Queen: The Complete Works

by Georg Purvis

  Unfortunately, Brian had more immediate problems on his mind. The tour had been a particular strain on his marriage, and he found consolation by working with other musicians and artists, the least likely being EastEnders actress Anita Dobson. Brian had been approached by her manager about producing her debut record, eventually released as Talking Of Love; after an initial meeting with Anita, the two hit it off and romance flowered. Because Brian was still married, he attempted to keep the new relationship discreet for the sake of his children, though that didn’t stop the press from publishing the rumours. John’s marriage was also going through a rough patch; he and wife Veronica decided it would be best to work on the marriage and, in a move that would become characteristic of John, took extended skiing vacations to Biarritz.

  According to Brian, “We said, ‘Right, we’re going to take a little break’ – we didn’t split up, but we needed space for ourselves - ‘and when the time is right, we’ll make the album, rather than somebody saying we’ve gotta make one.’ So, we waited and we did various other things: Freddie and Roger both did solo projects, and I’m halfway through one, and I did a lot of producing.”

  The band finally reconvened at Olympic Studios in London to start preliminary work on their follow-up to A Kind Of Magic, though they had a different plan this time. As with previous albums, each member would work separately on his own songs and then present virtually completed demos, into which the others would introduce their own ideas. “We made the decision,” Brian said in a 1991 Canadian radio interview, “that no matter who came up with the idea for the song, it would be credited to Queen, and not individuals, and I think it’s the best single decision we ever made. I just wish we made it twenty years ago instead, because it makes such a difference to the creation process. I would recommend it to anyone, anyone who is actually a proper group.”

  “Co-writing every song was a big step for us,” Brian told the Chicago Tribune in June 1989. “In the past, it got to the point where there’d only ever be one or two members of us in the studio at a time, so Queen wasn’t really functioning as a group, as far as recording went. But this time, it was like the old days, with all of us there and plenty of arguments, but constructive ones. There’s still a lot of musical friction, because we’ve gone off in very different directions. But personally, we’re getting on much, much better than we used to.”

  “We seem to work together better now than we did before,” Roger said in 1989. “We’re fairly up and down characters, and we’re all very different with different tastes in many ways. And we used to have lots of arguments in the studio, but this time we decided to share all the songwriting, which was a very democratic and good idea. Then you get decisions made on artistic merit, rather than financial or ego grounds.” Though it was a good idea to credit all the songs as Queen tracks, there were still clues as to who wrote what for careful listeners: Roger, still buzzing from fronting his own band, penned ‘The Invisible Man’ and most of ‘Breakthru’, while Brian contributed ‘I Want It All’ and ‘Scandal’. John and Freddie co-wrote ‘My Baby Does Me’ and ‘Rain Must Fall’, while Freddie stuck the opening of a work-in-progress to the beginning of ‘Breakthru’. The rest – ‘Party’, ‘Khashoggi’s Ship’, ‘Was It All Worth It’, and the title track – were true collaborations, musically initiated by Freddie but with all contributing lyrics. (The exception being ‘Party’, which was written and recorded without Roger.)

  “It’s basically the four of us,” Brian said in 1989. “If we ever deviated from that, then we certainly came back to that. There’s guitars, bass, drums and vocals, and nowadays there are a few synthesizers and samples and stuff thrown in. But we made a very conscious decision that the technology wasn’t going to take us over, and we were going to keep the human element as far to the front as we could and use the technology to preserve and augment that. A lot of it’s a very techno-aware album, but hopefully there’s a lot of humanity in there as well – we think so, we think it’s very exciting. We enjoy what we’re doing, and the sounds reflect us as a group more so than the last few albums. It’s not like, sit down with a drum-machine and a synthesizer. We played together and we evolved things that seemed to excite us, and then built everything around that.”

  Sessions kicked off in January 1988, meetings more devoted to planning and to creating demos than to the actual recording of songs. John explained of those initial sessions: “The first few weeks of recording, we did a lot of live material, a lot of songs ... Ideas came up, some jamming, we had a few ideas that were already prepared. ‘I Want It All’ was one of the few songs that was actually written before we went in.” Roger continued, saying, “Yes it is our first album since 1986 (laughs). I think the reason for the delay was that we wanted to sort of go away and recharge our batteries – quite logical really – and just sort of generate some new energy and enthusiasm for being Queen. We [initially] went into the studio and enjoyed it very much, but we still didn’t have any material. So we decided to go in for a longer time.”

  “We spent the whole of January in the studio and have been recording the first parts of the new album,” Roger told University Radio Bath in March 1988, while on tour with The Cross. “So far there’s twenty-two songs and it’ll be the best album that Queen have done in ten years, easily. It’s more back to the old style. I mean it’s almost like echoes of Led Zeppelin and everything in there. It’s great and it’s all live in the studio, which is great. It gives it more spark and energy I think. No machines – so far we haven’t time to do overdubs anyway, so there’s little synthesizer on it actually. It’s basically bass, guitar and drums with some piano.”

  Sessions alternated between The Townhouse, which had been used previously on A Kind Of Magic, and the legendary Olympic Studios. Recording was frequently put aside for other endeavours: Freddie was still working on Barcelona, and Roger had a UK tour scheduled for February and March. On 14 April, Freddie appeared on stage in the Time musical at London’s Dominion Theatre, despite his dislike of the medium. However, it was a special charity performance, and he was gently persuaded to do so by his friend Cliff Richard. Along with singing ‘In My Defence’ and the title track, which he had recorded years before, he performed two other numbers: the emotive ‘It’s In Every One Of Us’ and the crowd-rousing chant of ‘Born To Rock ‘n’ Roll’. It was shaping up to be a good year for the band.

  On 2 June, Brian’s father died, which hit the guitarist very hard. He and his father had been exceptionally close and, along with the disintegration of his marriage, this marked a low point in Brian’s life. “The two worst things I ever did in his eyes were: one, give up my academic career to become a pop star,” Brian recalled to OK magazine in 1998, “and two, live with a woman ... [He] was always trying to stop me going into the rock business but he built my guitar – the thing that propelled me into it.” He went through several bouts of depression, and admitted years later that he entertained thoughts of suicide. A deeply confused man, he poured his emotions into a new composition, ‘Too Much Love Will Kill You’.

  After considerable time off, the band resumed sessions towards the end of that summer, this time recording at Mountain Studios; the album was completed by Christmas of 1988, though further overdubs and mixing meant that the sessions dragged on until February 1989. “After we did the tour in 1986, which was a very big European tour, we were all absolutely exhausted and shattered and we basically didn’t want to work together or see each other for a while,” John said. “Towards the end of the second year [off], we sort of met up and Freddie suggested, ‘Perhaps we should try some time in the studio.’ And then the third we spent making the album, so in a way it was a two-year gap for us rather than a three-year gap.”

  The band certainly do sound refreshed on the album, exhibiting a renewed enthusiasm for the music they were coasting through on their two previous albums. There were more chart-friendly songs too, as Queen were keeping a keen eye on the charts, and at least the first three singles (‘I Want It All�
��, ‘Breakthru’ and ‘The Invisible Man’) were the right selections. Unfortunately, the album’s negatives outweigh its positives. Despite the jubilation in the opener, ‘Party’, it’s a poor stage-setter for what would follow: synthesized, programmed rock with few surprises and even fewer highlights. Queen exhibited faulty judgement by repeating a formula instead of advancing it, even slightly. While they had back-pedalled with The Works, there was a sense of urgency to deliver the goods due to the backlash against Hot Space, and A Kind Of Magic had been born out of a soundtrack, but there wasn’t much advancement between 1986 and 1989. The Miracle is a logical extension of A Kind Of Magic, yes, but why could it not have been a logical progression?

  There’s little to applaud here, but what is good is as good as anything on The Works or A Kind Of Magic. ‘I Want It All’ is a welcome return to the rock format, while ‘Breakthru’ and ‘The Invisible Man’ are upbeat and enjoyable. Even in a song like ‘Rain Must Fall’, Queen are showing that they want to experiment and want to expand their music, but their good intentions are muddled among the lesser tracks like ‘Party’ and ‘My Baby Does Me’. The most Queen-like song finally comes at the end of the album, after nearly forty minutes of bouncing between quality and mediocrity. ‘Was It All Worth It?’, the single that should have been, closes the album and is the only song in the traditional Queen manner. If the entire album had been like this song, it would have been infinitely better; as it is, it’s an indifferent collection that doesn’t offer anything to set itself apart from Queen’s other mid-1980s releases.

  Most of the album’s trouble stems from its production, a key factor that had plagued Queen’s albums since Jazz over a decade earlier. Synthesizers are still heavily featured, though the technology had been advanced so greatly by this point that their integration was only natural (remember, all of Freddie’s Barcelona had been performed by Mike Moran on keyboards). Despite Roger’s above claim that no synthesizers had been integrated into the sessions, they fell back into their old ways, overloading the songs with drum machines, programming and synthesizers, coming up with an album that was crystal clear and sparkling, but any depth and subtleties were overshadowed by technology. Brian was still pleased with the album, telling Hard ‘n’ Heavy that year, “The way it came out very guitar oriented just happened, as far as I can see. It’s very strange. It may have come about because we were actually doing more playing together. There’s a lot of live takes on there, so, you know, whereas we had got fairly machine oriented for a while, this isn’t. There’s a lot of technology, but it’s kind of after the event. It’s basically us playing as a band. So I guess it sounds like it. And no one’s more happy than I am. Having decided that we were going to credit every track to the four of us, as opposed to just one, everybody argued over every note, which is very healthy, and it’s much more of a cohesive group effort than we’ve done for a long time.”

  For the first time in a long while, the sessions proved fruitful enough to include non-album tracks as the B-sides of most of Queen’s singles from The Miracle; reportedly thirty tracks were recorded during the sessions, though only ten would make the final cut. ‘Chinese Torture’ was a short experiment with Brian’s guitar and delay effects, and would have been a slight (though interesting) inclusion. ‘Hang On In There’, ‘Hijack My Heart’, ‘Stealin” and ‘My Life Has Been Saved’ (the B-sides of ‘I Want It All’, ‘The Invisible Man’, ‘Breakthru’ and ‘Scandal’ respectively) would have been far superior inclusions in place of the lesser material, bringing the total up to fifteen known, released tracks. Taking into consideration the rejected ‘Too Much Love Will Kill You’ and unfinished ‘A New Life Is Born’ and ‘I Guess We’re Falling Out’, twelve unaccounted-for tracks or ideas remain. Several tracks started during the sessions for The Miracle were held over for Innuendo, but it isn’t known what songs these were or even if they were released.

  The cover was created by Richard Gray using a chromakey (known as bluescreening or greenscreening, as typically used for weather map presentations on TV) and an early variation of Adobe™ Photoshop (called Quantel graphic paintbox). It depicts an alarmingly creepy amalgamation of the four Queen faces to create a gigantic, one-headed, six-eyed creature. In a strange but subtle way, this was the band’s way of graphically affirming that they were now a more cohesive unit than ever, a visual representation of the new, more democratic writing approach they so thoroughly enjoyed. “Two or three weeks before we finished,” John said in 1989, “it was gonna be called The Invisible Men, but we changed it to The Miracle, which is a very heavy title in a way. It was from one song, and I think the sentiment is quite nice in a way, a bit naïve in some way, but it’s reasonably genuine. Mainly it’s entertainment, and if people get pleasure out of it and enjoy it, then that’s the point.”

  Unfortunately, the band members explained from the beginning that no live dates would be forthcoming: “To get into the whole cycle of making an album, going on tour, then going home and making an album again – we want to get out of that,” Roger said, which Freddie echoed almost verbatim in a separate interview: “I want to change the cycle of album, world tour, album, world tour. Maybe we will tour, but it will be for totally different reasons. I’ve personally had it with these bombastic lights and staging effects. I don’t think a forty-two-year-old man should be running around in his leotard anymore.” It’s strange for Freddie to have said something like that, a man who built his reputation as a showman upon the foundation of entertaining thousands and thousands of fans every night. Yet people accepted his explanation, though not wholly without accusations: rumours originated from the tabloids that Freddie was seriously ill, causing a backlash from the band members against such innuendoes. At the time, the band had no idea that Freddie was ill, but had been told by Freddie that something was definitely afoot and that he didn’t foresee a tour in support of the album.

  “I badly want to play live, with or without Queen,” Brian exclaimed in 1989. “If we can’t come to some kind of arrangement within the band, I’ll get my own project together, but I can’t stand it much longer. I want to go back on stage as fast as possible!” Brian would explain the next year that “We’re at something of a crossroads at the moment. We’re still very much alive in the studio – perhaps more so now than ever before – but this will be the first time we’ve released an album without promoting it with a tour. You see, at the moment Freddie just doesn’t want to tour. He doesn’t feel that he can, so the touring part of my life has come to a complete stop. It’s a terrible shame because Roger, John and myself all love playing live and feel that part of the reason for making an album is to be able to take it out on the road and have fun. So, taking the touring side of things away messed up my life, really – without exaggeration. I feel it’s taken the whole balance out of my life. If [Freddie] doesn’t enjoy it or feel happy with it then I guess you can’t do anything about it.”

  While the demand – and desire – for Queen to play live had become feverish, few seemed thrilled with The Miracle. Kim Neely said in Rolling Stone, “If you’re a fan who’s been hankering for years to hear Queen get back to the bombast of its heyday, play your old copy of A Night at the Opera or News of the World instead. But don’t give up hope. At least The Miracle offers little snippets of Queen’s former majesty.” She did offer praise for Freddie’s vocals – “indeed, Mercury – especially on the title track – has never sounded better” – and for Brian’s guitar, “when you can hear him, May’s role on The Miracle is, for the most part, limited to a quick, typically brilliant solo here and there.” The Times opined, “Musically, the synth-pop dabbling of ‘Radio Ga Ga’ and its ilk has been discarded in favour of the more familiar, grim amalgam of bubblegum metal power chords, mock symphonics and squiggly guitar solos. In its favour, it is difficult to imagine a collection more blithely out of step with the fashionably earnest Weltanschauung of contemporary rock. The miracles of which Freddie Mercury sings in the title track are everything from the longed
-for Utopia of ‘peace on earth’ to the more mundane pleasures of ‘Sunday mornings with a cup of tea’. Such is the extent of the social commentary.”

  Perversely, North American reviews were more positive. The Dallas Morning News wrote, “Queen’s musicianship often has taken a back seat to Freddie Mercury’s strutting histrionics. But Roger Taylor is one of rock’s fastest and most accurate drummers, and guitarist Brian May is a major talent. These two move toward center stage this time, as Queen muscles through a song list that’s remarkably varied for one album. Significantly, the music is all credited to the band as a whole, rather than to individuals members – with Mr. Mercury usually getting the lion’s share of the credits. The payoff is a record that rocks you, with a few twists ... Mr. Mercury, of course, does get to indulge his classical bent. The title song, a simple (perhaps simple-minded) celebration of life’s little triumphs, is not quite operatic, but it does offer lush orchestrations and celestial harmonies that duel intriguingly with Mr. Taylor’s rapid time-keeping. And with ‘Was It All Worth It’, Mr. Mercury takes a lofty look at the band’s lengthy career, ‘Living breathing rock ‘n’ roll’. The conclusion? Yes, it was worth it. But given the singer’s rather fiendish chortle at the end, you’re not sure if he means it.” Newsday agreed: “Led by Freddie Mercury’s raunchy vocals and Brian May’s guitar slinging, the Queen machine rolls on with The Miracle ... Mercury’s voice is steady and solid, May’s runs are as flashy and supple as ever. Most of the ten songs, written collaboratively by the four members, stick pretty much to the band’s formula of mini-suites: edgy pop with tempos that change half-way into the number and some delicious hooks.” Astonishingly, the Sun-Sentinel lavished the album with praise: “Here’s an album (like so many of Queen’s others) that should be used as a pop music how-to for aspirants. Combining the forces of rock, pop, metal, clever melodies and cunning stylizations, The Miracle never lets down. From one track to the next there is, as usual, no telling which way this band will go, affording even the most jaded ear a challenge.”