by Georg Purvis
The years between A Kind Of Magic and The Miracle were particularly difficult for Brian. Not only was his marriage with his wife Chrissy falling apart (the couple divorced in 1987), his father became ill and eventually passed away in the early summer of 1988. The band had also taken a temporary hiatus, with the prospect of future live work fading quickly.
Brian was clearly a confused man, and fell into a deep depression that he tried to cure by attempting to record his first solo album, as well as jamming with his peers and young upstarts alike. He took on the task of producing Bad News, a parody hair metal band from the minds of UK’s comedy troupe The Young Ones. He also contributed to the recording career of his post-divorce girlfriend, former EastEnders star Anita Dobson. Finally, Brian channelled his depression into a song that perfectly summed up his state of mind at the time.
‘Too Much Love Will Kill You’ was originally written and recorded for Brian’s solo project in 1988, before being turned over to Queen and recorded for inclusion on The Miracle, but was ultimately rejected. Songwriting royalties were the main dispute: the song was co-credited to Frank Musker and Elizabeth Lamers, songwriting friends of Brian who also helped him record a personal demo earlier that year. Brian’s version was later issued on his 1992 solo album Back To The Light, and issued as a single later that year, where it became his highest-charting solo single (and, up until that point, the highest-charting solo single by any band member), peaking at No. 5. He had performed the song unaccompanied except for his own piano at the Concert For Life, turning in an emotive yet understated performance.
“It was a big step to do it and I wanted to do it for Freddie,” Brian told Guitarist in 1992 of his Concert For Life performance. “It wasn’t that the song had a particular relevance – it wasn’t about AIDS – but it was a song that I felt was the best way of expressing myself and also the best thing I had to offer at the time. It was terrifying! It was in front of 72,000 people in the Stadium, half a billion people around the world and so it took an incredible amount of getting hold of myself to do it. As I was walking over to the piano I was thinking, ‘Should I really be doing this?’ So it was difficult, it really was. It’s so easy to do in rehearsal and yet, when that moment comes, something happens to your throat. Plus it really brought me back in touch with what was going on; suddenly there was only me doing my personal little bit.”
Equally beautiful was a guitar version, which was released as part of the CD single in August 1992, featuring The Red Special ‘singing’ the words instead of Brian, though this has become something of a rarity over the years, much like a live version that was released on the ‘Resurrection’ CD single from Los Angeles. A different live version, from the Brixton Academy, was released on Brian’s sole live CD, Live At The Brixton Academy.
The 1988 recording was dusted off six years later and released as-is on Made In Heaven. (It had first been planned as a bonus track on the Live At Wembley ’86 CD, to capitalize on Brian’s performance at the Concert For Life, but was removed at the last minute.) ‘Too Much Love Will Kill You’ was issued as the third single from the album in February 1996, reaching No. 15 in the UK charts (it was also issued as the first single from the album in the US a month earlier, climbing no higher than No. 118) and securing a well-deserved spot on the 1999 Greatest Hits III compilation.
TOO MUCH MONKEY BUSINESS (Berry)
This Chuck Berry song was played live by 1984.
TOP OF THE WORLD, MA (The Cross)
• Album (The Cross): MBADTK • Live: Bootleg
One of two tracks written as a five-way split between The Cross, ‘Top Of The World, Ma’ is a great rocker, opening up Mad: Bad: And Dangerous To Know with a declaration of lust for a girl, with the protagonist prepared to shout it from the rooftops. The song features a great guitar solo from Clayton Moss, with Spike’s Hammond organ high in the mix, and gets The Cross’ first proper collective album off to a rollicking start. ‘Top Of The World, Ma’ became the second song performed on the Mad: Bad: And Dangerous To Know tour, and was later shuffled in the set for the 1991 Blue Rock tour, becoming the closing number instead. A live version from 1990 was released on the Fan Club-only disc, The Official Bootleg.
TOSS THE FEATHERS (trad.)
Performed by The Corrs on 29 November 2003 at the Cape Town 46664 concert, Roger was asked by Andrea Corr to play drums on this traditional Irish song, lively in execution even if it offers little room for Roger to showcase his talents.
TOUCH THE SKY (Taylor)
• Album (Roger): Happiness?
Blending in effortlessly from ‘Revelations’, ‘Touch The Sky’ is one of Roger’s most delicate songs, and was written about Debbie Leng, Roger’s then-girlfriend and mother of three of the drummer’s children. The song features a touching lyric, almost an update of ‘Breakthru’ and ‘Final Destination’ (especially the line “and when you smile, you set the world alight”), though there are a few lines that are borderline cringe-inducing. With Jason Falloon on guitar and Mike Crossley on keyboards, Roger provides the remainder, with his powerful drumming a particular highlight.
The song was performed live on the 1994/1995 Happiness? tour, complete with the lengthy keyboard-dominated introduction, but was not reprised for further live airings.
TRACK 13 (Queen)
• Bonus: Heaven
For those fans who accidentally left their CD players running after the final strains of ‘It’s A Beautiful Day (reprise)’ concluded Made In Heaven, they were greeted with several unusual sounds. Those sounds have been confirmed by Brian to have been written about Freddie’s journey into Heaven, and were constructed mainly by John, Roger and Brian along with David Richards.
“This was started by me having fun with the ASR10 sampler,” Richards said in 2001. “I took the opening chords of ‘It’s A Beautiful Day’ and made them loop forever. Then I added some of Freddie talking through strange echoes. Brian and Roger heard it and came in to add some effects of their own and we thought of it as a surreal Requiem. It was the end of the album and we all were feeling very emotional.”
The piece runs at an astonishing twenty-three minutes, and was understandably included only on the CD versions of the album (the vinyl and cassette versions featured a pointless, seven-second edit). In this author’s opinion, the piece, which has received the original official title of ‘Track 13’, is best listened to late at night with all the lights off.
TURN ON THE TV (Taylor)
• B-side (Roger): 8/77
The flipside of Roger’s August 1977 debut solo single, ‘Turn On The TV’ borrows its title from the opening line of ‘Sheer Heart Attack’ and, like ‘I Wanna Testify’, is about as far away from punk or new wave as could be expected. Dealing with apathy and the summer doldrums, the song is like an upbeat rewrite of ‘Drowse’, set to a funky, disjointed rhythm. Roger handles all the instrumental duties here, but it’s hard to escape the notion that ‘Turn On The TV’ is little more than filler.
TUTTI FRUTTI (Penniman/LaBostrie/Lubin)
• Live: Wembley
A superb rendition of Little Richard’s 1957 hit single was performed nightly as the centrepiece of the acoustic medley on the Magic tour, starting off with a terrific acoustic introduction, allowing plenty of interaction between Freddie and the audience, before giving way to a fiery electric finish. An edited version from Wembley Stadium appeared on the 1992 Live At Wembley ’86, but was reinstated fully for the 2003 reissue, which was retitled Live At Wembley Stadium.
TWIST AND SHOUT (Medley/Russell)
Originally performed by The Isley Brothers in 1962 and made famous by The Beatles on their 1963 debut, Please Please Me, ‘Twist And Shout’ was performed as an encore number during Roger’s 1994/1995 Happiness? tour.
TWO SHARP PENCILS (GET BAD) (Taylor)
• B-side (Roger): 7/84
A candidate for one of the strangest Queen-related tracks ever recorded, ‘Two Sharp Pencils (Get Bad)’ shows that Roger still had an ear cocked towards the f
unkier side of the charts. Unfortunately, everything here is programmed and dates the song to a specific week in the summer of 1984, becoming embarrassingly obsolete the second it hit the shops. The backing is terse and deviates little, and the words are sung by Roger with his voice electronically lowered to give the impression that he is soulful and funky. In all, ‘Two Sharp Pencils (Get Bad)’ should have remained unreleased, especially in favour of some of the stronger material recorded during the sessions, but it was issued instead on the 12” version of ‘Strange Frontier’.
THE UNBLINKING EYE
(EVERYTHING IS BROKEN) (Taylor)
• Download: 11/09 • CD Single: 1/10
Just as he had done with ‘Woman You’re So Beautiful (But Still A Pain In The Ass)’ following the 2006 North American leg of the Queen + Paul Rodgers tour, Roger went back into the studio after the 2008 Rock the Cosmos tour to work on some further solo material. With the creative juices flowing and the ideas abundant, Roger worked discontinuously at The Priory on songs throughout 2008 and 2009, before announcing the first fruits of his labours that November. Titled ‘The Unblinking Eye (Everything Is Broken)’, the song was touted as a protest song: “What happened to the protest song?” Roger mused in the press release. “Music is now so polished, shiny and predictable, we have forgotten to try and say something with it. I am getting old and like everyone, have the right to say something about the ‘state of control’ we live under – powerless to do anything about it.”
With ‘We Believe’ marking the only foray into sociopoliticial statements on The Cosmos Rocks, it was up to Roger to pick up the slack, and, while ‘The Unblinking Eye’ isn’t as ham-fisted as Brian’s power ballad, it’s just as lyrically clumsy, taking over six minutes to say a lot that we already know: there are pointless wars to drag on, the government is increasingly exercising their power to spy on its citizens, and nations are left broken and unfixable while its people are being taxed higher and higher. “We are directionless,” Roger seethed in the press release. “I’m pissed off – you should be, too.”
But Roger doesn’t sound pissed off; instead, he seems resigned, weary to constantly bleating on about the foibles and misdemeanours of government officials, and aware that he could write about it as much as he want, but corruption and greed will still exist. This works against the effectiveness of the song, an epic ballad that is masterfully performed by Roger (and including a Stylophone solo); if it had been married to an angrier arrangement, the song would have packed more of a punch, but as it stands, it’s a lumbering, lugubrious, albeit well-intentioned, ballad that merely hints at the vexation Roger was trying to express.
Released in November 2009 as a download-only single, ‘The Unblinking Eye (Everything Is Broken)’ was well-received in the fan community, though it eluded a wider audience. Released the same week as the Absolute Greatest compilation, Roger duly mentioned his new single a few times in promotional rounds, promising a physical release “eventually”. Unfortunately, the song was forgotten as quickly as it was released, and when it finally was released on CD in January 2010, not even the addition of a semi-instrumental mix and an in-the-studio video could entice the general public to purchase it. As a result, the single failed to chart, but if Roger was discouraged by its failure, he didn’t let on, and confirmed to the Queen Fan Club that he was working on a new solo album.
UNDER AFRICAN SKIES
Brian mentioned this title as an unreleased song from the 46664 sessions from March 2003 on his soapbox, which he had hoped to continue work on after the sessions were completed. Soon after, Brian was reminded about the 1986 Paul Simon track of the same name, and he sheepishly admitted to forgetting Simon’s track existed. Whether the song will be completed remains to be seen.
UNDER DISPUTE: see BANANA BLUES
UNDER PRESSURE (Queen/Bowie)
• A-side: 10/81 [1] • Album: Space • Live: Magic, Wembley, On Fire, Montreal • CD Single: 11/88 • Compilation: Hits2, Classic, WWRYHits • A-side: 12/99 [14]
In July of 1981, following their first shows in South America, Queen found some semblance of peace at Montreux Studios. They reluctantly started work on their follow-up to The Game but, because they had just spent so much time recording not only that album but also Flash Gordon in late 1980, and then toured the world several times over in such a short amount of time, there was no real rush to get any product out. Besides, they were planning on releasing their first compilation album, which would do nicely until they came up with some new sounds.
But that didn’t stop them from getting a handful of songs in the can: skeleton versions of ‘Back Chat’, ‘Life Is Real (Song For Lennon)’, ‘Cool Cat’ and most likely ‘Put Out The Fire’ were started during preliminary sessions for the new album. Brian explained the story in the Greatest Video Hits 2 commentary in 2003: “[It’s] complex, really. We just happened to be in the studio, and David [Bowie] dropped in and we started jamming. We went out for some food and thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great to do some original ideas.’ John came up with the riff that started it all off, and we all got into it.
“Then it came to what is this song about? David came up with the idea of us all going in one after the other and singing what we thought the tune should be – I think he’d done that with some other people – but we did that and then we sat down and chose bits of everything. It was really done in an odd way. So that gave you the tune, and at that point David started to feel very strongly about what he felt the song was about, so he wrote a set of lyrics – first of all, it was called ‘People On Streets’, but he wanted to revise it and make it slightly more abstract, so it became ‘Under Pressure’.”
“That was through David Richards, the engineer at the studio,” Bowie said of the collaboration. “David knew that I was in town and phoned me up and asked me to come down ... So I went down, and these things happen, you know. Suddenly you’re writing something together, and it was totally spontaneous, it certainly wasn’t planned. It was, er ... peculiar.”
Bowie was working on ‘Cat People (Putting Out Fire)’ with Giorgio Moroder when he ran into David Richards, who had previously engineered “Heroes” in 1977 and would go on to work on several of Bowie’s mid-1980s albums. The two struck up a conversation and Richards introduced Bowie to his new employers. The five musicians started jamming on old songs before it was suggested that they write their own. “Absolutely nothing was written,” Roger said in 2002, “and, in fact, all that we were doing was jamming and David came in one night, and we were just playing other people’s songs for fun and David said, ‘This is stupid, why don’t we just write one?’ ... We took the multi-track tapes to New York and I spent all day there with David and mixed it that night. I remember we were fiddling about and we got the bassline, and then we went for a pizza! And when we got back, we couldn’t remember it, and somebody thought of it ... John did, yes.”
Prior to Bowie’s arrival, the band were working on their own improvisation, which was titled ‘Feel Like’; when Bowie showed up, they borrowed the piano line and came up with a completely new riff and lyrics. It’s easy to hear who wrote what parts: the scat introduction can be seen as a foreshadowing of Freddie’s 1985 single ‘Living On My Own’, while the “insanity laughs” section is more in the ambiguous vein of Bowie’s early 1970s hits. The finale from the middle eight, in which Brian’s guitar finally comes to the fore along with an astounding drum break, is pushed into heavy Queen territory, while the finger-clicking coda and “This is our last dance” recalls Bowie’s early single, ‘You’ve Got A Habit Of Leaving’.
It was a song that adhered to both artists’ styles and the results were splendid. Roger revealed that “We’d never actually collaborated with anybody before, so certain egos were slightly bruised along the way,” while Brian confirmed as much, saying, “To have his ego mixed with ours was a very volatile mixture ... it made for a very hot time in the studio.”
“He was quite difficult to work with,” Brian reflected in 1982 in Intern
ational Musician & Recording World, “because it was the meeting of two different methods of working. It was stimulating but, at the same time, almost impossible to resolve. We’re very pigheaded and set in our ways and Mr Bowie is, too. In fact, he’s probably as pigheaded as the four of us put together. I think it was a worthwhile thing to do. But after ‘Under Pressure’ was done, there were continual disagreements about how it should be put out or if it should even be put out at all. David wanted to redo the entire thing. I had given up by that time because it had gone a long way from what I would have liked to see. But there is still a lot of good stuff in the song. There was a compromise: Freddie, David and Mack actually sat down and produced a mix under a lot of strain. Roger was also along to keep the peace to some extent, because he and David are friends.”
“David Bowie and Freddie and I have been friends for the past few years,” Roger said at the time. “‘Under Pressure’ was a spontaneous collaboration.” That spontaneity is obvious on the finished recording: the song sounds almost unfinished and is more of a rough mix state than a polished final recording. Bowie confirmed this: “It stands up better as a demo. It was done so quickly that some of [the lyric] makes me cringe a bit.”
Crystal Taylor revealed, “On the first night of recording ‘Pressure’, at the end of the evening Brian and myself went on a bit of a binge and ended up back at the studio with David Richards for a jam session. Once again we were out of it and Brian wanted to play, with him on guitar, David on piano and yours truly drumming, and let me assure you that I am the world’s worst drummer when I’m sober, so try to imagine this. David actually taped it, and years later we listened, and out of about an hour of playing there is actually ten minutes of good rock.”
With the song completed, EMI embraced the recording and wanted to release it. Since nothing else had been recorded (except for additional Bowie backing vocals on Freddie and John’s ‘Cool Cat’, a song Bowie asked them not to release), an outtake from The Game called ‘Soul Brother’ became the B-side and Queen were therefore accorded ‘top billing’. When it came time to film a promotional video for the single, the band were more or less indifferent to the notion and Bowie was unavailable, so, through the latter’s recommendation, director David Mallet was enlisted to come up with something suitable.