Queen: The Complete Works

by Georg Purvis

  I DREAM OF CHRISTMAS (May)

  Written in July 1984 during sessions for ‘Thank God It’s Christmas’, Brian’s offering for a one-off holiday single turned out to be far superior to Roger’s plodding contribution, which was chosen instead. Later recorded by Brian’s girlfriend Anita Dobson in 1987, that version features a soaring guitar solo, prominent backing vocals from Mr May himself, and a children’s choir, recalling John Lennon’s ‘Happy X-Mas (War Is Over)’. If the Queen version is anything like Dobson’s rendition, fans could be in for a very special present indeed – provided it’s ever released, of course...

  I FEEL FINE (Lennon/McCartney)

  Another Beatles song played live by 1984, Brian revisited it in 1978, during the Rock ‘n’ Roll Medley, and in 1986, throwing in the riff during his customary guitar solo.

  I GO CRAZY (May)

  • B-side: 1/84 [2] • Compilation: Vision • CD Single: 11/88 • Bonus: Works

  Recorded during sessions for The Works in 1983, Brian’s ‘I Go Crazy’ is one of the band’s finest rockers and deserved a place on the album as much as ‘Man On The Prowl’ or ‘Tear It Up’. During the collective cherry-picking of songs for the album, though, ‘I Go Crazy’ was voted off, as Brian explained to Faces magazine in 1984: “As [Queen] is a democracy, [the others] don’t get their own way, either. With this last album, now, I wrote a single, you might call it one of my heavy indulgences. It was very rough and raw, but I really liked the sound. The other three hated it so much they were ashamed to play it. So, it wound up as the B-side on ‘Radio Ga Ga’, which is good as it gives the fans a song they didn’t receive on the album, more for their money. But you see, it was kept off the album by the majority.”

  Telling a heartbreaking story about a star-struck girl leaving her “normal” boyfriend for an unnamed famous rock singer, while he maintains a stiff upper lip attitude, ‘I Go Crazy’ is set to a muscular and exuberant backing track, which would have helped reaffirm Queen’s status as a rock band, so sorely needed after the poor reaction to Hot Space. Incidentally, the song was first recorded during sessions for Hot Space in the spring of 1982, which Greg Brooks confirmed twenty-five years later by premiering an early run-through recording at a Fan Club convention, though this version lacks vocals. Brian clearly enjoyed his song, and would occasionally play the riff in his nightly guitar solo throughout 1981 and 1982.

  Oh, and the main character needn’t have worried about seeing The Rolling Stones in 1984; they weren’t touring that year.

  I GOT MY MOJO WORKING (Waters)

  This Muddy Waters blues tune was played live by 1984.

  I GOT YOU (I FEEL GOOD) (Brown)

  James Brown’s famous hit single from 1966 was performed live by The Reaction.

  I GUESS WE’RE FALLING OUT

  Starting off with the same drum-machine pattern used for ‘My Baby Does Me’, ‘I Guess We’re Falling Out’ is a Brian-based ballad recorded during The Miracle sessions, and has often been called “the greatest Queen song left unreleased.” Quite a hefty statement for a song that features only one complete verse, but there are the makings of a strong performance here, with gorgeous vocal harmonies and some fine guitar work, and it would have been a nice addition to The Miracle if only the band had finished it.

  I WANNA HOLD YOUR HAND (Lennon/McCartney)

  This 1964 Beatles single was played live by the Brian May Band on only one occasion: 12 December 1993 in Liverpool, a fitting location.

  I WANNA TAKE YOU HIGHER

  This isn’t Roger’s attempt at covering Sly & The Family Stone’s 1969 single, but is instead a completely unrelated song from the fruitful preliminary sessions for Strange Frontier in 1983. With a jerky rhythm and layers of raw guitars, the song addresses Roger’s fascination of fast cars and women, but was deemed superfluous and remains unreleased.

  I WANNA TESTIFY (Clinton/Taylor/Taylor)

  • A-side (Roger): 8/77

  The summer of 1977 was a season of change for most bands, with the new generation of confrontational musicians raising a tuneless ruckus. Unlike the rest of Queen, who were deeply rooted in their own musical preferences of the past – vaudeville, music hall, gospel, funk, R&B, blues and good old-fashioned rock ‘n’ roll – Roger embraced the new sound and, while the rest of the band was resting after a strenuous year of touring, he immediately started to record home demos of several new songs.

  This time, though, the ideas flowed faster than ever, and in no time he had three completed songs: ‘Fight From The Inside’, ‘Turn On The TV’ and ‘I Wanna Testify’. Along with an upgraded version of ‘Sheer Heart Attack’ from the autumn 1974 sessions, Roger reserved ‘Fight From The Inside’ for the next Queen project but decided that the other two tracks were too good to leave unreleased. Before long, he had his first solo single ready for release.

  ‘I Wanna Testify’ is the stronger of the two tracks, and was rightly given top billing upon its release. The official explanation for the song was that Roger simply re-recorded The Parliaments’ 1967 ‘(I Wanna) Testify’ (which had already been upgraded in 1974 by the relaunched Parliaments), but a close listen to the original recordings and Roger’s “cover” reveal that these are two completely different songs, sharing only a similar melody and chorus. Roger, giving credit where credit was due, credit to George Clinton and Daron Taylor, the original songwriters, and rightly credited himself for the arrangements.

  Written in the style of many other R&B classics of the 1950s and 1960s, the song finds a hapless, stressed father in the midst of personal conflict with his wife and son before overworking himself into alcohol addiction and losing not only his job but his family, too. It’s a touching story, striking a rueful tone with the concluding verse, acknowledging his fault and urging others to do the same: “Please pay attention to the words that I mention / And listen to the moral of this song”. Set to a chunky backing, with all instruments performed and all vocals sung by Roger – not taking the term “solo record” lightly at all – ‘I Wanna Testify’ is a strong single debut, showcasing not only Roger’s clever arrangement but his adeptness at instrument swapping.

  Unfortunately, all the effort that went into the single, with the drummer spending £5,000 of his own money to record the song, didn’t pay off in the end: released at the end of August 1977, the single sank without a trace. Roger wrote in the autumn 1977 issue of the Fan Club magazine, “About my own recent single – you know, the one you didn’t hear on the radio – well, it was merely a pleasant excursion and will not be a regular thing. People have asked me if I’m going solo – well, certainly not, nothing could be further from the truth. I think it’s vitally important right now that Queen keeps its strong group identity, as that is one of our main strengths. So many groups seem to break up at the wrong time or just prematurely; it won’t happen with us.” Promotion was minimal, despite a great performance on Marc Bolan’s television show Marc in September 1977, mere days before the glam rocker’s untimely death.

  To date, ‘I Wanna Testify’ and its B-side are true rarities, remaining one of the few Queen-related tracks to have never appeared on compact disc or digitally.

  I WANT IT ALL (Queen)

  • A-side: 5/89 [3] • Album: Miracle • Compilation: Hits2, Classic • Live: 46664 • Live (Q+PR): Return, Ukraine

  Praised as a welcome return to Queen’s classic rock sound, ‘I Want It All’ was written by Brian in 1988 and submitted to the sessions for The Miracle as one of the first completed songs for the album. Focusing on a world-weary society of oppressed youths, the song is a call-to-arms to adolescents yearning for more in life, with a powerful, anthemic rallying cry at the heart of the song. “We were heading into the period where we decided to share the credit for all the songs,” Brian explained in 2003, “and John has said that [it] was pretty much a finished song when we went into the studios – that’s true, it was just this riff that I was obsessed with for months. The actual title was a favourite phrase of Anita’s, a very ambitious girl
: ‘I want it all, and I want it now’.”

  Rightly released as the forerunner to Queen’s first studio album in three years, the song reached No. 3 in the UK upon its release in May 1989, and also became a minor US hit, peaking at No. 50. The single version is superior, with a punchier mix and omitting the instrumental intro, replacing it with the hard-hitting chorus, and editing out part of the instrumental section after the bridge. (Hollywood Records issued the wrong version of the song on the 1991 re-release of The Miracle, instead putting out a version that excised the first chorus and cut the song back a few seconds.) “‘I Want It All’ re-establishes our old image in a way,” Brian said in 1989. “It’s nice to come back with something strong. Something that reminds people we’re a live group. I don’t think we’re a singles band, really. Just before we put the single out I started listening to what’s on the radio, and the kind of stuff that becomes a hit these days bears no resemblance to what we do. People only remember the hits, but I suppose we have done okay.”

  A video was shot for the single on 22 April 1989, with David Mallet directing (the last time he would direct a video with Queen while Freddie was still alive, though he would go on to direct the Concert For Life and ‘Heaven For Everyone’ from Made In Heaven). The video was an attempt to prove that Queen could still be considered a live band without actually touring; it didn’t work. “Of course now we’re in an era, making this video, where Freddie’s already very ill,” Brian said, “and he’s finding it harder to actually find the energy to do things like this. You wouldn’t think so seeing him in this video, because he just squeezes so much out of himself, but a lot of the time, in this period, he was pretty sick. So it’s an amazing effort of will that he managed to do this at all.” Shot at Elstree Sound Studios, the band are placed on a small stage in the centre of a gigantic warehouse. The stage was chosen to create intimacy, yet they appear ill-at-ease – Freddie, especially – and remain mostly static during the video. Not one of the more memorable videos, it was nevertheless issued on Greatest Flix II and Greatest Video Hits 2, the latter featuring some memorably humorous outtakes of the band attempting to get the introductory sequence right. Roger explained the video in 2003, saying, “It’s not the most interesting video, but it’s so simple in terms of approach and ideas. It’s just ‘big’: big lenses, big spotlights – a performance video. I think we got so sick of the concept things and stories and people pretending to act and dressing up and huge film sets and everything at the time was sort of trying to look like Blade Runner. I [thought] we’d make it very simple with a sort of live-ish performance.”

  Due to Freddie’s ill health and his inability to tour, the song was never performed live by Queen in the singer’s lifetime. “We were never able to perform this song live,” Brian explained. “It would have become something of the staple core of the Queen show, I’m sure, very participatory. It was designed for the audience to sing along to, very anthemic.” The song was, however, performed by Who vocalist Roger Daltrey and Queen during the Concert For Life on 20 April 1992, which suited Daltrey’s voice just fine. In fact, Brian commented in 2003 that the bridge of the song was a Pete Townshend tactic he put to good use: “Interesting, I wrote myself a bit in the middle. I can’t remember quite why that was, it’s a very sort of Pete Townshend thing to do, isn’t it? But it made a nice little kind of duet in the middle, a bit of sparring between me and Freddie, and I know he enjoyed that.”

  I WANT TO BREAK FREE (Deacon)

  • Album: Works • A-side: 4/84 [3] • CD Single: 11/88 • Live: Magic, Wembley, 46664 • Compilation: Hits2, HitsUS • Bonus: Works • B-side (Roger): 11/94 [32] • Live (Q+PR): Return, Ukraine

  “One of our biggest hits,” Brian said of ‘I Want To Break Free’ in 2003. “[John] didn’t write many songs, but most of them sure counted.” This understatement is an accurate evaluation of John Deacon’s songwriting abilities: of the fifteen studio albums released in Queen’s career, eight of John’s twenty-one compositions became singles, most of them major hits, but none more prominently than ‘I Want To Break Free’.

  Released as the second single from The Works in April 1984, the song became a major hit worldwide, peaking at No. 3 in the UK and becoming an anthem along the same lines as ‘We Will Rock You’ and ‘We Are The Champions’. The song expresses the main character’s desire to get away from his hectic life, though some have interpreted it as a gay anthem – which Freddie was asked about by a South American reporter in 1985, responding that he wasn’t the writer of the song and that it wasn’t about the gay world.

  Musically simplistic, with a clean acoustic guitar played by John neatly filling in the spaces in the rhythm section performed by himself and Roger (whose drumming is very economical here, but well-suited to the song), the only downside of the song is the lack of a guitar solo. In lieu of such is a synthesizer solo played by Fred Mandel (who also contributed synthesizer work to ‘Radio Ga Ga’ and ‘Hammer To Fall’), sounding remarkably like the Red Special and therefore begging the question as to why Brian’s guitar wasn’t used in the first place. The single version, extended to just over four minutes with an atmospheric synthesizer intro, has appeared on Greatest Hits II and the US reissue of Greatest Hits, while an extended remix, running just over seven minutes, appeared on 12” versions of the single and featured snippets of other songs from The Works à la ‘More Of That Jazz’ from 1978. This version was also released as a bonus track on The Works.

  A video for the single was made in March 1984, and went on to achieve far more notoriety than anything Queen had done in the past. Suggested by Roger’s then-girlfriend Dominique, the video shows the four members spoofing the popular UK television soap opera Coronation Street, dressing up in drag and looking fairly convincing in the process. However, the drag section of the video lasts for only the first and last verses and choruses, with the remainder being made up of some truly baffling (yet very Mallet) sequences in which the band are surrounded by coal miners, made up of members of the Fan Club, in an abandoned warehouse. (“And bang – there’s the Royal Ballet in a box,” Roger quipped in the commentary for the song on the 2003 Greatest Video Hits 2 DVD.) Typical of Freddie, it was the combination of this sequence with the drag that would be the final nail in the coffin of Queen’s relationship with America: the single fared no better than No. 45 in the charts, and Queen never toured there again. However, “We had more fun making this video than we did any other,” Roger said, though he regarded the offensive ballet sequence as “art with a capital ‘f’ ... there’s not much more I can say to that.”

  The single became a beloved anthem for impoverished nations, and was always well received when performed live between 1984 and 1986. When the band performed the song on the Works! tours, Freddie would appear with a pair of false breasts, revealing them to a delighted crowd (and usually thrusting them in John’s face) at the conclusion of the song. However, when the band appeared at the Rock In Rio Festival in January 1985, reports trickled back that this cross-dressing move wasn’t so well received: “Pop star Freddie Mercury ... received a royal pelting when he appeared on stage in Rio de Janeiro wearing women’s clothes, huge plastic falsies and a black wig,” People magazine reported. “A near riot erupted when the crowd of 350,000 began tossing stones, beer cans and other missiles at him as he started to sing Queen’s ‘I Want To Break Free’. Why the violent reaction, especially when fans obviously knew they weren’t paying to see Lawrence Welk? Explains Maria Caetano, who worked as an interpreter at the concert: ‘The song is sacred in South America because we consider it a political message about the evils of dictatorships.’” Record Mirror reported: “There’s a spot of trouble when Freddie decides to dress up in his best Bet Lynch gear for ‘I Want To Break Free’. Some outraged Brazilians decide this just isn’t on and get very nasty. Instead of throwing beer cans at the stage in time honoured tradition, they decide that pebbles and bits of concrete are far more effective. Fred does a sprint to safety and it’s all forgotten quickly.�
� The truth is that the audience did boo and react negatively, but nothing was flung at Freddie, as shown in the uncut video. Just to be safe, the following week Freddie opted to go flat-chested.

  I WAS BORN TO LOVE YOU (Mercury)

  • Album (Freddie): BadGuy • A-side (Freddie): 4/85 [11] • Album (Queen): Heaven

  Written by Freddie for his 1985 solo album Mr Bad Guy, ‘I Was Born To Love You’ is a joyous and ebullient admission of love. Set to a pulsating synth beat, with some raucous piano work, the song is an early highlight of Mr Bad Guy and was rightly chosen as the first single from the album. Released in April 1985, the single peaked at No. 11, surprising even Freddie, who didn’t think much of it to begin with and had no choice but to capitulate to CBS’ demands that it be finished and released. (In Japan, the song became a minor sensation, appearing in a commercial to promote cosmetics company Noevia, and peaking at No. 55 in the charts.) An extended remix, doubling the original running time to seven minutes, is a gruelling test of endurance and patience, throwing in just about everything that a remix can handle, including trick-shot drum programming and several vocal interludes. An early version, recorded on 25 May 1984, features only Freddie on vocals and piano and is a fascinating insight into his underrated capabilities on that instrument.