JustPriest
Till Deaf Do Us Part
Pt. 2
The world received its first taste of The Works when Radio Ga Ga was released as a single in January 1984. The song was credited solely to Taylor, giving him his first UK top-five hit since I’m In Love With My Car, the B-side to Bohemian Rhapsody in 1975.
In typically contrary style, Queen had hired David Mallet to direct a video (which eventually cost £110,000) promoting a song moaning about the dominance of video. But Queen were nothing if not pragmatic.
Mercury and producer Giorgio Moroder were dabbling with the soundtrack for a new version of Fritz Lang’s 1927 sci-fi movie Metropolis. Lang’s footage of industrial cogs and smoke-belching chimneys was stripped into Mallet’s film, which showed Queen zooming around in a flying car, and conducting 500 extras in a synchronised handclap. This part was supposed to illustrate how modern radio’s meaningless ‘ga ga’ had turned listeners into gormless drones. But some critics compared the scene to a Nazi party rally. “People thought we were really trying to be dictators,” May grumbled. None of this mattered when Radio Ga Ga became a UK No.2 hit.
But the single tanked in America. At the time, many record labels used independent pluggers to secure radio airplay with clandestine payments. Now an industry-wide investigation was under way, and the labels panicked.
“So Capitol got rid of all their independent guys,” May explained, “and the reprisal from the networks was aimed at the artists who had records out. Radio Ga Ga was rising, but the week after that it disappeared.”
However, Queen’s dealings with American radio had become problematic around the time of Hot Space. For years, May refused to name Mercury’s personal manager, Paul Prenter, in interviews, referring to him only as “the guy who looked after Fred”. This was no longer possible after the Bohemian Rhapsody movie. Here, Prenter (played by actor Allen Leach) was reborn as a classic movie villain who drove a wedge between Mercury and Queen.
“It wasn’t far off the truth,” said May. “He was very dismissive with the radio stations. “I discovered later that he went around saying: ‘No, Freddie doesn’t want to talk to you.’”
“Prenter was always whispering in Freddie’s ear,” confirmed Mack. “They were both into R&B and disco, so you had Prenter telling Freddie that Queen were old-fashioned and he didn’t need guitars.”
However, The Works (named after another of Mercury’s favourite clubs and his pre-tour rallying cry: “Give ’em the fucking works!”) was unlike Hot Space. Released in February 1984, it was a belting rock album cunningly spliced with pop songs and ballads.
Mercury’s compositions ranged from the inspired to the throwaway. His courtly ballad It’s A Hard Life lived up to May’s praise, while Man On The Prowl was rockabilly-by-numbers redeemed by Fred Mandel’s honky-tonk piano. Keep Passing The Open Windows (titled after the family’s catchphrase in The Hotel New Hampshire) had a maddening chorus, and lyrics straight out of Mercury’s self-empowerment handbook (‘You just gotta be strong and believe in yourself…’). Is This The World We Created…? was written at the last minute to provide a Love Of My Life-type ballad.
May and Taylor shared the credits on Machines (Or Back To Humans), a mash-up of synthesiser, Vocoder and howling guitar, with now-dated lyrics about ‘bytes and megachips’, and May scored with two blood-and-guts rockers: Tear It Up and Hammer To Fall, the latter using the catchiest of hooks to warn listeners that we were all doomed if Reagan or Chernenko started World War III.
The Works reached No.2 in the UK and No.23 in the States. The numbers would have been better had Queen toured America. “But Freddie didn’t want to go back and play smaller venues,” said May. “He was like: ‘Let’s just wait and then soon we’ll go out and do stadiums as well.’”
However, Queen were about to scupper their chances further. A second single, I Want To Break Free, became a UK No.3 hit, accompanied by a hilarious but problematic video. A pastiche of the British soap opera Coronation Street was always going to be a bit parochial, but Queen appearing in drag was too much for MTV. Two decades later, Dave Grohl dressed as several women in the promo for the Foo Fighters’ Learn To Fly. But when Queen did it 40 years ago, MTV refused to use their video.
“For the first time in our lives we were taking the mickey out of ourselves,” Mercury protested. “But in America they said: ‘What are our idols doing dressing up in frocks?’”
“MTV hated it,” said May. “They could not accept a rock group dressing as women, and in America Queen were still seen as a rock group.”
Then again, it was difficult to imagine Eddie Van Halen modelling May’s pink nightdress and hair curlers, nor even Dave Lee Roth wearing fake breasts and pushing a vacuum cleaner, à la Freddie. So convincing was Roger Taylor’s schoolgirl that David Mallet’s fiancée spotted him and Taylor in a huddle and thought they were having an affair.
“I’m Canadian, so I got it,” recalled Fred Mandel. “I mean, come on, it’s just Benny Hill, typical British humour. I also liked seeing Roger doing the dishes and Freddie doing housework.”
Capitol pleaded with Queen to make an alternative performance video for MTV, but Mercury refused. There was no persuading him, something May found frustrating while shooting a promotional clip for the next single, It’s A Hard Life. May applauded Mercury’s willingness to address his emotional turmoil in the song: “And then he went and dressed as a giant prawn in the video. I was terribly disappointed.”
Mercury, in his prawn-like ensemble, roamed a Bacchanalian wonderland populated by cross-dressing ballerinas and extras in ball gowns and insect heads. Partway through, Taylor and Deacon sloped into view wearing tights and Elizabethan ruffs (with the drummer’s late 20th-century baseball boots visible in one shot).
It’s A Hard Life was another UK Top 10 hit, while the next single, Hammer To Fall, reached No.13. Both cued up Queen’s world tour, albeit minus America. “There were always other places for us to go where we were selling well,” suggested May. Regrettably, these included South Africa, where I Want To Break Free had gone to No.1.
In October, Queen defied the United Nations’ anti-apartheid boycott to play Sun City, a hotel/ casino complex in Bophuthatswana. They’d been informed that racial segregation didn’t apply there. Which was nonsense. With tickets costing the equivalent of more than £50 each in South African rand, Queen performed to a sea of white faces in a wealthy white person’s playground.
The band received a Musicians Union fine and were placed on the United Nations blacklist. “Queen are jerks,” declared Daryl Hall, of soft-rock duo Hall And Oates, and one of the Artists United Against Apartheid collective.
“We thought we could build bridges,” May said.“We are totally and fundamentally opposed to apartheid.”
“On balance, going there was a mistake,” conceded Taylor.
Mercury, who was born in Zanzibar, in the Indian Ocean off the coast of East Africa, never ventured an opinion.
A month after their ill-fated trip to South Africa, Queen released a non-album single, Thank God It’s Christmas. The title sounded like a collective sigh of relief. But it was eclipsed by Band Aid’s Do They Know It’s Christmas?, a charity single from which Queen were noticeably absent. “I don’t know if they would have had me on the record,” suggested Mercury. “I’m a bit old.”
In the pre-internet world, it took longer for bands to discover where and why their records were selling. I Want To Break Free had been a hit in South Africa because it resonated with supporters of the anti-apartheid African National Congress movement, whose future president, Nelson Mandela, had already spent more than 20 years in prison.
By January 1985, the song had been adopted as a protest anthem in Brazil. After two decades of military dictatorship, the country was about to hold its first democratic election since 1964. Mercury’s impassioned ‘God knows I want to break free!’ spoke to the country’s oppressed, meaning that this most apolitical of rock groups had accidentally become political.
That month, Queen arrived in Brazil to play the opening and closing nights of the 10-day Rock In Rio festival at the Barra Da Tijuca stadium in Rio de Janeiro, the biggest rock festival ever held, with a reported attendance of 1.5 million. By now Queen were at the peak of their live powers, and Mercury saw no reason to adapt their show.
After a victory lap of Crazy Little Thing Called Love, Bohemian Rhapsody and Radio Ga Ga, Queen returned to encore with I Want To Break Free. Mercury strode in from the wings sporting a wig, and a tight sweater under which he’d jammed a pair of torpedo-shaped plastic breasts. This was his second pair, as previously European audiences had complained that the first ones weren’t visible from the cheap seats: “So I had to get some bigger tits.”
However, the costume upset the Brazilians, none of whom had seen Queen’s video and couldn’t understand why Mercury would undermine the song’s heartfelt message. Contrary to press reports, they didn’t bombard the stage with bottles, but they booed and jeered, until Mercury removed the offending accessories.
“There was no place Freddie wouldn’t go,” May marvelled, years later. “Even singing with false breasts in South America.”
The Works, its singles and videos summated Queen’s unique place in 80s rock, but also the inner conflict that defined it. “We always wanted to change,” Taylor explained, “and we never regarded ourselves as a singles band. But I’ve come to realise that a lot of people do think of Queen as just that. Or they think that all we did was flounce around in dresses.”
By the time Mercury performed drunk at their show in Auckland, Queen had agreed to take a year off after the tour. “I think that we probably all hated each other for a while,” said May.
In April 1985, Freddie Mercury released his first solo single, the dance track I Was Born To Love You, followed by the album, Mr Bad Guy. The rest of Queen wondered if they’d lost him for good. “Freddie had stepped so far away,” said May. “I thought we might not get him back.”
Then came the request that changed all their lives. Boomtown Rats vocalist Bob Geldof, the brains behind Band Aid, was planning Live Aid, a fundraising concert for famine-stricken Africa. Geldof wanted Queen to play, and wouldn’t take no for an answer.
“We definitely hesitated to say yes,” recalled May. “We had to consider whether we were in good enough shape. The chances of making fools of ourselves were so big.”
They needn’t have worried. During the early evening of July 13, Queen arrived to find 72,000 people inside London’s Wembley Stadium and cameras waiting to broadcast their performance around the world. Mercury trotted on stage like an eager show pony, flashing a knowing grin, like he was about to deliver the punchline to the world’s funniest joke. As he hammered out the opening notes to Bohemian Rhapsody on a grand piano, Queen’s doubts and fears evaporated. For the next 20 minutes they gave the audience ‘the works’ and more. The four musketeers had returned to fight another day.
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The world received its first taste of The Works when Radio Ga Ga was released as a single in January 1984. The song was credited solely to Taylor, giving him his first UK top-five hit since I’m In Love With My Car, the B-side to Bohemian Rhapsody in 1975.
In typically contrary style, Queen had hired David Mallet to direct a video (which eventually cost £110,000) promoting a song moaning about the dominance of video. But Queen were nothing if not pragmatic.
Mercury and producer Giorgio Moroder were dabbling with the soundtrack for a new version of Fritz Lang’s 1927 sci-fi movie Metropolis. Lang’s footage of industrial cogs and smoke-belching chimneys was stripped into Mallet’s film, which showed Queen zooming around in a flying car, and conducting 500 extras in a synchronised handclap. This part was supposed to illustrate how modern radio’s meaningless ‘ga ga’ had turned listeners into gormless drones. But some critics compared the scene to a Nazi party rally. “People thought we were really trying to be dictators,” May grumbled. None of this mattered when Radio Ga Ga became a UK No.2 hit.
But the single tanked in America. At the time, many record labels used independent pluggers to secure radio airplay with clandestine payments. Now an industry-wide investigation was under way, and the labels panicked.
“So Capitol got rid of all their independent guys,” May explained, “and the reprisal from the networks was aimed at the artists who had records out. Radio Ga Ga was rising, but the week after that it disappeared.”
However, Queen’s dealings with American radio had become problematic around the time of Hot Space. For years, May refused to name Mercury’s personal manager, Paul Prenter, in interviews, referring to him only as “the guy who looked after Fred”. This was no longer possible after the Bohemian Rhapsody movie. Here, Prenter (played by actor Allen Leach) was reborn as a classic movie villain who drove a wedge between Mercury and Queen.
“It wasn’t far off the truth,” said May. “He was very dismissive with the radio stations. “I discovered later that he went around saying: ‘No, Freddie doesn’t want to talk to you.’”
“Prenter was always whispering in Freddie’s ear,” confirmed Mack. “They were both into R&B and disco, so you had Prenter telling Freddie that Queen were old-fashioned and he didn’t need guitars.”
However, The Works (named after another of Mercury’s favourite clubs and his pre-tour rallying cry: “Give ’em the fucking works!”) was unlike Hot Space. Released in February 1984, it was a belting rock album cunningly spliced with pop songs and ballads.
Mercury’s compositions ranged from the inspired to the throwaway. His courtly ballad It’s A Hard Life lived up to May’s praise, while Man On The Prowl was rockabilly-by-numbers redeemed by Fred Mandel’s honky-tonk piano. Keep Passing The Open Windows (titled after the family’s catchphrase in The Hotel New Hampshire) had a maddening chorus, and lyrics straight out of Mercury’s self-empowerment handbook (‘You just gotta be strong and believe in yourself…’). Is This The World We Created…? was written at the last minute to provide a Love Of My Life-type ballad.
May and Taylor shared the credits on Machines (Or Back To Humans), a mash-up of synthesiser, Vocoder and howling guitar, with now-dated lyrics about ‘bytes and megachips’, and May scored with two blood-and-guts rockers: Tear It Up and Hammer To Fall, the latter using the catchiest of hooks to warn listeners that we were all doomed if Reagan or Chernenko started World War III.
The Works reached No.2 in the UK and No.23 in the States. The numbers would have been better had Queen toured America. “But Freddie didn’t want to go back and play smaller venues,” said May. “He was like: ‘Let’s just wait and then soon we’ll go out and do stadiums as well.’”
However, Queen were about to scupper their chances further. A second single, I Want To Break Free, became a UK No.3 hit, accompanied by a hilarious but problematic video. A pastiche of the British soap opera Coronation Street was always going to be a bit parochial, but Queen appearing in drag was too much for MTV. Two decades later, Dave Grohl dressed as several women in the promo for the Foo Fighters’ Learn To Fly. But when Queen did it 40 years ago, MTV refused to use their video.
“For the first time in our lives we were taking the mickey out of ourselves,” Mercury protested. “But in America they said: ‘What are our idols doing dressing up in frocks?’”
“MTV hated it,” said May. “They could not accept a rock group dressing as women, and in America Queen were still seen as a rock group.”
Then again, it was difficult to imagine Eddie Van Halen modelling May’s pink nightdress and hair curlers, nor even Dave Lee Roth wearing fake breasts and pushing a vacuum cleaner, à la Freddie. So convincing was Roger Taylor’s schoolgirl that David Mallet’s fiancée spotted him and Taylor in a huddle and thought they were having an affair.
“I’m Canadian, so I got it,” recalled Fred Mandel. “I mean, come on, it’s just Benny Hill, typical British humour. I also liked seeing Roger doing the dishes and Freddie doing housework.”
Capitol pleaded with Queen to make an alternative performance video for MTV, but Mercury refused. There was no persuading him, something May found frustrating while shooting a promotional clip for the next single, It’s A Hard Life. May applauded Mercury’s willingness to address his emotional turmoil in the song: “And then he went and dressed as a giant prawn in the video. I was terribly disappointed.”
Mercury, in his prawn-like ensemble, roamed a Bacchanalian wonderland populated by cross-dressing ballerinas and extras in ball gowns and insect heads. Partway through, Taylor and Deacon sloped into view wearing tights and Elizabethan ruffs (with the drummer’s late 20th-century baseball boots visible in one shot).
It’s A Hard Life was another UK Top 10 hit, while the next single, Hammer To Fall, reached No.13. Both cued up Queen’s world tour, albeit minus America. “There were always other places for us to go where we were selling well,” suggested May. Regrettably, these included South Africa, where I Want To Break Free had gone to No.1.
In October, Queen defied the United Nations’ anti-apartheid boycott to play Sun City, a hotel/ casino complex in Bophuthatswana. They’d been informed that racial segregation didn’t apply there. Which was nonsense. With tickets costing the equivalent of more than £50 each in South African rand, Queen performed to a sea of white faces in a wealthy white person’s playground.
The band received a Musicians Union fine and were placed on the United Nations blacklist. “Queen are jerks,” declared Daryl Hall, of soft-rock duo Hall And Oates, and one of the Artists United Against Apartheid collective.
“We thought we could build bridges,” May said.“We are totally and fundamentally opposed to apartheid.”
“On balance, going there was a mistake,” conceded Taylor.
Mercury, who was born in Zanzibar, in the Indian Ocean off the coast of East Africa, never ventured an opinion.
A month after their ill-fated trip to South Africa, Queen released a non-album single, Thank God It’s Christmas. The title sounded like a collective sigh of relief. But it was eclipsed by Band Aid’s Do They Know It’s Christmas?, a charity single from which Queen were noticeably absent. “I don’t know if they would have had me on the record,” suggested Mercury. “I’m a bit old.”
In the pre-internet world, it took longer for bands to discover where and why their records were selling. I Want To Break Free had been a hit in South Africa because it resonated with supporters of the anti-apartheid African National Congress movement, whose future president, Nelson Mandela, had already spent more than 20 years in prison.
By January 1985, the song had been adopted as a protest anthem in Brazil. After two decades of military dictatorship, the country was about to hold its first democratic election since 1964. Mercury’s impassioned ‘God knows I want to break free!’ spoke to the country’s oppressed, meaning that this most apolitical of rock groups had accidentally become political.
That month, Queen arrived in Brazil to play the opening and closing nights of the 10-day Rock In Rio festival at the Barra Da Tijuca stadium in Rio de Janeiro, the biggest rock festival ever held, with a reported attendance of 1.5 million. By now Queen were at the peak of their live powers, and Mercury saw no reason to adapt their show.
After a victory lap of Crazy Little Thing Called Love, Bohemian Rhapsody and Radio Ga Ga, Queen returned to encore with I Want To Break Free. Mercury strode in from the wings sporting a wig, and a tight sweater under which he’d jammed a pair of torpedo-shaped plastic breasts. This was his second pair, as previously European audiences had complained that the first ones weren’t visible from the cheap seats: “So I had to get some bigger tits.”
However, the costume upset the Brazilians, none of whom had seen Queen’s video and couldn’t understand why Mercury would undermine the song’s heartfelt message. Contrary to press reports, they didn’t bombard the stage with bottles, but they booed and jeered, until Mercury removed the offending accessories.
“There was no place Freddie wouldn’t go,” May marvelled, years later. “Even singing with false breasts in South America.”
The Works, its singles and videos summated Queen’s unique place in 80s rock, but also the inner conflict that defined it. “We always wanted to change,” Taylor explained, “and we never regarded ourselves as a singles band. But I’ve come to realise that a lot of people do think of Queen as just that. Or they think that all we did was flounce around in dresses.”
By the time Mercury performed drunk at their show in Auckland, Queen had agreed to take a year off after the tour. “I think that we probably all hated each other for a while,” said May.
In April 1985, Freddie Mercury released his first solo single, the dance track I Was Born To Love You, followed by the album, Mr Bad Guy. The rest of Queen wondered if they’d lost him for good. “Freddie had stepped so far away,” said May. “I thought we might not get him back.”
Then came the request that changed all their lives. Boomtown Rats vocalist Bob Geldof, the brains behind Band Aid, was planning Live Aid, a fundraising concert for famine-stricken Africa. Geldof wanted Queen to play, and wouldn’t take no for an answer.
“We definitely hesitated to say yes,” recalled May. “We had to consider whether we were in good enough shape. The chances of making fools of ourselves were so big.”
They needn’t have worried. During the early evening of July 13, Queen arrived to find 72,000 people inside London’s Wembley Stadium and cameras waiting to broadcast their performance around the world. Mercury trotted on stage like an eager show pony, flashing a knowing grin, like he was about to deliver the punchline to the world’s funniest joke. As he hammered out the opening notes to Bohemian Rhapsody on a grand piano, Queen’s doubts and fears evaporated. For the next 20 minutes they gave the audience ‘the works’ and more. The four musketeers had returned to fight another day.
With The Works Queen returned to their rock roots, and annoyed a lot of people
Drunken shenanigans. MTV-upsetting videos. Furious Brazillians. Sun City
Queen 1984 : Radio Ga Ga (Episode 26)
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