Queen: The Complete Works

Home > Other > Queen: The Complete Works > Page 47
Queen: The Complete Works Page 47

by Georg Purvis


  One of Freddie’s more endearing videos was created for the single at Limehouse Studios on 2 and 4 April 1985 and directed by old stalwart David Mallet. Showing Freddie and a female lover cavorting through several rooms of a luxurious home, with Freddie serenading her as she gleefully runs away from him, the video strikes a saccharine and poignant tone – though the following scenes of hundreds of Amazonian women goose-stepping in a large arena is baffling. Interspersed are shots of Freddie in a room full of mirrors, dancing and twirling around as his white leather jacket increasingly dislodges itself from his upper torso.

  Revisited for the Made In Heaven project and given the typical Queen treatment, the song is an undoubted highlight of the album. The most rock-oriented track on the album, ‘I Was Born To Love You’ features an exuberant vocal performance from Freddie and a delightful instrumental backing painstakingly arranged by Brian. In Japan, it was used in a 1996 Kirin Ichiban Shibori liquor advert, and was released as a single in March 1996, peaking at No. 45. Six years later, based on its use as the theme to the TV show Pride, it was re-released, and peaked at No. 40. Recognizing the emotional connection that Japan had to the song, it received its live debut in 2005 during the Japanese leg of the Queen + Paul Rodgers tour, when Brian and Roger performed an acoustic version as part of the final encore; a rendition of this touching duet was later released on the Super Live In Japan DVD.

  I WISH YOU WOULD (Arnold)

  This Yardbirds song was played live by 1984.

  I’M A LOSER (Lennon/McCartney)

  This Beatles song was played live by 1984.

  I’M GOING SLIGHTLY MAD (Queen)

  • Album: Innuendo • A-side: 3/91 [22]

  Written by Freddie with his tongue planted firmly in cheek, ‘I’m Going Slightly Mad’ is a welcome return to the camp, vaudeville songs that had peppered early Queen albums but ended abruptly in 1977 once the band’s increasing success dictated their musical direction. Following the humour-impaired 1980s, this exasperated outburst of comic insanity was a refreshing reminder of Freddie’s wicked sense of humour. A nice wordplay song, the lighthearted lyrics betray a serious side effect – states of dementia – of AIDS victims, which Freddie was indeed going through. While on a radio promotional tour for Innuendo in 1991, during which Brian was inundated with questions about the band touring the US again, he candidly – and offhandedly – mentioned that Freddie was prone to black outs, and “you don’t want the singer blacking out in the middle of the song.”

  Jim Hutton, Freddie’s partner during the last years of his life, said of the song in his book Mercury And Me, “When Freddie penned the song ‘I’m Going Slightly Mad’, it was after another through-the-night session with [friend] Peter Straker. Freddie explained he had the phrase ‘I’m going slightly mad’ on his brain and told Peter what sort of thing he wanted to say in the song. The inspiration for it was the master of camp one-liners, Noël Coward. Freddie set about with Peter trying to come up with a succession of goofy lyrics, each funnier than the last. He screamed when they came up with things like ‘I’m knitting with only one needle’ and ‘I’m driving only three wheels these days’. But the masterstroke was ‘I think I’m a banana tree’. Once that came out there was no stopping Freddie and Straker – they were then in full flow. I went to bed to fall asleep listening to their laughter wafting upstairs.”

  “That was very much a Freddie track and you tend to want to give the author his head,” Brian told Guitarist in 1994. “Even though we said that everything is by Queen, there was still somebody who was basically the original author and everyone else worked on it. It was a good idea as it produced a lot of input, but in the end it was Freddie’s baby so it was natural that he would want to get certain things right.”

  The promotional video, filmed on 15 and 16 February 1991 at Wembley Studios, and directed by Rudi Dolezal and Hannes Rossacher, ranks as one of Queen’s finest and was also one of Freddie’s final appearances in front of a camera, his illness starting to show. Despite wearing a layer of padding, two layers of clothes, and a wild, matted wig, he still appears gaunt but, adapting that old adage “the show must go on”, he performed as if he was the paragon of health. During filming, Freddie was heard to comment, “I wanted to make the video as memorable as possible. I’ve always wanted to co-star in a video with a gorilla and a group of penguins. A little bit of Queen madness.” At one point during filming, one of the penguins, Cleo, decided to mark her territory – unfortunately, it happened to be on the black leather couch where she was seated between Roger and Freddie, but both leapt out of the way in time. (Life imitating art, perhaps; witness one particular line of lyrics from ‘Delilah’.)

  The song was picked as the second single from Innuendo and was released in March 1991, peaking at a disappointing No. 22, though it reached No. 1 in Hong Kong.

  I’M IN LOVE WITH MY CAR (Taylor)

  • B-side: 10/75 [1] • Album: Opera • Live: Killers, Montreal • CD Single: 11/88 • Bonus: Opera • Compilation: WWRYHits • Live (The Cross): Bootleg • Live (Q+PR): Return, Ukraine

  Roger’s paean to four-wheeled beauties became a cult favourite upon its release in 1975, before receiving widespread attention in the live setting two years later. Full of double entendres and sexual innuendo, the song’s tongue-in-cheek demeanour may not have won Roger any points with the fairer sex: “Cars don’t talk back / They’re just four-wheeled friends now.” Featuring a raucous guitar line from Brian and some masterful drumming, the song became a perfect showcase for Roger when played live, appearing as part of the medley between 1977 and 1981, and was brought out of mothballs in 2005 for the Queen + Paul Rodgers tour.

  “I remember my car at the time,” Roger said in a 1997 BBC interview, “because I think we’ve got the exhaust on the record, and that was a little Alfa Romeo. But I think it was more about people in general, for instance boy racers. In particular we had a sound guy/ roadie at the time called Jonathan Harris, who was so in love with his car, and that inspired that. I think he had a Triumph TR4.”

  When ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ was selected as the first single from A Night At The Opera, Roger fought ardently for his song to be released as the B-side, though this was initially met with resistance. Roger told the Detroit Free Press in 1982 that “I wish that would’ve been a single in its time. Of course, I made just as much money on it. It was the backside of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, so I probably made more money that way.” Sixteen years after its initial release, the scars still had yet to heal, with Brian grumbling to Q magazine, “We always rowed about money. A lot of terrible injustices take place over songwriting. The major one is B-sides. Like, ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ sells a million and Roger gets the same writing royalties as Freddie because he did ‘I’m in Love With My Car’. There was contention about that for years.” Considering one of Roger’s songs wouldn’t be released as an A-side until 1982, and even then as a US-only single, having ‘I’m In Love With My Car’ as a B-side was a small concession – though his bandmates were less than amused when he purchased a Surrey mansion in 1978, while the others were still residing in modest city homes.

  (I’M NOT YOUR) STEPPING STONE (Boyce/Hart)

  Although Jimi Hendrix later wrote a song called ‘Stepping Stone’, it’s likely that it was The Monkees’ 1966 hit that was covered live by 1984.

  I’M SCARED (May)

  • Album (Brian): BTTL • B-side (Brian): 8/92 [5]

  “I kept doing different versions of [‘I’m Scared’],” Brian told Guitar World in 1993, “as I kept finding out that I was scared of more and more things. And I figured that most of us are. We just keep it inside. I think it’s good to let all that stuff out sometimes, do a bit of screaming.” In the years following Queen’s retirement from touring, Brian catapulted himself into more and more projects in order to keep himself busy, but privately he was suffering from depression. With his personal life in a shambles – his marriage was falling apart because of an unstoppable attraction to EastEnder Anita Dobson
– and his father dying in June 1988, Brian went through an increasingly difficult period, even contemplating suicide, an admission he was only able to make several years later in hindsight.

  Music was his only solace amid the turmoil and, in 1988, he prepared a tape of demos that he circulated to a select group of friends, giving them an indication of what he’d been up to and what his first solo album would contain. Two of those songs – ‘The Dark’ and ‘My Boy’ – dated back to 1980 and 1982 respectively, but the third song was a more recently-written hard rocker that fashioned Brian’s fears into a self-deprecating story of public embarrassment and emotional anxiety.

  First released as the B-side of ‘Too Much Love Will Kill You’ in August 1992, ‘I’m Scared’ was later remixed for inclusion on Back To The Light, fattening up Brian’s weaker vocal, making a few choice lyric changes, stripping away some fussy guitar work in the verses, and adding what was dubbed the ‘Chaos Karaoke’, a litany of fears collected into a jumbled chattering of semi-decipherable lines. Of what can be made out, Brian enumerates his fear of losing control, pain, being unknown, being ugly, dying, deformed, dull, the dark, being found out and, most importantly, being scared of Stephen Berkoff. (Known for his villainous character in Beverly Hills Cop, he also portrayed Adolf Hitler in the 1988 ABC miniseries War And Remembrance.)

  I’M TAKING HER HOME

  Originally performed by The Others, ‘I’m Taking Her Home’, the B-side of their breakthrough single ‘Oh Yeah’, was performed by 1984. Authorship is unknown.

  IDEA (BARCELONA):

  see EXTRACTS FROM GARDEN LODGE

  IF I WERE A CARPENTER (Hardin)

  Tim Hardin’s ‘If I Were A Carpenter’ was performed live by Smile in 1969, and was one of two tracks performed at The Cross’ Marquee Club Christmas concert in 1992, which saw a reunion of Smile for the first time in over twenty years.

  IF YOU CAN’T BEAT THEM (Deacon)

  • Album: Jazz

  This snarling rocker falls victim to a cliché set of lyrics, and is a rare fall from grace from the normally dependable John Deacon. The band’s recorded performance is superb, but after such classics as ‘You’re My Best Friend’, ‘You And I’ and ‘Spread Your Wings’, which challenged Freddie’s and Brian’s own songwriting abilities, ‘If You Can’t Beat Them’ is surprisingly rote, its melody akin to the MOR pap by Journey, Boston, or REO Speedwagon that was then clogging up the airwaves.

  Live, however, the song was a different beast altogether, and became one of the standout tracks of the 1978 North American Jazz tour, where it was performed nightly. The song was retained for most of the following year’s shows, but was dropped in 1980 in favour of stronger material. Despite its weaknesses as a studio song, its transformation on stage was astonishing, and would have made for better listening on Live Killers than some of the other songs released in its stead.

  IMAGINE (Lennon)

  The night after John Lennon’s assassination, the band were so devastated by this senseless act of insanity that they quickly learned the former Beatle’s 1971 plea for peace and performed it that night at Wembley Arena. Originally intended as a one-off, the band threw the song into their set list for a few more dates as a tribute, the most commonly bootlegged version being from Frankfurt on 14 December 1980. The song was revived by Queen + Paul Rodgers at the Hyde Park concert on 15 July 2005, as a panegyric to the innocent civilians killed in the suicide bombings in Tavistock Square and on the London Underground the week before, and was included as the sole bonus feature on the DVD version of Return Of The Champions.

  IMMIGRANT SONG (Page/Plant)

  A one-off performance from Berlin on the Magic tour in 1986 of the classic Led Zeppelin rocker, this song was recorded for their third album, released in 1970.

  IMPROMPTU (Queen)

  • Live: Wembley

  Ever since 1977, the band would perform a nightly improvised jam that would often go under different titles: ‘Instrumental Inferno’ was the most popular one, while ‘Tokyo Blues’ and ‘Rock In Rio Blues’ were not uncommon. The most widely known version exists on the Live At Wembley Stadium album and DVD releases, and comes right before Brian’s guitar solo, and was based on Freddie’s 1985 solo song, ‘Foolin’ Around’.

  IN CHARGE OF MY HEART (Taylor)

  • German B-side (The Cross): 8/90

  One of the more curious non-album tracks to surface from the Mad: Bad: And Dangerous to Know sessions is this Roger-penned track, released as the B-side of ‘Liar’ in August 1990 and a concert favourite, serving as the set opener on the 1990 tour. The original version lasts barely more than two minutes, but the extended version is the one to seek out, with a suitably atmospheric opening of keyboards and pounding drums.

  It was rumoured that Queen recorded their own version of ‘In Charge Of My Heart’ during sessions for The Miracle – indeed, Freddie interpolates the line into his own composition ‘Stealin” – but these rumours are unfounded, and remain unconfirmed by any official source.

  IN MY DEFENCE (Clark/Soames/Daniels)

  • Soundtrack (Freddie): Time • Compilations (Freddie): Pretender, FM Album, The Solo Collection • A-side: 11/92 [8]

  In the summer of 1985, Dave Clark – formerly the drummer and leader of The Dave Clark Five – asked Freddie to take part in a charity soundtrack album for the then-popular West End musical Time. He agreed, but on condition that John, Roger and Brian be involved in the sessions. As Dave had already booked studio time with his own group of session musicians, he convinced Freddie with the caveat that, if he was displeased with the results, Dave would finance a re-recording of the song as a Queen performance. As it turned out, Freddie was satisfied, and, unfortunately, no Queen versions of any material for Time were attempted. As Freddie was preparing for the A Kind Of Magic album in London with the others, he would occasionally nip off to Abbey Road Studios to provide the vocals for both this song and the title track. While both performances were stellar and tested the limits of Freddie’s vocal power, it was on the latter track that he shone, capturing the definitive take, according to Dave, in one pass.

  The song was the first to be recorded in October 1985, with Mike Moran on piano, Paul Vincent (who had worked with Freddie on Mr Bad Guy) on guitars, Andy Pask on bass, Graham Jarvis on drums, and Peter Banks (not related to the former Yes guitarist of the same name) on keyboards. Despite his initial reluctance, the prearranged session proved fortunate in the end when Freddie met keyboardist Mike Moran, who would collaborate with Freddie on his next major project in 1987. Mike became a session musician following his graduation from the Royal College of Music in London, and provided music for films such as Time Bandits and The Missionary, though he gained his first major taste of fame with ‘Rock Bottom’, featured on the Eurovision Song Contest in 1977.

  Unfortunately for Mike, the first day of recording would prove to be ominous since he was involved in a major traffic accident, breaking four ribs and bruising both wrists. Nevertheless, he soldiered on, asking Dave Clark not to mention to Freddie what had happened since they hadn’t yet met each other. When he arrived at Abbey Road, Freddie strode up to him and, noting his physical appearance, offered him a glass of Stolichnaya vodka, which must have gone nicely with the painkillers Mike had taken earlier in the day, and a usable backing track was produced. Further work, including synths, guitars and additional Freddie overdubs, would be done in Munich at Musicland Studios.

  The song became a highlight of the soundtrack for Time, among other contributions from Sir Laurence Olivier, Cliff Richard, Julian Lennon, Dionne Warwick and Burt Bacharach, Ashford and Simpson, Murray Head, Leo Sayer, Jimmy Helms, and John Christie and Stevie Wonder. It was remixed by Ron Nevison and issued posthumously as the sole single from The Great Pretender / The Freddie Mercury Album in November 1992, reaching a much-deserved No. 8 in the UK. Eight years later, Dave Clark himself remixed the track for inclusion on the three-disc Solo box set, giving the song a crisper feel while remaining mostly faithful to
the original recording. Freddie performed the song only once on 14 April 1988 at London’s Dominion Theatre, when he appeared at a special gala charity performance, dubbed Give Time For AIDS, with all proceeds donated to the Terence Higgins Trust. His four-song set that night was ‘Born To Rock ‘n’ Roll’, ‘Time’, ‘In My Defence’ and ‘It’s In Every One Of Us’, all with Cliff Richard and Sir Laurence Olivier, but the clear highlight of Freddie’s final live performance remains ‘In My Defence’.

  IN ONLY SEVEN DAYS (Deacon)

  • Album: Jazz • B-side: 1/79 [9]

  John’s second contribution to Jazz is this simple, upbeat piano track, with some sublime acoustic guitar work from John himself. At a time when it was more accepted that a major rock band write songs about one night stands and eschewing the subject of a fleeting holiday romance, John refused to adapt to custom and delivered this sweet ballad, with lyrics that drift toward the gratingly naïve. With one of Freddie’s most understated piano contributions and a lovely orchestrated guitar solo, ‘In Only Seven Days’ was released as the flipside of ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’ in the UK, but was understandably omitted from the live setting.

  IN SEARCH OF LOVE:

  see EVERYBODY NEEDS SOMEBODY

  IN THE DEATH CELL

  (LOVE THEME REPRISE) (Taylor)

  • Album: Flash

  A variation on Roger’s earlier Flash Gordon composition, ‘In The Space Capsule (Love Theme Reprise)’, this piece features the same droning synthesizer with additional dialogue between Flash and Dale.

 

‹ Prev