrection’ and ‘Last Horizon’ – became hits, with four of the five singles reaching the Top Thirty. The album, released in September 1992 just before The Brian May Band went out on the road in its support, peaked at an impressive No. 6 in the UK, certainly the best showing any Queen-related solo album had received since
Mr Bad Guy
in 1985. Comparisons were made to the later Queen albums, and most were in Brian’s favour: certainly, he was no Freddie, but the vocalist’s influence was manifest. “[It was] very strange,” he explained to
Guitarist
, of not recording with Freddie. “It was always a project which was in parallel with Queen, because we always had a positive attitude to people doing stuff outside the band, getting new experiences and bringing them back into the band. But it did become something very different at the end, when Freddie went. I started to realize that this was a kind of bridge towards the next part of life, whatever that may be.

“I always felt close to Freddie in the studio, whether he was there or not, because we worked together so intensively over the years. So I can still hear him talking to me when I’m doing some of this stuff, especially when I’m trying to sing – which has not been easy. But I wanted to do it, because I didn’t want anyone else
to be speaking my ideas when it was such a personal statement. So it was good for me to imagine Freddie sitting there.”

Even though Brian had lost a collaborator in Freddie, he found a new working relationship with Cozy Powell. The drummer, who had a long and illustrious career, had been working with Black Sabbath in the late 1980s when Brian was asked to contribute guitar to that band’s
Headless Cross
album. The two, who had met in the mid-1970s and were appreciators of each others’ work for as long, discovered an instant rapport, and in addition to Cozy playing drums on most of the
Back To The Light
tracks, Brian also contributed guitar to two tracks from Cozy’s solo album
The Drums Are Back
. He liked the backing tracks for ‘Ride To Win’ and ‘Somewhere In Time’ so much that he added lyrics, creating ‘Resurrection’ and ‘Nothin’ But Blue’ respectively, and Cozy became Brian’s drummer of choice. It was a relationship that would last for most of the decade until the drummer’s untimely death in April 1998.

Back To The Light
is an interesting paradox: although it’s Brian’s most cohesive solo album it still sounds disjointed. While the songwriting was strong, the biggest disappointment was Brian’s vocal performances, which he was quick to address in, of all places,
Guitarist
: “In the beginning, Freddie didn’t have all the powers that he wanted to have as a vocalist; he just worked to achieve those and improved as he worked over the years. So I just took that as a good example. I thought, ‘If I’m going to sing this album, I’m going to have to work at it,’ and I treated it rather like a weight-training programme – I went in there, sang my guts out and tried to reach further every day. It’s amazing what you can do if you really try. I was quite stunned, because in the beginning I was struggling with it – all those regions around top A – and in the end, in ‘Resurrection’, I got up to a top D above that, without going into falsetto, which was quite a little crusade for me. I was amazed that I could actually do that. It’s another question as to whether I can do it on stage, but at least it happened, as least I know I can get there if I really try hard enough.”

The lyrics were strong, the musical performances were consistent, and it wouldn’t have been impossible to imagine most of the tracks becoming Queen songs. “I suppose [Queen comparisons are] inevitable,” Brian observed in
Guitar World
in 1993. “There’s bound to be similarities. I’ve got to carry some trademarks away from Queen, because I can’t help being me. In my opinion, there are superficial similarities to Queen, but I think what is underneath on this album is actually pretty different. It’s much more of a personal statement.” The album it most closely resembled was
Innuendo
; indeed, it could be seen as a companion piece to that album, as if
Back To The Light
were Brian’s own interpretation of the same circumstances. The only difference was that it lacked the input of a four-way collaboration, with more emphasis on the guitar. “Yeah, I enjoy [the heavier stuff],” Brian said in
Guitar World
. “I have an outlet for that now, whereas sometimes the band had to be a bit more broad, stylistically. Now I can get more into the heavy stuff. And I do enjoy it, I must admit.”

Unsurprisingly, the guitar work is exemplary; The Red Special could have done most of the singing (indeed, it did on special guitar-dominated versions of ‘Nothin’ But Blue’, ‘Just One Life’ and ‘Too Much Love Will Kill You’). “Ninety-five per cent of [the songs were recorded with The Red Special],” Brian said in
Guitar World
. “On a couple of tracks, I also used this wonderful guitar that Joe Satriani gave me, which was a big departure for me. He gave it to me after we did the Guitar Legends concert in Seville, which I was lucky enough to be asked to put together. We all had a great time and I developed an even greater admiration for Satriani than I already had. He’s such an amazingly dexterous player, you expect him to be technical and nothing else. But the fact is that he’s got so much soul and feeling in what he does. He’s really a guitarist’s guitarist. Plus, he’s a nice guy. Anyway, he sent me this guitar and I picked it up and was inspired. So I kicked in with it.”