Queen: The Complete Works

by Georg Purvis

  The video, directed by Derek Burbridge and filmed at the New London Theatre on 6 October 1977, shows Freddie dressed in a Nijinsky ballet suit, and is the visual depiction of the vocalist’s original intent that band and audience be united as one. For the first, but certainly not the last, time, the band enlisted the assistance of Fan Club members to help with the video. With only four days’ notice, some got their invitation too late, but that didn’t stop over 800 fans from showing up and participating. As a thank you, the band performed a special, impromptu concert (see Part Four for more information). An alternate version of the video was shown in recent years on Top Of The Pops 2, with completely different editing and different guitar parts towards the song’s conclusion; unfortunately, this version has not yet been released commercially.

  Due to the massive success of the single (in France, it peaked at No. 1 for twelve weeks – then, the maximum allotted time a single was allowed at the top; as a result, ‘We Will Rock You’ then became the A-side, and the single enjoyed a further twelve weeks at No. 1), the band performed the song at every live show between November 1977 and August 1986. Though it’s customary to think of the song as the most obvious show closer, it didn’t achieve that status until May 1978; until then, along with ‘We Will Rock You’, it was merely the first encore performance, and the show would end up closing with ‘Jailhouse Rock’ and ‘Sheer Heart Attack’. Generally, though, the original coupling became the closer shortly after that (except for a few performances in 1980, as well as being split by ‘Friends Will Be Friends’ in 1986), since it was the most logical and appropriate way to end a Queen show.

  At the Concert For Life on 20 April 1992, Brian introduced Freddie’s favourite singer, Liza Minnelli, who came out to sing an interesting adaptation of the song. What was more heartfelt was the appearance of all the guest musicians coming out during the second chorus to provide backing vocals, a tactic which had been used at Live Aid in 1985 with ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’

  There were numerous reissues, thanks in no small part to the song’s immediate adoption as a sports anthem, but perhaps the most controversial move came in 2001, when Brian and Roger re-recorded the song with Robbie Williams. The makeover was recorded for the film A Knight’s Tale and was played during the credits. However, there was one person missing from the recording; John, who was originally invited to participate, declined, thus confirming his status of retirement. When the bassist heard the finished product, he blasted the song, saying it did no justice to the original and that Robbie wasn’t fit to perform any of Queen’s songs. It is a sentiment shared by many of Queen’s fans; any rumours that Robbie would become the next vocalist for Queen have fallen by the wayside.

  WE BELIEVE (May/Rodgers/Taylor)

  • Album (Q+PR): Cosmos • Italian CD Promo (Q+PR): 11/08 [4]

  The normally mild-mannered and reserved Brian May would channel his political and social beliefs into song whenever he felt the occasion deserved it. Starting with ‘White Man’ in 1976, after researching the plight of Native Americans struggling to survive in North America while on tour there, Brian would only infrequently become incensed enough to write a song about his particular ire du jour; more often than not, these broadsides were clunky and maladroit, and while their messages were well-intended, the delivery left a lot to be desired. As good a songwriter as Brian is, his message songs flat-footed, as evident with the abomination that is ‘46664 (The Call)’.

  This is true with ‘We Believe’, an epic power ballad that is firmly rooted in embarrasing, world-changing messages and a synthetic arrangement that would have been suitable in the late 1980s, but sounds horribly outdated in 2008. Astonishingly, in a preview article in Classic Rock, Brian called this a “fairly upbeat” song, but one glance at the words indicates the opposite: the song explores the evils of mankind and the lying, manipulative nature of politicians, with an optimistic bent that somewhere out there, someone can wave a magic wand and fix all of the world’s problems. (If only it was that easy.) “This is very much Brian’s song, that one, in which I think he sort of puts his views on everything, you know - on the state of everything according to him,” Roger explained in a 2008 BBC Radio Two interview. “It’s very, it’s very well meant, you know: ‘There’s no evil that we didn’t have a hand in’, I think is quite well put and, yeah, it’s a sort of statement.”

  At the time that the song was written, Barack Obama was campaigning for the Democratic ticket in the 2008 US presidental elections; upon receiving that nomination, he had an uphill battle against Republican opponent John McCain and his own c-lebrity, vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin. With Obama taking the tactful route by promising change instead of fear-mongering, hope was restored to a nation that so badly needed a makeover after eight years under the lead of George W. Bush; Brian, therefore, got caught up in the hype, and genuinely believed that one person can make a significant change in a nation’s beliefs.

  As with all of Brian’s message songs, the intent is good in ‘We Believe’ but the delivery is its downfall, with a ponderous arrangement that brings its running time to just over six minutes, and well over the point of tolerability; there aren’t any dynamics to engage listeners, and, apart from a searing guitar solo, the song fails to pick up. Whereas on some of the other songs on the album Paul sounds ill at ease with the subject matter, here he’s most convincing, making the best of the lyrics and harnessing his vocal power into an emotional performance, thus becoming one of the few saving graces of this song.

  ‘We Believe’ was released as an Italian-only promotional single in November 2008, and was edited significantly to a more digestible three minutes, peaking at No. 4 in the Virgin Radio charts. At one point this song and ‘Call Me’ were in the running for the follow-up single to ‘C-Lebrity’ and, as it was in heavy rotation in the live repertoire at the time, ‘We Believe’ appeared to be headed for that honour; unfortunately, due to mounting tensions with the primary musicians, the single failed to materialize. When performed live, the song’s arrangement varied between its album rendition, with Paul on all vocals, and an alternate approach, with Brian on lead vocals on the first verse. Three years later, a version of the song, recorded by Martha Rossi (Scaramouche in the Italian version of the We Will Rock You musical), was released on the singer’s debut EP, Musica Sará, with Brian taking a special interest in his song. “This is something that was close to my heart,” he said in a video message for Rossi’s fans. “I wrote it for the Queen + Paul Rodgers collaboration, but these things kind of get swept away with the passage of time, and I was really thrilled when Martha said she wanted to do a special version of it for the Italian audience. Raffaella Rolla has done an excellent translation and this work has been going on for some time and I’ve taken a little part in it, but not a very big part. Anyway, I wanted to congratulate Martha on a fantastic piece of work, which means a lot to me, and I hope we have a great success out there.”

  WE WILL ROCK YOU (May)

  • B-side: 10/77 [2] • Album: World • CD Single: 11/88 • Bonus: World • CD Single: 2/96 [15] • CD Single: 1/98 [13] • Live: Killers, Magic, Wembley, 46664, On Fire, Montreal • A-side: 7/00 [1] • Live (Brian): Brixton • Live (Q+PR): Return, Ukraine • Bonus: World

  It’s astonishing that a simple rock song with only a minimal stomp-stomp-clap backing and a short burst of guitar has gone on to become an anthem for every sports team on the planet. Even more amazing was the amount of success it garnered. Not only was it the lead-off track on News Of The World, but it was played extensively in concert, and has been released countless times in countless countries on countless singles and compilations. More recently, it even became the title of Queen’s foray into the world of stage musicals.

  Of course, the track is ‘We Will Rock You’, a defiant response to the punks, critics and nay-sayers. More specifically, it’s about a man going through the various stages of life – childhood, adulthood, and death – and falling on hard times (“You got mud on your face
/ Big disgrace”). The song was constructed as a counterpart to Freddie’s more melodic ‘We Are The Champions’ and was inspired by the events of Queen’s May 1977 UK tour, a brief trip that included Bristol, Southampton, Stafford, Glasgow, Liverpool and London, which was the band’s most extensive tour of their homeland since December 1975. Fans in those cities were so excited that their favourite band had finally decided to return home that they gave the band a run for their money: they sang their hearts out to every song, which gave Freddie and Brian their own ideas for separate songs.

  “That was a response to a particular phase in our career when the audience was becoming a bigger part of the show than we were,” Brian explained to Guitar World in 1993. “They would sing all the songs. In a place like Birmingham, they’d be so vociferous that we’d have to stop the show and let them sing to us. So both Freddie and I thought it would be an interesting experiment to write songs with audience participation specifically in mind. My feeling was that everyone can stamp and clap and sing a simple motif. We did that record at Wessex, which is an old converted church that has a naturally good sound to it. There are no drums on there. It’s just us, stamping on boards many times with many primitive delay machines and clapping. A bit of singing, a bit of guitar playing and that’s it.”

  “It came very quickly,” Brian told Undercover magazine in 1998. “It was after an experience we had with an audience. It was fairly early on in our history. We used to like people to sit and damn well listen to the songs, you know. We weren’t a dance band or a sing along group. Then suddenly, people would start to sing along with the songs and they would sing everything. In the beginning we thought, ‘Oh god, what are we going to do about this? It’s annoying!’ After a little while, we realized that that was how people felt and it kind of felt good if you actually conditioned yourself that way. One evening we finished a concert and we went off. It was actually in Birmingham, in England. And the audience sang to us a kind of a football song or whatever, you know. It was a very moving experience. Freddie and I looked at each other and thought, ‘Something important has just happened here, and we should embrace it rather than fight it.’ We both went away and starting writing with the idea that we would involve the audience deliberately. And Freddie wrote ‘We Are the Champions’ and I wrote ‘We Will Rock You’. I think I woke up about three in the morning and I heard the initial beat in my head and I thought, ‘That’s what an audience could do. They could sing something along to it, something that was a kind of uniting feeling.’ That’s what happened. We did it very quickly in the studio. Roger thought it was a joke because there was no drums on it.”

  Roger confirmed this in a 1984 issue of Modern Drummer: “Everybody thinks that’s drums, but it’s not. It’s feet. We sat on a piano and used out feet on an old drum podium. It’s rather hard to explain in words what we did, but what you hear isn’t drums. We must have recorded it, I don’t know, fifteen times or so. We put all sorts of different repeats on it to make it sound big. There’s a catch though. When we do ‘Rock You’ live, I have to do it with drums, so everything is slightly delayed. Everything is to suit the song. To have just one way of working would result in the inability to change or adapt. A good drummer must be flexible. It’s imperative.”

  Much like The Rolling Stones’ ‘Honky Tonk Women’ and its original counterpart ‘Country Honk’, two different versions of ‘We Will Rock You’ exist: the first is the more famous stripped-back version, while the second is an actual band performance. Examples of this can be found on Live Killers and the 2011 double-disc reissue of News Of The World (taken from a November 1982 performance in Tokyo): the song starts off with a raucous guitar riff, a rarity in Queen’s vast canon, and is kicked into high gear with a cavalcade of drums before falling into place with a driving rhythm section. The words are the same, but the performance is more energetic, even allowing a short snippet of a bass solo to sneak in during Brian’s guitar solo. This version was only ever used during live performances between 1977 and 1982, where it served as the introductory number for practically every show.

  A more reserved uptempo version was recorded for the band’s sixth BBC session in October 1977, and remained unreleased until May 2002, when it was released as part of a promotional sequence for the musical of the same name, on a CD single featuring other versions of the song as part of a tie-in with British newspaper The Sun – the same paper that morbidly hounded Freddie in his dying days, incidentally, and which Roger lashed out against in 1994 with ‘Dear Mr Murdoch’, a vicious diatribe against its owner.

  What’s most interesting about the song is that it wasn’t initially released as a UK single, only appearing as the B-side of ‘We Are The Champions’. Of course, in the US it was a double A-side release with that song, and was also extracted from Live Killers as an Elektra-only single release in August 1979. In early 1978, the song was boosted to A-side status in France when ‘We Are The Champions’ ran its twelve-week course (see the entry above for details), and while it appeared in many remixes over the next few years, most are too minute or monotonous to mention.

  One that should be mentioned is a release that has caused upset among many Queen fans. In 1991, Hollywood Records started its massive re-release programme of the band’s back catalogue and included as a bonus track on News Of The World a remix of ‘We Will Rock You’, intriguingly subtitled ‘Ruined by Rick Rubin’. Rubin had produced a plethora of major acts, including Red Hot Chili Peppers, Johnny Cash and System of a Down. This time, he deconstructed ‘We Will Rock You’, stripping it of almost everything except the vocals and rebuilding it around an urban-sounding drum-machine loop; he then called in Flea and Chad (bassist and drummer, respectively, from Red Hot Chili Peppers) to add some flavour to the remix. Rubin then sampled some of Brian’s own guitar from ‘Stone Cold Crazy’ and added a recurring siren motif throughout as well as record scratches. The result is a glorious presentation of noise, but some fans were not receptive to the new approach and preferred not to acknowledge its existence.

  A five-track promotional release came in mid-1991 of this version, along with four other mixes: Ruined Instrumental, Big Beat a Capella, Effects a Capella and Zulu Scratch a Capella. Two other remixes were made but remain unreleased: Clap a Capella and Effects Instrumental. While these other mixes become monotonous after a while, fans are urged to give the proper remix a chance; it may be an acquired taste, but it does contain some nice bits and does justice to the idea of updating the song for the 1990s.

  If fans were outraged by the Rick Rubin remix, they must have been doubly so by two others. In 2000, Brian and Roger re-recorded the song with pop band 5ive, while in 2004, the duo re-recorded the song with Britney Spears, Beyoncé Knowles and Pink each taking a verse. This was done for a Pepsi advertisement, which also featured Brian and Roger as Roman kings while the three female singers are portrayed as gladiators in the Coliseum. Oh yes, and there’s a soda-based product in there somewhere, too.

  The recording with 5ive was just as controversial, since it featured new lyrics ‘rapped’ by the pop band. Brian played guitar and bass in addition to co-producing with Richard Stannard and Julian Gallacher, and, when the single appeared in July 2000, ecstatic 5ive (and perhaps some reluctant Queen) fans snatched it up, and it became the first time the song reached No. 1 in the UK.

  As for the original version, it reached a modest No. 4 in its US double-bill pairing with ‘We Are The Champions’, and didn’t chart at all when released in its live format. The song took on a new life in the live setting: it was the fast-paced opener for many years, but as the second encore it carried an extra air of expectation. The audience knew by that point that the show was approaching its conclusion, but they still sang as vociferously as ever, while Freddie would let them take over the choruses as he pranced around the stage, working the crowd into a frenzy. “At concerts, I discovered, people tend to do three claps rather than two stamps and a clap,” Brian told Guitar World in 1993. “The amazing thing is to go to footbal
l matches, or sports events in general, and hear people do it. It’s very gratifying to find that it has become part of folklore, sort of. I’ll die happy because of that.” And it doesn’t matter which sport, either – baseball, football, rugby, or soccer – as long as there’s some sort of participatory vibe at the venue, the song (or even just the stomp-stomp-clap rhythm) is likely to emerge.

  A video was constructed in January 1978 at Roger’s mansion in Surrey. By that point, the members had become wealthy businessmen as well as musicians. They decided, then, that they need not be managed by an outsider any longer. Unfortunately their current manager, John Reid, was also managing Elton John and had decided one megastar was enough. So, between takes for ‘Spread Your Wings’, the band rushed off in Freddie’s Rolls-Royce and terminated their contract with Reid before going their separate, amicable ways. As a celebration of their freedom, they ran through ‘We Will Rock You’ for the cameras almost as an afterthought.

  “It’s really odd, but it wasn’t really something we considered important at the time,” Brian said of the low-budget, almost slapdash video constructed for the song, “and then, in the fullness of time, ‘We Will Rock You’ just became this incredible anthem which – along with ‘We Are The Champions’ – represented us all over the world.” In the commentary for the 2003 DVD Greatest Video Hits 1, Brian confirmed that “Yeah, I do feel very proud of it, really, in a sense. That’s kind of my gravestone, I suppose.”

  WE’RE GOING HOME (Lee)

  A variation of Ten Years After’s track ‘I’m Going Home’ was performed by Ibex on 9 September 1969 at The Sink Club, Liverpool. This would be the final track of the standard set, with an encore coming shortly after. Unfortunately, the available tape cuts off prematurely so it’s not known what songs made up the encore. Doubly unfortunate is the fact that Brian and Roger, then of Smile, joined Ibex on stage, making this the first known performance of the embryonic Queen.