Queen: The Complete Works (44 page)

‘Blues Breaker’ remained a vinyl-only curiosity for nearly a decade, before it was issued on the second of two CD singles of ‘Back To The Light’ in November 1992 (the first CD single featured the other two
Star Fleet Project
songs), marking that song’s first – and long overdue – appearance on CD.

BLURRED VISION
(Queen)

• B-side: 11/85 [7] • Compilation:
Vision

• CD Single: 11/88

Essentially the programmed drum section from ‘One Vision’, this throwaway B-side contains little of substance and offers even less in the way of interest.

BODY LANGUAGE
(Mercury)

• A-side: 4/82 [25] • Album:
Space
• CD Single: 11/88

• CD Single: 10/91 [16] • Bonus:
Space

The nadir of the
Hot Space
album. Written and performed exclusively by Freddie, save for a few guitar licks in the outro from Brian, ‘Body Language’ is a perfect example of funk gone horribly, horribly wrong: synthesized bass, drum-machines, and uninhibited proclamations of Freddie’s increasing fascination with sex. Brian, for once, was unimpressed, and implored Freddie to make the song more universal for the fans. However, the vocalist was deep into his sexual experimentation, and ‘Body Language’ was the forum most appropriate for him to express it.

Inexplicably released as the first single from the album, the fact that it crawled to only No. 25 should have been an indication of how out of touch Freddie was with his fans: as much as he enthused about
Thriller
, it’s impossible to imagine Michael Jackson doing songs quite like this. Even more astonishing was the chart placement of the single in the US, where it peaked at No. 11 and became a favourite in bars and dance clubs around the nation. The promotional video, filmed in Toronto in April 1982 and directed by Brian Grant, features Freddie cavorting around a soundstage with half-naked men and women following him around before he meets up with the other band members for the finger-clicking interlude. The other three look out of place and uncomfortable, and Brian later unsympathetically attributed the video as a Freddie tour de force. In an attempt at being somewhat artistic – or perhaps Grant was just trying to instill a bit of humour into an otherwise unwatchable video – there is one humorous moment when, after Freddie dances with three large black ladies shaking maracas, the third and largest lady goes flying into a gigantic strawberry cake right before his eyes.

‘Body Language’ was performed in full on a few rare instances in the 1982
Hot Space
European tour, but was only a semi-regular addition to the US set lists before it was mercifully dropped in time for the 1984
Works!
tour. The track was chosen to receive a remix in 1991, with k.d. lang producer Susan Rogers selected for the task; the result was little better than the original, though the addition of piano was a welcome one. The
Hot Space
remaster would have been better off with the non-album ‘Soul Brother’ and the extended remixes of ‘Staying Power’ and ‘Back Chat’.

BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY
(Mercury)

• A-side: 10/75 [1] • Album:
Opera
• CD Single: 11/88

• AA-side: 12/91 [1] • B-side: 12/99 [6]

• Live:
Killers, Magic, Wembley, 46664, On Fire, Montreal

• Live (Q+PR):
Return, Ukraine
• Bonus:
Opera

So much has been said about ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ over the course of three decades that it’s impossible
to unearth information that is new and shocking to the reader. And yet fans want, quite naturally, to know all they can about the song that has been called the Song of the Millennium. Many legends surround ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, most of them true. However, the facts seem to get lost in the legend: Freddie, having written the bulk of his material for the
Sheer Heart Attack
album, started writing an operatic piece in the summer of 1975, originally titled ‘Real Life’. “‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ didn’t just come out of thin air,” Freddie explained. “I did a bit of research, although it was tongue-in-cheek and it was a mock opera. Why not? I certainly wasn’t saying I was an opera fanatic and I knew everything thing about it.” He continued: “We wanted to experiment with sound. Sometimes we used three studios simultaneously. ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ took bloody ages to record but we had all the freedom we wanted and we’ve been able to go to greater extremes.”

Gary Lagan, assistant engineer for the album, said of the recording process, “The drums, the bass and maybe the guide guitar and piano from Freddie have got to be ten or twelve tracks and it only leaves you another twelve to fool around with, which isn’t very much when you look at the amount of vocals that are going on. You had to keep bouncing things down, without losing the quality of everything, and we couldn’t even go back a stage. Once you’d gone down a route then nine times out of ten it would destroy what you’d already done, so you had to make sure that what you were doing was a hundred per cent right, because there was no undo button in those days.”

A legendary story made the rounds after the song had been released, which most attributed to sheer folklore, but Brian maintains its truth: “We were stretching the limits of technology in those days. Because ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ was entirely done on sixteen-track, we had to do a lot of bouncing as we went along; the tape got very thin. This ‘legendary’ story, that people think we made up, is true: we held the tape up to the light one day – we’d been wondering where all the top end was going – and what we discovered was virtually a transparent piece of tape. All the oxide had been rubbed off. It was time to hurriedly make a copy and get on with it.”

“I’m really pleased about the operatic thing,” Freddie gushed in 1975. “I really wanted to be outrageous with vocals because we’re always getting compared with other people, which is very stupid. If you really listen to the operatic bit there are no comparisons, which is what we want.” Brian agreed, saying, “‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ was really Freddie’s baby from the beginning: he came in and knew exactly what he wanted. The backing track was done with just piano, bass and drums, with a few spaces for other things to go in, like the tic-tic-tic on the hi-hat to keep the time, and Freddie sang a guide vocal at the time, but he had all his harmonies written out, and it was really just a question of doing it.”

Many alternate meanings and claims about the song’s lyrics have been put forth over the years, though its true story has died along with its author. (Roger once offhandedly mentioned that Freddie told him what it was about, but whether he was being deliberately coy or truthful is unknown. To many fans’ frustration, he never even explained its meaning as told to him.) Freddie was always guarded when asked about his lyrics, preferring to let the listeners draw their own conclusions, but every possible interpretation has been posited over the years. Instead of offering his own opinions, this author will merely say that some ideas are more believable than others: whether the listener believes it’s about Freddie coming to terms with his sexuality or something far more sinister is all down to what each fan concludes from the lyrics.

Roy Thomas Baker, producer of the sessions (and of Queen’s first four albums), has claimed that Freddie used to come into the sessions with more and more ideas, expanding the operatic section until it became what it now is. However, Brian has maintained (as evident in the above quote) that Freddie knew where everything would go and that everything was constructed in his head before the song was recorded, and that the result is what Freddie had been hearing for months. “Freddie used to come into the studio armed with sheets and sheets of paper with notes scribbled all over them in his own particular fashion,” Brian said. “It wasn’t standard musical notation, but As and Bs and Cs and sharps in blocks – like buses zooming all over his bits of paper. He had the song all worked out when he came in. We played a backing track which left the gaps. And he would go, ‘Bum bum bum bum, that’s what happens here...’”

What was eventually released in October 1975 was a curious blend of rock, opera and balladry that was unlike anything ever attempted by a rock band before. The band were undoubtedly ambitious in their design and approach, but would it pay off in the end? “A lot of people slammed ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’,” Freddie grumbled, “but who can you compare that to? Name
one group that’s done an operatic single. We were adamant that ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ could be a hit in its entirety. We have been forced to make compromises, but cutting up a song will never be one of them!”

While critical reviews were less than ecstatic, saying that Queen were just being pretentious, demand for the single was staggering, and it all started one weekend in late October, when Freddie and Roger visited their friend Kenny Everett, a DJ for the BBC, with a copy of the single in hand. “I got a call in 1975 – I was living in a beautiful honey-coloured Cotswold stone pub – from Freddie Mercury,” Everett recalled many years later, “who said, ‘Ken, I don’t know what I’ve done. I was in the studio the other day and I finished off this single and it’s about eight minutes long, and I don’t know whether it’s going to be a hit’. And I said, ‘Oh, bring it over. We’ll stick it on one of my tape machines in the studio and give it a listen. I doubt anyone’ll ever play it, that length, because people are frightened of long records. They might think the DJ’s gone to the loo and forgotten to come back!’ So he brought it over and plonked it on the machine and of course this glorious operatic wonder came out, and I said, ‘Oh, forget about this. It could be half an hour, it’s still gonna be number one for centuries’. So I remember him being so unsure about this piece of genius. It was very odd, when you look at it in retrospect, because it was so great. I mean, it’s like Mozart saying, ‘Ohhh, I don’t know whether my clarinet concerto’s going to take off.’ Silly, really. I mean, it’s got Number One written all over it from the first note.”

Although sworn to not play the single on the radio, Kenny became so enamored with the song that he immediately played it the next day, gushing praise and cheekily remarking that he had promised not to play it. While the band may have been horrified that an as-yet-unreleased single reaching nearly six minutes was being transmitted across Britain, they were undoubtedly not prepared for the response it received. Listeners echoed Kenny’s fascination for the song, and called the BBC asking where they could get a copy of the single. EMI rush-released the single on 31 October 1975, and the song instantly secured the top spot in the British charts.

Any trepidation about the single’s success, as well as notions that it should be edited for release, were soon scrapped. The single sold millions of copies worldwide, and became Queen’s first Top Ten hit in the US. Live, however, the song was a different beast altogether. “[It’s] not a stage number,” Brian explained. “A lot of people don’t like us leaving the stage. But to be honest, I’d rather leave than have us playing to a backing tape. If you’re out there and you’ve got backing tapes, it’s a totally false situation. So we’d rather be up front about it and say, ‘Look. This is not something you can play on stage. It was multi-layered in the studio. We’ll play it because we think you want to hear it.’”

The solution to the problem was simple: the band had Kenny Everett construct a short intro piece on 13 November 1975 (the day before Queen’s major British tour) that comprised a generic introduction before commencing with a snippet from ‘Ogre Battle’, and then merging into the operatic section, at the conclusion of which the band would bound onto the stage and perform the rock bit, which would then segue effortlessly into the next track. The band would then open the medley with the introductory ballad section (the multi-tracked intro chorus was never performed in any live setting), which would lead into the next number before the operatic bit; the medley would then conclude with the quieter “nothing really matters” section, and finally end with Roger bashing the gigantic gong behind his kit. The song was split up this way, with the introductory tape opening shows, for the 1975 and 1976
A Night At The Opera
tours, as well as the Summer 1976 British dates.

For the Queen Lizzy tour in early 1977, the band rehearsed a full version of the song; knowing they would encounter difficulties with the operatic bit, the band instead had the album version blare from the PA system, allowing the stage lights and effects to do their work as the band took a short break, before re-entering the stage with the hard rock bit. The song was performed this way between 1977 and 1986, and while performances hardly deviated from one another from show to show, the song would always be received with unbridled enthusiasm from the audience and, regardless of their mother tongue, they would sing every word along with Freddie.

Intriguingly, Freddie was approached by the London Dance Centre in early October 1979, asking him if he would like to take part in a charity gala ballet performance to benefit the City of Westminster Society for Mentally Handicapped Children. The vocalist obliged, and rehearsed routines for ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ and ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’, finally performing at the London Coliseum on 7 October 1979, wowing the audience (and Roger, who came along for moral support) and confirming Sid Vicious’ snide comment that Freddie was “bringing ballet to the masses.”

What has gone down in rock history about the song isn’t so much its fusion of rock and opera, but the innovative tactic of making promotional videos more acceptable. Up until 1975, major rock acts had no way to promote singles unless they appeared on
Top Of The Pops
or any similar music television programme (the US had American Bandstand, as this was six years before MTV). While some films had been shot in the past, notably ‘Happy Jack’ by The Who in 1966 and ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ by The Rolling Stones in 1968, those were taped on film and commissioned primarily for
Top Of The Pops
. ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, however, was taped on video and was used for a multitude of programmes; whereas, in the past, different TV shows would demand different performance clips, ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ was a universal clip for all TV shows.