JustPriest
Till Deaf Do Us Part
Ich danke ebenfalls für die sehr netten Worte.
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How many Galileos do you want? - Wir ermitteln unsere Queen Top40!
- Ersteller JustPriest
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JustPriest
Till Deaf Do Us Part
2. INNUENDO
(1991)
Punkte: 1217
Schnitt: 105,9
1. Innuendo (546)
2. The show must go on (380)
3. These are the days of our lives (133)
4. Headlong (61)
5. I'm going slightly mad (59)
6. Ride the wild wind (51)
7. Don't try so hard (38)
8. Delilah (3)
9. Bijou (1)
10. I can't live with you (0)
10. All gods people (0)
10. The Hitman (0)
‘Innuendo’: The Final Queen Album Released In Freddie Mercury’s Lifetime
Queen’s 14th studio album is tinged with sadness, as it was the last to be released during Freddie Mercury’s lifetime.Just 20 months after the release of The Miracle, along came Innuendo, on February 4, 1991. It was the shortest wait for a new Queen album in over a decade, and yet, for all the joy, their 14th studio album is tinged with sadness as it was the last to be released during Freddie Mercury’s lifetime.
Innuendo was recorded between March 1989 and November 1990 at Metropolis Studios in West London and Mountain Studios in Montreux. It was originally intended for release in time for Christmas 1990, but Freddie’s ailing health meant that it was inevitably delayed, not that you would know from the quality of the music or the power in Freddie’s vocals that range over four octaves. Musically the album is complex and for many fans, this is an album that is “back to the roots”…and that’s no bad thing at all.
Midway through recording the album, in February 1990, Queen won the Brit Award for Outstanding Contribution to British Music. It was a long time coming but richly deserved. The whole band were at London’s Dominion Theatre to receive their award and Brian spoke on behalf of the band; it proved to be Mercury’s final public appearance.
From the very opening bars of the opening track, which is also the album’s title song, the band set out their stall. This is pomp rock, grandiose and huge. “Innuendo” began as a jam and the whole thing smacks of Led Zep, but with very definitely Queen’s unique approach stamped all over it; in case you’re wondering it’s Steve Howe from Yes playing the flamenco guitar interlude. It was released as a single ahead of the album in the UK, topping the charts, and went Top 20 in the Billboard Mainstream Rock chart where it was released later.
“I’m Going Slightly Mad” has its roots in a Noel Coward pastiche that was devised originally by Freddie, before being completed by the band in Switzerland. The video, filmed with Freddie very ill indeed, features Brian May dressed as a penguin, Roger Taylor wears a tea kettle on his head, John Deacon is a jester, and Mercury wears a bunch of bananas on his head.
Brian May took “Headlong” to Switzerland, having originally intended it for his own solo album. With Freddie’s vocals, it instantly became a Queen song and went Top 3 in the Mainstream Rock Chart when it came out as the album’s lead single in January 1991. “I Can’t Live With You” is another song intended for Brian’s solo album.
“Don’t Try So Hard” is trademark Freddie and a beautiful song, one of those that after repeated listening to this album becomes embedded as a firm favorite. Roger’s first composition on the album is “Ride The Wild Wind,” one that he had originally recorded as a demo with his own vocals that were subsequently changed to a lead vocal from Freddie, with Taylor on b/vs. Brian’s trademark solo is brilliant.
The one song on the album not to be credited to Queen for songwriting is “All God’s People.” It’s a Mercury/Moran co-write and was originally intended for Freddie’s Barcelona album, on which he worked with producer/songwriter Mike Moran. Next up is Taylor’s second contribution as a songwriter, the nostalgic and poignant, “These Are the Days of Our Lives.” It’s made even more emotional in the knowledge that the accompanying video was the last appearance by Freddie. When it ends he looks straight at the camera, whispering, “I still love you”.
“These Are the Days of Our Lives” was released as a single in the US on Freddie’s 45th birthday, September 5, 1991, and as a double A-side single in the UK three months later on 9 December, following Freddie’s passing. The UK release was a double A-side with “Bo-Rap” and debuted at #1 on the chart, remaining at the top for five weeks.
“Delilah” is a homage to Freddie’s cat, and sits outside the run of the album, but apparently, Mercury was insistent that it should be included. By contrast, “The Hitman” could not be more different. It’s an out and out rocker that was another song that was started by Freddie before John Deacon took over much of the rearrangement of the song structure and turned it into a trademark Queen song.
“Bijou” is a clever song, devised by Brian and Freddie that has the guitar doing the verses and the vocals becoming the chorus. It’s a beauty! May later said that Jeff Beck’s 1989 song, “Where Were You,” was part of the inspiration behind it. In 2008, Queen + Paul Rodgers, on their Rock the Cosmos Tour, featured Brian playing the verses and then a video of Freddie from the 1986 Wembley concert, matched to his vocals.
Is there a better closing track to any Queen album than “The Show Must Go On”? It is perfect in every way. It’s also a collaborative number, with all four members having a hand in its writing. The song tells the story of Mercury continuing to record and to work, even as the end was approaching. It is hard not to be overwhelmed when listening to it. Initially, it was not released as a single, but was in October 1991 to help promote the Greatest Hits II album; the promo film features clips from all the Queen videos since 1982.
Innuendo topped the UK charts, but somewhat disappointingly could only make No.30 in America. It also went top 10 just about everywhere, with the coveted No.1 spot being secured in Holland, Germany, Switzerland and Italy.
With Freddie’s tragic passing on November 24, 1991, we all assumed that was to be the end of the road for the band. But there was more in store…
‘Innuendo’: The Final Queen Album Released In Freddie Mercury’s Lifetime
Queen's 'Innuendo' was their 14th studio album, but tinged with sadness. It was the last to be released during Freddie Mercury’s lifetime.
www.udiscovermusic.com
Watch ‘1991 – Innuendo’: The Latest Episode In Queen’s ‘The Greatest’ Video Series
This week’s episode looks inside the Montreux studio sessions of March 1989 – November 1990 which produced the band’s landmark ‘Innuendo’ album.
Queen have shared ‘1991- Innuendo’, the latest episode in their archival video series, ‘The Greatest’, which you can watch in full below.
‘1991 – Innuendo’ revisits Queen roaring into the 1990s with their 14th and penultimate studio album, the smash hit Innuendo, and looks inside the Montreux studio sessions of March 1989 – November 1990 carried out under the shadow of Freddie Mercury’s increasing frailty, but remembered by Roger Taylor as “strangely, a very happy album to make.”
Producer Dave Richards adds: “With Innuendo, somebody suggested that they should play live, and they thought that was a good idea. So we set them up in the Casino Hall (Montreux) and the studio itself was linked with 54 mic lines going down and we could record groups in there.
“They actually created a song live, by improvising until it became a song. And that’s how it started.”
Roger Taylor: “We were working abroad together in Mountain Studios. I think Freddie had then decided he actually loved Switzerland, and he didn’t want the studio to be under the lake, which is where he wanted before. There’s some very good stuff on Innuendo, and it was quite live as well, and I think a bigger studio is good for us.”
Brian May: “There was a feeling of sort of re exploring our youth almost buried in there somewhere. And it was fun. We were all working really flat out on everybody’s ideas and not being kind of possessive about things, so there’s quite a liberation there.”
John Deacon: “I think we’re all throwing in different ideas. There’s a lot more teamwork, but people still get very precious about the songs that they feel they started off with.”
Dave Richards: “Freddie was singing down there live as well with them, and there was absolutely no impression from me that he could have been sick. He was full of beans and singing away.”
At the beginning of 1991, the Innuendo album and single were released and both entered the UK charts at number one. It was also Queen’s first album to go gold in the US on release since The Works in 1984.
Brian May: “The new album is great. I think it’s the best one for quite a long time. Very often you put out an album you think, but I wish we’d done this, you know. This one I feel quite happy about and I can listen to it without any problem. I like it a lot.”
The guitarist adds, “Actually, we had some fantastic times, and I think we got over our stupid, you know, going out the whole time business, you know? We were a very close knit group like a family, and we would work in the studio until, usually until Freddie got very tired.”
“I did a complete demo for “The Show Must Go On”, including that very high part, you know, “On with the show”. And I said to Freddie, because Freddie always used to say, ‘Oh Brian, you’re f_king making me tear my throat to bits again’. So I remember apologizing in as much as I said, ‘Look, I’ve done it in falsetto. I don’t know if it’s possible to do it full voice, you know, but obviously that would be great’.”
Brian May: “And he went ‘Oh for God’s sake’, you know, he said, ‘roll the tape’, a couple of vodkas, and he went for that line, which is outstanding, you know, for him to reach those notes. He’s reaching heights he’s never done before. He’s just finding the energy from somewhere? And the voice on “The Show Must Go On” is incredible. I never heard anybody sing like that in my whole life. And he rose to every challenge and seemed to reach heights that he never even reached before.”
This recording experience, despite the challenges we now know the band were facing, proved to be hugely productive, and Innuendo marked the band’s 20th anniversary in style, delivering a powerhouse of song writing and recording in the finest Queen tradition.
Watch ‘1991 – Innuendo’: The Latest Episode In Queen’s ‘The Greatest’ Video Series
Queen have shared '1991 - Innuendo', the latest episode in their on-going archival video series, 'The Greaatest', this week revisiting the 'Innuendo' album.
www.udiscovermusic.com
Watch ‘1991 – Innuendo’: The Latest Episode In Queen’s ‘The Greatest’ Video Series
Queen have shared '1991 - Innuendo', the latest episode in their on-going archival video series, 'The Greaatest', this week revisiting the 'Innuendo' album.
www.udiscovermusic.com
Queen the Greatest: 1991 - Innuendo (Episode 37)
- YouTube
Auf YouTube findest du die angesagtesten Videos und Tracks. Außerdem kannst du eigene Inhalte hochladen und mit Freunden oder gleich der ganzen Welt teilen.
www.youtube.com
Queen - I'm Going Slightly Mad (Making Of & Alternative Takes) (High Quality)
- YouTube
Auf YouTube findest du die angesagtesten Videos und Tracks. Außerdem kannst du eigene Inhalte hochladen und mit Freunden oder gleich der ganzen Welt teilen.
www.youtube.com
Queen - Mad in the Making: The Making of the "I'm Going Slightly Mad"
- YouTube
Auf YouTube findest du die angesagtesten Videos und Tracks. Außerdem kannst du eigene Inhalte hochladen und mit Freunden oder gleich der ganzen Welt teilen.
www.youtube.com
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JustPriest
Till Deaf Do Us Part
The Last Goodbye: How Queen made Innuendo and Made In Heaven
Even as his time ran out, Freddie Mercury was the driving force behind Queen’s 1991 album Innuendo and the voice from beyond the grave on 1995’s Made In Heaven. Here’s how Queen went out with a bang.
By 1990, the hounds of Britain’s tabloid press were hot on Freddie Mercury’s trail. Day and night, the Queen frontman’s Garden Lodge home in West London crawled with reporters, his increasingly rare outings dogged by shutter-clicks and thrusted microphones.
His pursuers had a common goal: to confirm the most open secret in rock’n’roll, that Mercury was HIV positive, had AIDS – and was dying. But for now, the press would be forced to seize on crumbs of evidence for their splashes – most recently, Mercury’s gaunt appearance at that February’s Brit Awards – while Brian May parried them with the party line: “He definitely hasn’t got AIDS, but I think his wild rock‘n’roll lifestyle has caught up with him.”
In an age before social media, the silence from the Queen camp was absolute. Yet the band’s public denials of Mercury’s worsening condition were at odds with their musical output of the era, with the following year’s Innuendo album all but admitting the singer’s diagnosis, while diving deeper into his headspace than any tell-all interview.
“We were dealing with things that were hard to talk about at the time,” May told Guitar World, “but in the world of music, you could do it.”
Recorded at London’s Metropolis Studios and the Mountain facility in Montreux, Innuendo was far too varied to be glibly cast as ‘the AIDS album’. In Queen’s grand tradition, these twelve songs pinballed between genres – the title track alone offered vaudeville drum rolls, flamenco guitars and a screaming hard-rock solo from May – and were inspired by themes as disparate as Roger Taylor’s cars (Ride The Wild Wind) and Mercury’s calico cat (Delilah).
The effervescent I Can’t Live Without You and the foot-down Headlong (a song originally mooted for May’s solo career) hardly sounded like the work of a dead man walking.
“The last thing he wanted,” said Taylor of Mercury’s defiant last stand, “was to draw attention to any kind of weakness or frailty. He didn’t want pity."
Even so, at least three of Innuendo’s key songs offered a window into Mercury’s mindset as the sand ran out. The singer’s own I’m Going Slightly Mad paired an itchy, haunted verse to a lighter chorus, with an incongruous Hawaiian slide-guitar solo and gallows humour metaphors that stopped the vocal from becoming too bleak (‘This kettle is boiling over/I think I’m a banana tree’).
Chiefly written by May – but with Mercury setting the lyrical tone and insisting that the bleakly ironic working title remained – The Show Must Go On was darker still, led by the doomy chop of strings and a wretched lyric (‘Empty spaces/What are we living for?’).
Sweeter – if no less affecting – was Taylor’s These Are The Days Of Our Lives, the drummer yearning for blissful formative years when ‘the bad things in life were so few’.
The gulf between those times and the here-and-now was starkly underlined by the US single’s monochrome video, with Mercury rail-thin and rooted to the spot due to the stubborn lesion on his foot, but still giving a sparkle as he looked deep into the lens for the whispered pay-off: ‘I still love you.’
The feeling was evidently mutual, at least in the UK, where both the Innuendo single and album reached No.1 without a sniff of promotion from the singer or the band setting foot on a stage.
“I think it’s the best one for quite a long time,” May told Vox. “There’s nothing I’m embarrassed about. Often you put out an album and you think ‘But I wish we’d done this…’. This one, I feel quite happy about, and I can listen to it without any problems. I like it a lot. I think it’s nicely complex and nicely heavy, and there’s a lot of invention on there.”
Queen had nothing left to prove. With Innuendo a worthy swansong, the obvious move for a man in Mercury’s position would be to retreat from view, make his arrangements and run down the clock in peace. But as Taylor reflected in the Days Of Our Lives documentary, the singer saw his numbered days as a chance for a last late burst of creativity, whether to assure his own legend or arm his bandmates with material for the road ahead.
“The sicker he got, the more he seemed he needed to record,” the drummer recalled. “To give himself something to do, some reason to get up, so he would come in whenever he could. So really, it was quite a period of fairly intense work.”
May had a similar take on events. “Freddie just said, ‘I want to go on working, business as usual, until I fucking drop. That’s what I want. And I’d like you to support me, and I don’t want any discussion about this’.”
In the early months of 1991, the Mountain Studios were the backdrop for scenes that now sound impossibly moving, Mercury holding himself upright against the console, emboldening himself with vodka, pitting his ebbing talent against the ticking clock as he tracked moments like You Don’t Fool Me, his final songwriting credit on A Winter’s Tale, and his last recorded vocal with Mother Love.
“He never actually finished that,” May told Guitar World. “He said, ‘Oh, Brian, I can’t do any more. I’m dying here’. It’s incredible, he never seemed to let it get him down. He was always full of humour and enthusiasm. He would make jokes about it, really.
“At the time,” May continued, “strangely enough, we developed such a great closeness as a band that [the last sessions] were quite joyful times. There was this cloud hanging over, but the cloud was outside the studio, it wasn’t inside. I have really great memories of those times.”
Mercury’s sanguine outlook, reflected the guitarist, gave him an “invincible” air. But it couldn’t last forever. In early November 1991, Mercury stopped taking his AIDS medication; on the 22nd of that same month, he gazumped the gutter press by releasing a statement confirming his condition.
“Following the enormous conjecture in the press over the last two weeks, I wish to confirm: I have been tested HIV-positive and have AIDS. I felt it correct to keep this information private to date in order to protect the privacy of those around me. However, the time has now come for my friends and fans around the world to know the truth. I hope everyone will join with me, my doctors and all those worldwide in my fight against this terrible disease.”
Two days later – while a media circus swarmed outside Garden Lodge – Mercury passed away, the cause of death cited as bronchial pneumonia. A small ceremony at a West London crematorium followed in short order, the singer’s coffin disappearing to the strains of Aretha Franklin. And although the devastated survivors had a hectic aftermath – from the star-dusted tribute concert at to May’s solo single, Driven By You – they were left with an unfillable gulf.
“Apart from the grief of losing someone so close,” said May, “suddenly your whole way of life is destroyed. All that you have tried to build up for the last twenty years is gone.”
As an emerging solo artist, May enjoyed solid UK hits with Driven By You and The Miracle-era offcut Too Much Love Will Kill You. But the guitarist would soon become reacquainted with the sharp end of the music business, taking his underrated 1992 solo album Back To The Light to the US for an ignominious tour where venues that could never have contained Queen were sprinkled with empty seats.
Even so, he appeared to have drawn a line in the sand, insisting “my role now is to be me”, and maintaining in an interview with Virgin Radio that “there cannot be a Queen without Freddie.” But perhaps there was still enough Freddie to sustain them.
In the spring of 1994 came the early inklings of the project that would become 1995’s Made In Heaven, as the three survivors began combing the vaults for sunken treasure. The guitarist’s memory that he had “delved deep” was no exaggeration, with The Game-era material like It’s A Beautiful Day gathered alongside the vocal parts laid down in Montreux earlier that decade. All of it, stressed May, was “very precious stuff”.
So began the emotive “jigsaw” process of turning these pencil sketches into fully orchestrated songs.
“There’s tracks like I Was Born To Love You,” noted the guitarist in the Days Of Our Lives documentary, “which was never a Queen track – that was a solo track, which Freddie did very hurriedly. So we stripped everything away, and lovingly, cherishingly re-edited all his vocals. I spent months and months piecing together our bits to make it sound like we were all in the studio together.
"I’m very fond of Mother Love. And it has a little piece of Goin’ Back, which was the very first thing that Freddie ever sang in the studio. I wrote to Carole King to ask her permission, and she was delightful, she was so supportive.
“The whole album is a fantasy,” May continued, “because it sounds like the four of us are there all together, having fun and making the album. Of course, for most of the time, when you’re listening, that’s not the case. It’s built to sound that way. And a lot of love went into that.”
“Brian and I, certainly, felt that we knew what Freddie would have been thinking,” added Taylor in the same documentary. “We felt like he was almost in the corner of the room. We sort of got there. And I was very pleased with the result.”
Measured in sales figures alone, there could be little doubt that theQueen hardcore – and more than a few fairweather fans – approved of the survivors’ labour of love.
Released on November 6, 1995, Made In Heaven topped the UK album chart, marching towards multi-platinum sales and spitting out five Top 20 UK singles. Stripped of context, few connoisseurs would argue this was the strongest album in Queen’s auspicious catalogue. But there were moments here well-worthy of the brand, including the neck-tingling opening salvo of It’s A Beautiful Day, the title track’s rousing balladry and the impossibly moving A Winter’s Day.
“The last album is one of the most ridiculously painful experiences, creatively, I have ever had,” May told Radio 1. “But the quality’s good, partly because we did have those arguments. Whether it’s healthy for life or not is another matter.”
Curiously, given the praise shortly to heaped onto The Beatles’ cut-and-shut Free As A Bird single, press reaction to the album was somewhat muted, with NME’s memorably virulent review focused on the ethics of the project (“Made In Heaven is vulgar, creepy, sickly and in dubious taste”).
In truth – and whatever your take on the album’s musical merits – anecdotal evidence all points to the fact that this last hurrah was exactly what Mercury had hoped for in Montreux.
“Freddie at the time said, ‘Write me stuff, I know I don’t have very long,’” explained May in the Days Of Our Lives documentary. “‘Keep writing me words, keep giving me things, I will sing, I will sing. And then you do what you like with it afterwards and finish it off’.”
By completing Made In Heaven, then, the Queen survivors had fulfilled their leader’s last will and testament in the band’s inimitable style, rather than leave it to industry vultures to crudely reanimate and repackage the sweepings. Perhaps just as important, they had exorcised the demons and drawn a line under the original band’s extraordinary first run.
As May remembered of the process: “You were just listening to Freddie’s voice twenty-hours a day and that can be hard. You suddenly think, ‘Oh God, he’s not here, why am I doing this?’ But now I can listen to Made In Heaven and it’s just joy – and I feel like it was the right album to finish up on…”
The Last Goodbye: How Queen made Innuendo and Made In Heaven
Even as his time ran out, Freddie Mercury was the driving force behind Queen’s 1991 album Innuendo and the voice from beyond the grave on 1995’s Made In Heaven. Here’s how Queen went out with a bang
Meine Top 3:
1. Innuendo (auch in meiner Top 20 Liste)
2. The show must go on (s.o.)
3. Ride the wild wind (10)
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JustPriest
Till Deaf Do Us Part
1. A NIGHT AT THE OPERA
(1975)
Punkte: 1678
Schnitt: 140
1. Bohemian Rhapsody (712 Punkte)
2. The Prophet's Song (375)
3. Love Of My Life (207)
4. '39 (174)
5. Death On Two Legs (136)
6. You're My Best Friend (33)
7. I'm In Love With My Car (31)
8. Lazing On A Sunday Afternoon (10)
9. Sweet Lady (0)
9. Seaside Rendezous (0)
9. Good Company (0)
9. God Save The Queen (0)
A Night At The Opera: Queen’s Regal Invite Could Not Be Ignored
From its title to the music, ‘A Night At The Opera’ is majestic.
The UK tour to support the release of Sheer Heart Attack got underway during the autumn of 1974, and after taking in Europe and America, it finished at the Budokan in Tokyo, Japan, on May 1, 1975. Between the band’s return and the start of another UK tour on November 14, 1975, Queen recorded the album that would turn them from big stars to superstars. Work on Queen’s fourth album, another co-produced by the band along with Roy Thomas Baker, began in August 1975, and it was only finished shortly before the opening date of their tour at Liverpool’s Empire Theatre on November 14. A Night At The Opera, as we all now know, is a masterpiece. Everything from its title (one that is borrowed from The Marx Brothers 1935 movie) to the music, the album’s artwork, and the whole pomp and circumstance of the entire package is majestic.
John, Roger, Brian, and Freddie took much-needed holidays before work on the new project began in earnest with a three-week writing and playing session in a rented Herefordshire house. They then decamped over the Welsh Marches once more to Rockfield. The band later worked in five more studios (Roundhouse, Sarm East, Scorpio, Lansdowne, and Olympic) in their pursuit of perfection, and in so doing, their own self-belief was fully justified.
The 12 tracks that make up A Night At The Opera comfortably broke the 43-minute mark, and like its predecessor, the sequencing of this record creates its own dynamic. This is an album that should be listened to in its entirety rather than through the unpredictability of random play and shuffle.
Queen made the most of the 24 track set-ups Baker brought to the table, and along with the engineer, the late Mike Stone who sadly passed away in 2002, they collectively created a great sounding record. It opens with “Death On Two Legs (Dedicated To…),” a barely veiled and acerbic open letter to a businessman contact, which was actually given its finishing touches immediately before release. It’s one of Freddie’s sharpest lyrics, so vicious that Brian May wasn’t too thrilled to even have to sing the words.
Freddie’s “Lazing On A Sunday Afternoon” continued to showcase his piano playing skills and his growing confidence on keyboards helped to make the whole album so much better. There follows a neat transition into Roger Taylor’s “I’m In Love With My Car,” a paean to speed and auto fixation that would one day be used as the sound-bed for a Jaguar TV advert, meanwhile offering itself as a serious love song. It was also used as B-side to “Bohemian Rhapsody,” but only after Roger allegedly locked himself in a cupboard at Sarm Studios until the others laughingly agreed to it.
More new ground is broken by John Deacon’s “You’re My Best Friend,” which in 1976 became the eminent bass man’s first composition to be released as a Queen single, and a hit at that. Very much John’s baby, he even supplies the Wurlitzer organ.
Brian May’s “39” is his first composition to appear on this album and it is a science fiction come space travel number that is a reminder of his learned interest in astrophysics and astronomy in general. Given the song’s weird skiffle arrangement, Brian asked Deacon to play double bass, and the number was included in Queen’s set-list by 1976, becoming an instant crowd favorite.
Brian’s “Sweet Lady” accentuated the almost willful diversity of Queen at this point in their career, with its live rhythm section and heavily distorted rock thrash in ¾ time. Mercury’s “Seaside Rendezvous” is another track that shows the band’s inventiveness, since Freddie and Roger provide a woodwind section performed by just their voices, along with a tap-dancing sequence they performed on the mixing desk with thimbles over their fingers.
The second side of A Night At The Opera commences with Brian’s lengthy, “The Prophet’s Song,” that was inspired, if that is the right word, when he was feverish with hepatitis during the Sheer Heart Attack sessions. A heavy, moody piece, “The Prophet’s Song” was the ideal centerpiece for the forthcoming tour. Its Biblical atmosphere being accentuated by the guitarist’s use of the toy koto, a traditional Japanese stringed instrument more usually associated with experimental classical music.
Freddie’s often covered “Love Of My Life” (written for girlfriend Mary Austin) is a quite beautiful ballad, embellished with May’s harp, Roger’s delicate cymbals, and the predominant Gibson Hummingbird acoustic guitar – coincidentally purchased by Brian in Japan the previous spring.
Brian’s “Good Company” is one of his wise family pieces – a song full of sound values and mature reflection. Recorded with the ukulele and his trusty Red Special to hand, their overlapping mimics a traditional Dixieland jazz band feel; the poignant narrative has a twist in the tale.
And so to the colossal, the monumental (adjectives can barely do this song justice), “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Composed in six sections, mostly by Mercury in his Holland Park home, this was the song that divided opinion even within the ranks. Surely they couldn’t expect to get away with this? Mercury was certain of its merits, but seldom gave much away concerning the lyrical structure and the references to classic opera, Old Testament seers, and the principal characters Scaramouche and Galileo.
If pressed, Freddie would say: “It’s one of those songs which has such a fantasy feel about it. I think people should just listen to it, think about it, and then make up their own minds as to what it says to them… “Bohemian Rhapsody” didn’t just come out of thin air. I did a bit of research although it was tongue-in-cheek and mock opera. Why not?”
But if he kept his reasoning private, the public response was amazing, especially when he cunningly gave a pre-release tape to DJ friend, Kenny Everett, with a winking, “But you’re not allowed to play it on air in its entirety.” Naturally, Everett ignored that demand, as Mercury knew he would, and played it fourteen times in two days. The panning, the layer upon layer of vocals, the gongs and tympani – hell, the band’s very own operatic chutzpah – this is one of those songs that everyone knows, but that once listened to again, even in hindsight, still baffles and delights.
Ironically, prior to releasing it as a single, one senior EMI executive was convinced that it was too long and he tried to convince the band that it needed to be edited if it was to stand any chance of getting any radio plays.
Mixing the gloriously bombastic with the sweetly simple, May’s guitar solo is bang on the money. “Bohemian Rhapsody” was very much “Freddie’s thing” and also his tour de force, containing as it did elements of works in progress from earlier ventures.
As if the song wasn’t visual enough, it was accompanied by a ground-breaking video, and while it was said to be the most expensively constructed single made to that point in time, it recouped in full, and then some.
And that wasn’t the end of the affair, and there was only one way to follow it. A revisit to May’s arrangement of the National Anthem, “God Save The Queen” (surely that didn’t go unnoticed in Sex Pistols circles either); it was something they’d been using as a tour finale for some time. Instrumental, multi-layered and strangely affecting, May would achieve a kind of lifetime ambition many years later when he performed it from the roof of Buckingham Palace for the Queen’s Golden Jubilee in 2002; it was also a kind of homage to Jimi Hendrix’s Woodstock version of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
And so the album was released on November 21, 1975, and as a result, Christmas belonged to Queen. The sold-out tour that had begun a week before the album’s release culminated with a Christmas Eve concert at Hammersmith Odeon that was videotaped and broadcast by the BBC on The Old Grey Whistle Test. Their North American tour kicked off in the fourth week of January and this too proved to be a triumph. A Night At The Opera soared to No.4 on the Billboard album chart and “Bohemian Rhapsody” became the band’s first top-ten single on the Hot 100 while Queen were touring America.
Following A Night At The Opera’s entry into the UK charts on December 15, 1975, there were many Christmas stockings filled with the album, and two days after Christmas, on December 27, it topped the charts. It stayed there over the New Year’s holiday before being replaced by Perry Como’s Greatest Hits for a week. So strong was the surge in sales, however, that Queen returned to the top spot for another two weeks. Meanwhile, “Bohemian Rhapsody” was at No.1 on the UK singles chart for nine weeks, beginning on November 29 and staying there until January 31 the following year. As we now all know, it would later return to the top spot at a far less happy time.
A Night At The Opera: Queen’s Regal Invite Could Not Be Ignored
The album 'A Night At The Opera' is a masterpiece. From its title to the music, the whole pomp and circumstance is majestic.
www.udiscovermusic.com
Watch ‘1975 A Night At The Opera – Make or Break’ – Episode Five Of Queen’s ‘The Greatest’ Video Series
This latest episode revisits the writing and recording of the band’s seminal – and highly influential – fourth album.This latest episode revisits the band’s fourth album, A Night At The Opera, released December 1975. Widely regarded as Queen’s seminal album, Queen’s perilous financial situation at the time made this an incredibly risky leap of faith, creating a genuine make or break moment for the band.
Brian May: “We were not only poor, but we were in debt. All the sound and lighting companies and the people that hadn’t been paid. So we were at a really crucial point. We might have had to break up if that album hadn’t done well.”
The album is, without doubt, Queen at their absolute finest as musicians, composers and producers – harnessing an incredible array of musical styles. The fact it was created when the band were on the brink of financial ruin, and was, at the time, the UK’s most expensive album ever produced – brings into sharp focus what a huge risk they were taking.
Roger Taylor recalls this as a ‘make or break moment’ for the band. The band were so in debt they feared that it might have been unable to continue if the album did not perform well.
May explains: “It was an expensive album, enormous complexity on there. Even looking at it now I wonder how we did some of that stuff.”
The leap of faith paid off and it completely changed the landscape for Queen thanks to hit singles including “You’re My Best Friend”, by bassist John Deacon, and of course the legendary “Bohemian Rhapsody” – as well as producing such lasting Queen classics as Freddie Mercury’s “Love Of My Life” and Roger Taylor’s “I’m In Love With My Car”.
A Night At The Opera topped the charts across the globe, going on to sell over 6 million copies giving it platinum status in many countries, including multi-platinum in the US. It received universal acclaim and would continue to collect accolades year after year. In 2018 it was deservedly inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.
Without doubt a milestone in the Queen story the album of course also provided them with what would become the biggest song in their history
Watch ‘1975 A Night At The Opera - Make or Break’ - Episode Five Of Queen’s ‘The Greatest’ Video Series
Queen have shared 1975 A Night At The Opera - Make Or Break the fifth episode of their on-going archival video series, The Greatest.
www.udiscovermusic.com
Queen the Greatest: 1975 A Night At The Opera - Make or Break (Episode 5)
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Auf YouTube findest du die angesagtesten Videos und Tracks. Außerdem kannst du eigene Inhalte hochladen und mit Freunden oder gleich der ganzen Welt teilen.
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Queen - The Making Of A Night At The Opera (Full 2005 Documentary)
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Queen - A Night At The Opera(1975) - complete video album
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Auf YouTube findest du die angesagtesten Videos und Tracks. Außerdem kannst du eigene Inhalte hochladen und mit Freunden oder gleich der ganzen Welt teilen.
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Till Deaf Do Us Part
“People have slammed Bohemian Rhapsody but who can you compare it to?
Tell me one group that’s done an operatic single?”:
The epic story of A Night At The Opera, the album that turned Queen into superstars
In 1975, Queen were an ambitious band hungry for superstardom – and then they released their fourth album, A Night At The Opera, and monster hit single Bohemian Rhapsody. Former Melody Maker journalist Harry Doherty was on hand to watch it explode.
It could have been any other damp, cold Friday afternoon in the November of any other year. But this one was a bit special… 1975 was heading for Christmas and I was in the middle of a music mag office in sole, exclusive possession of the album, the song, from the band that would rule the world of rock for the next 30 years. Full of anticipation, I put the test pressing on the office turntable and something called Bohemian Rhapsody soared out. Well, it soared for me: it dive-bombed for others in the office. One colleague, Allan Jones, was horrified: “What is this?!” He guessed at 10cc. When I told him that it was Queen, his jaw dropped and hit the floor. He hated it! I loved it, and went on to review Queen’s A Night At The Opera for Melody Maker.
I said things like ‘easily their best work to date’, some words about ‘intricate musicianship’ and ‘displaying the variety of their talent’, commented that it would be remembered as an album of ‘May classics’ (was it?), and hooked unashamedly on to Bohemian Rhapsody. ‘The album,’ I wrote, ‘picks up the best of the concepts of Queen II and combines it with the studio expertise of Sheer Heart Attack. That combination, plus the growing maturity of the band, has given Queen a complete identity. Indeed, I don’t think I’d be too far out if I said that Queen could well set a future direction in British rock’n’roll. They’re hard rock, but just commercial enough to capture a massive, wide-ranging audience.’
All these years later, friends have come and gone – goodbye, Fred – but Queen, in one shape or other, are still very much with us. The band as we know now are a part of the fibre of our rock community.
Back in the mid-1970s, however, Queen were mere mortals – not that they thought so. When you were was in the presence of Freddie Mercury, you knew it… and you believed it. With Sheer Heart Attack on the verge of release, I’d interviewed His Majesty in the office of his press officer, Tony Brainsby. Nothing could have prepared me for the experience… but I soon learned. Sheer Heart Attack is as close to hard rock-cum-pop perfection as you can get; but even then, the album in the bag, treading on the doorstep of humungous success, Freddie is not happy. And he’s not happy that they had to record this album in bits and pieces; a situation generated when Brian May, suffering from hepatitis, took to bed and recovery while the other three recorded the tracks.
May had returned with the condition after the band’s debut tour in America with Mott The Hoople. So when they started recording Sheer Heart Attack, it was without their guitarist. He came in afterwards on his own to add guitar. Though the ailing Brian had delivered his parts to a superlative album like a true guitar hero, Freddie was adamant that Brian had brought this upon himself. “Well, darling,” he said, “we covered for him. He owed it to us.”
A year later, November 1975, I’m in the presence of greatness again as Queen are close to finishing what would be recognised as the album of their lives, A Night At The Opera. We’re in the offices of Rocket Records, because the band have by this time appointed John Reid, Elton John’s chargé d’affaires, as their business manager; Reid had been appointed after an earlier disastrous management contract with a company called Trident, who also owned the studios where Queen recorded most of their early albums, including A Night At The Opera. It obviously went seriously sour, as described in the opening track of A Night At The Opera, Death On Two Legs, with barbed lyrics such as: ‘Screw my brain ’til it hurts/You’ve taken all my money – and you want more’ and ‘You’re a sewer-rat decaying in a cesspool of pride’ – possibly the ultimate put-down. Reid would be a stop-gap until Queen established their own business empire.
For now, though, there’s me, Freddie, John Deacon and Roger Taylor, but no Brian May. The man is exhausted after his efforts recording his parts on A Night At The Opera – they do say that hepatitis lingers on. Taylor is nestled in one corner. A real rock’n’roll animal during these years, he’s restless. “I’m pissed off listening to the bloody album,” he mutters. Four months in the making, the nights with this …Opera have taken their toll.
In another corner of the office, Freddie is on the phone to some American hack telling him, darling: “The album is absolutely wonderful, you really must hear it.” But he, like Taylor, has had his fill of A Night At The Opera just now. Which is ironic because we’re on our way to the first public playback of said masterpiece…
“I’ll never forget this album, dear,” Freddie tells me. “Never. But we’ve got to have this playback just to let friends hear what we’ve been up to. The problem, as I see it, is that they’ll never understand it with one listen.” He can’t wait to get it over with. “Later on we’ll go out, get pissed and put the damned album on hold for a while.”
I’m with you Freddie, I think, but I still can’t wait to hear what you’re so pissed off about…
They’re fidgety. John Deacon is all fingers drumming on desk and picking out faults on the tour programme. The band are going out on a worldwide tour in a week or so. No pressure…
Meanwhile, Freddie is still spreading the good word to the States about the album, and Taylor and Deacon are debating how Bohemian Rhapsody, six minutes long and not exactly yer typical single, will go down. They’re amused, but couldn’t care less. As we arrive at the North London Roundhouse studio for the playback we’re greeted by a placard proclaiming: ‘Welcome to A Night At The Opera’.
“We’re not nervous,” Taylor offers, “we’re just nervous wrecks. I just want to get out on the road again.” The realisation that he has just four days to achieve that particular ambition weighs heavily upon him.
The playback goes extraordinarily well. Everyone realises that they are experiencing something monumental. The record company is pleased, the party is ecstatic, the champagne is flowing – time for Freddie and I to depart. But not before we listen to the final historic rendition of The National Anthem on harmony guitars by Brian May, the glorious closure of A Night At The Opera. We listen in thrall. Freddie can’t believe it. “STAND UP YOU BASTARDS!” he shouts, and whether it is in salute to Queen or The Queen I am still not sure. But we all did his biding as if by royal command.
Then the Mercury Man and myself are in a car and heading to the White Elephant on the River for a tête-à-tête and review of the past couple of months of his life over dinner. “Thank goodness that’s over,” Freddie sighs. “Some of those people really BOO-OORE me.”
On his own, Freddie’s kaleidoscopic personality vibrates. If you are in his company, the feeling you get is that you are the sole purpose for his being; he is so completely entertaining and engrossing. At a top-notch restaurant, he demands the service of someone royal before finally we get down to discussing A Night At The Opera.
“It’s really taken the longest to do out of our four albums so far,” he says. “We didn’t really cater for it. We just set upon it and we were going to do so many things. It’s taken us about four months and now we’ve gone over the deadline with the tour approaching. It’s more important to get the album the way we want it, especially after we’ve spent so long on it.
“The last bits – piecing it together – are more important than the rest of it. It’s easily our most important album yet, to be honest. In a way the best judge we had was tonight because we listened to it back for the first time. We just haven’t had the time to do that. I know that we’ve got the strongest set of songs ever. It is going to be our best album, it really is.
“If I thought there was something wrong with it, I would say so, but there are certain things on this album which we’ve wanted to do for a long time. I’m really pleased about the operatic thing” – ahem, we’re talking about Bohemian Rhapsody now – “I really wanted to be outrageous with the vocals because we’re always getting compared to other people, which is very stupid. If you really listen to the operatic bit, there are no comparisons, which is what we want. But we don’t set out to be outrageous – it’s in us. There are so many things that we want to do but we can’t do everything at the same time. It’s impossible. At the moment, I’m happy that we’ve made an album which, let’s face it, is too much to take for some people. But it was what we wanted to do.”
Mercury considers the impact Queen made with Sheer Heart Attack. It posited them where they wanted to be – in a sphere of influence. Queen II had set the cards on the table; Sheer Heart Attack had stated “here’s what we can do”; A Night At The Opera took it to the limit.
Freddie uses his fork as an exclamation mark, stabbing his food as he speaks. “With Sheer Heart Attack, we thought, we can do certain things and establish ourselves!” Stab! “Like vocally, we can outdo any band!” Stab! “With this album, we just thought that we would go out, not restrict ourselves with any barriers, and just do what we want to do!” Stab!
He considered Bohemian Rhapsody specifically. “I had this operatic ‘thing’, and I thought why don’t we doo-oo-oo it.” His affectation on the ‘do’ really emphasises his determination to achieve something radically different. By then, I’d heard the track a few times. ‘Overboard’ was a word I used to him to describe the work.
“We went a bit overboard on every album, actually,” he responded gleefully. “But that’s just the way Queen is. In certain areas, we feel that we want to go overboard. It’s what keeps us going really, darling. If we were to come up with an album where people said: ‘It’s just like Sheer Heart Attack but there were a few bits on Sheer Heart Attack that are better…’ Well, I’d give up. Wouldn’t you?”
I pathetically nod ‘yes’, as if I had just made an album the measure of Sheer Heart Attack that very evening…
As we tucked into a main course avec bubbly, Freddie, though, was sure that Queen were firmly set on a right royal journey. “What really helped was the last tour. We’ve done a really successful worldwide tour which we’ve never done before. All that experience was accumulating and when we came to do this album, there were certain things which we had done in the past which we can do much better now.
“Our playing ability was better. Backing tracks on this album are far superior. We start off with backing tracks and we really felt they were really closely knit, and we seemed to feel each other’s needs, which is very important for backing tracks.
“I think Queen has really got its own identity now. I don’t care what journalists say – we got our identity after Queen II. With that album, we had our own thing. America saw that it was good, and so did Japan. Since then, we’re the biggest group in Japan. I don’t mind saying that. We are! We outdo anybody. And that’s because we’ve taken it on our own musical terms.
“People have slammed Bohemian Rhapsody but who can you compare it to? Tell me one group that’s done an operatic single?”: The epic story of A Night At The Opera, the album that turned Queen into superstars
In 1975, Queen were an ambitious band hungry for superstardom – and then they released their fourth album, A Night At The Opera, and monster hit single Bohemian Rhapsody. Former Melody Maker journalis
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Till Deaf Do Us Part
Pt.2:
“So since Queen II we’ve had our own identity and, of course, if we do something that’s harmonised, we’ll be The Beach Boys and if we do something that’s heavy, we’ll be Led Zeppelin, or whatever. But the thing is that we have an identity of our own because we combine all those things which mean Queen. That’s what people don’t seem to realise.
“A lot of people have slammed Bohemian Rhapsody but if you listen to that single, who can you compare it to? Tell me one group that’s done an operatic single? I can’t think of one! But we didn’t do an operatic single because we thought we’d be the only group to do it. It just happened!
“The title of the album came at the very end of recording. We thought: ‘Oh God, what are we going to call this album?’” Typically, the two most humorous members of the band reverted to The Marx Brothers, but this was certainly an album made by a group firmly placing collective heads in the noose.
“We’ve always done that,” Freddie agreed. “We’ve always put our necks on the line. We did it with Queen II. On that album we did so many outrageous things that people started to say ‘self-indulgent’, ‘crap’, ‘too many vocals’… but that is Queen. After that, they seemed to realise what Queen was all about.”
And just to tighten the noose, let’s stick out a six-minute mini-opera that possibly stands no chance of getting radio play… “We look upon our product as songs,” Freddie considers gently. “We don’t worry about singles or albums. All we do is pick the cream of the crop. Then we look upon it as a whole to make sure the whole album works.
“With Bohemian Rhapsody, we just thought it was a very strong song and so we released it. But there were so many arguments about it. Somebody suggested cutting it down because the media reckons we have to have a three minute single, but we want to put across Queen as songs. There is no point in cutting it. If you want to cut down Bohemian Rhapsody, it just won’t work.
“We just wanted to release it to say that this is what Queen are about at this stage. This is the single and you’re going to have an album after that.”
And this, asserts Fred, is the uniqueness of Queen. Their USP (Unique Selling Point) is simply: take it or leave it. Like it or loathe it. “We’re just very different. We do things now in a style that is very different to anybody else. But we haven’t acquired that just to be different, it just happened. We go through so many traumas, and we’re so meticulous. There are literally scores of songs that have been rejected for this album – some of them nice ones. If people don’t like the songs we’re doing at the moment, we couldn’t give a fuck. We’re probably the fussiest band in the world, to be honest. We take so much care with what we do because we feel so much about what we put across.
“And if we do an amazing album we make sure that album is packaged right, because we’ve put so much loving into it. It’s what we do, darling.”
The interview finished, Freddie invites his multicolour, multisexual, effervescent, personal entourage to join us – here’s Kenny Everett pushing to the front to embrace and congratulate his buddy on a job well done. Everett was the first Freddie turned to when he realised that Bohemian Rhapsody might not make it to the nation’s airwaves. Six minutes, he told Freddie, you have no chance. And then proceeded to play it something like 10 times on his radio show that weekend. Bo-Rhap was on its way…
The next day, after exposing their masterwork to the fickle elements of the media, the band got together again to listen through to A Night At The Opera one more time before sending it to the pressing factory. And that’s when they decided to remix it…
A few weeks later, and I’m sitting backstage at Hammersmith Odeon talking with Brian May, just as Queen are preparing for a soundcheck for a series of gigs in west London. Sitting there, considering the immensity of what is happening around his band, May is calmness itself.
“We’re a bigger band now and we can afford to plough more into the presentation. We’ve always lived beyond our means anyway! Dynamics are things we consider worthwhile in a show, just so that we can make it a complete evening out for the fans. The glamour will never take away from the music. We’re much too conscious of the music to let that happen.
“The music is first in everything and if we add a particular effect or particular lights, it’s to get across a certain mood at a certain time to emphasise the music.
“You see, you have to understand it’s romantic music we’re playing – in the old sense of the word. It’s music to tear your emotions apart. There’s a kind of personality we share with our audience. We’re like that. We’re sort of schizophrenic. We like to be serious about some things and not as serious about others.”
Ah, and here we have Queen on tour. Here we have in Bohemian Rhapsody and A Night At The Opera, a quintessential ‘studio record’; we have the Queen that proudly proclaim on album sleeves ‘no synthesisers’; the Queen lording it on the road; the Queen that has to reproduce this on stage. How do you square that circle, Brian?
May considered this. “We play differently on stage from on record. On stage, it’s good to have a two-way conversation with the audience rather than oneway. Let me explain this. It’s no good just getting out there and playing if you’re not getting across to the people. We treat recording as a separate thing altogether from the stage act. We don’t have any thought of holding back something on record if we couldn’t do it on stage. There are very complicated things on the record but, hopefully, not complicated for complication’s sake.
“There’s a lot of texture on our albums. We started that with our second album.” You see now that Queen II is a significant album in the growth of Queen. It is my favourite Queen album, by the way. Brian developed the theme. “That album has a lot of impact. If you listen to our albums more and more, you will get more and more out of them.”
Still, as Bohemian Rhapsody and A Night At The Opera were being unleashed, May was ticking the box that said ‘room for improvement’. “I’d like to see us, as a four-piece, work together more on songs. In the case of A Night At The Opera, it was impossible because we didn’t have enough time, and we were in the situation where a couple of us were in one studio and the others in another, so you lose a bit of the group feeling in that way.
“It’s good to be out on the road,” he says. “It draws you together.”
You get a sense that Brian thinks too much, and when he talks to you about A Night At The Opera, he’s what you might call ‘picky’…
“It’s not that there is too much individualism,” he says. “I can point toward things on this album which have suffered from us not having us all there at one time. and because there was too much responsibility on one person at one time very often. I can’t say which tracks because it would spoil it for people. That’s not to say I don’t think it’s a good album. I love it.”
We went on to talk about the Queen modus operandi; how the band got from college to collective. I point out that with four very strong personalities in the Queen ranks, it wouldn’t be surprising that things might get a little bit hectic now and then.
“Generally,” May answers, “the working relationship within the band is that we tend to leave each other alone musically, unless asked. That would be my interpretation. If someone has an idea, you assume that they want to be left alone to get on with it and put it across the best way.
“Sometimes, they’ll come and talk about it, which I do a lot. Maybe I can’t make a decision and I’ll come to the others and say, ‘How does this strike you?’ and they’ll suggest something and usually I’ll agree.
“The relationship gets strained sometimes. I got very worried once that I was going out on a limb and that the rest of the band didn’t really approve of what I was doing. It happened on a track on A Night At The Opera – Good Company. I spent days and days doing those trumpet and trombone things [all of which were played by May on the guitar] and trying to get into the character of those instruments. The others were doing other things and they’d pop in from time to time and say, ‘Well, you haven’t done much since we last saw you…’
“They probably wouldn’t mean it in a dire way, but I would get very offended and very worried that I was doing something which their heart wasn’t in but, in the end, it turned out well.”
And Freddie. What was it about the Mercury-May chemistry, especially when May worked on Mercury songs? How did that work?
“Freddie and I worked together very well. Is it hard? No, quite the opposite. I find it natural. I think he’s got a knack of using me to my best advantage. Usually he has everything sorted out until the last note, calls me over and tells me which way he wants it. There is never any friction.
“He’s got a strong personality. I think we all have. We’re all very stubborn, particularly in the studio, and sometimes it leads to bad feeling. Generally, however, if it comes down to a genuine musical argument, we tend to see eye to eye in the end. We all know where we’re going; it’s just a question of how we get there that is argued about.”
We rattle on about Freddie for a while, laugh about him, his ways and his genius. May could talk on the subject for hours, he says. “Freddie is a born figurehead,” he comments with deep affection. “He loves himself to be used as a figurehead. He knows exactly what’s best for himself.
“Freddie knows exactly what he wants and how to get it. He’s definitely the driving force behind the band getting where it is. He’s flashy but he knows he’s got the substance to back it up. He’ll never be flash in an area where he’s not confident. If there’s something he knows he doesn’t know much about, he’ll steer completely away from it, or he’ll conquer it. There’s no halfway house. He won’t give the impression that he knows what he’s talking about when he doesn’t. He’ll always make sure that he knows what he is talking about and then let everybody know. Some people think that he’s arrogant but in fact, he’s only arrogant when he knows he can afford to be.”
After all, who could challenge Freddie Mercury? The other members of Queen, if anything, pushed their singer to the front and encouraged him to impose his magnetic personality on to the media and public. Such was their confidence in their own musical ability and business nous that they were perfectly happy to let Freddie loose.
“It’s good that Freddie has such a strong personality because he doesn’t let it go to his head, which he could quite easily have done,” says May. “It’s very weird that that happened. We could see it happening from the beginning. He’s our frontman and we consciously used it in that way. The press did, and still do, take it too far. A lot of the press are very dimly aware that the rest of the group exist.
“It would be a big mistake for anybody to disregard the role each member plays in Queen. It really does interlock well as a group and we couldn’t do without any one of us at all. I think if anyone left it would disappear.”
…Only to reappear occasionally, as if by a kind of magic.
Originally published in Classic Rock issue 88, December 2005
“People have slammed Bohemian Rhapsody but who can you compare it to? Tell me one group that’s done an operatic single?”: The epic story of A Night At The Opera, the album that turned Queen into superstars
In 1975, Queen were an ambitious band hungry for superstardom – and then they released their fourth album, A Night At The Opera, and monster hit single Bohemian Rhapsody. Former Melody Maker journalis
Meine Top 3:
1. Bohemian Rhapsody
2. The Prophet's Song
3. '39
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JustPriest
Till Deaf Do Us Part
Zum Abschluss die komplette Punkteliste.
Leider etwas unübersichtlich, da die reinkopierte Tabelle die Anzahl der Zeichen überschreitet.
1. Bohemian Rhapsody 712
2. Innuendo 553
3. Don't Stop Me Now 411
4. Who Wants to Live Forever 387
5. The Show Must Go On 380
6. The Prophet's Song 375
7. Spread Your Wings 345
8. March of the black Queen 342
9. I Want It All 340
10. Killer Queen 330
11. Somebody To Love 317
12. Princes Of The Universe 213
13. Tie Your Mother Down 209
14. Love Of My Life 207
15. White Queen 186
16. '39 174
16. Fat Bottomed Girls 174
17. We are the champions 170
18. Stone Cold Crazy 165
19. Under Pressure 164
20. Now I'm Here 161
21. Another One bites the Dust 156
22. Keep yourself alive 150
23. One Vision 138
24. Death On two legs 136
24. Hammer to Fall 136
25. These Are the days of our lives 133
26. Radio Gaga 125
27. Seaven Seas Of Rhye 121
28. Ogre Battle 120
28. Brighton Rock 120
29. Great King Rat 110
29. It's late 110
30. Father To Son 109
31. Liar 108
32. We will rock you 105
33. I Want To Break Free 101
34. Breakthru 97
35. A Kind of Magic 95
36. Flick Of The Wrist 92
36. Flash's Theme 92
37. It's A Hard Life 83
37. Sheer Heart Attack 83
38. Save Me 76
39. Gimme The Prize 71
40. Was It All Worth It 69
41. Mustapha 68
42. Headlong 61
43. I'm going slighty Mad 59
44. The Miracle 52
45. Doing All Right 51
45. White Man 51
45. Good old fashioned lover boy 51
45. Ride The Wild Wind 51
46. Scandal 49
47. Tenement Fuster 48
48. All Dead All Dead 45
48. Crazy Little Thing Called Love 45
49. In The Lap Of Gods (Revisited) 44
50. Is this the world we created? 42
51. Nevermore 41
51. Teo Torriate 41
52. Dragon Attack 39
53. My Fairy King 38
53. Don't Try So Hard 38
54. The Millionaire Waltz 36
54. Las Palabras de Amor 36
55. You're my best Friend 33
55. No One But You 33
56. Let Me Entertain You 32
57. The Fairy Talles Master Stroke 31
57. I'm in love with my car 31
58. One Year Of Love 30
58. Friends Will Be Friends 30
59. Play The Game 28
60. You Take My Breath Away 26
60. Keep passing the open windows 26
61. Son and Daughter 25
62. Modern Times Rockn Roll 23
62. We Will Rock You (Fast Version) 23
63. Lily Of The Valley 22
63. Get Down, Make Love 22
63. Bicycle Race 22
64. Don't Lose Your Head 21
65. The Invisible Man 20
66. Jesus 19
66. You Don't Fool Me 19
67. Dreamers Ball 17
67. Flash to the Rescue 17
68. Rock It (Prime Jive) 15
69. The Hero 14
69. I Was Born To Love You 14
69. Heaven For Everyone 14
70. If You Can't Beat Them 13
70. Pain Is So Close to Pleasure 13
71. Drowse 12
71. Mother Love 12
72. My Baby Does Me 11
72. It's A Beautiful Day (Reprise) 11
73. Lazing On A Sunday Afternoon 10
73. More Of That Jazz 10
74. Some Day One Day 9
75. Long Away 8
75. Jealousy 8
75. Sail Away Sweet Sister 8
75. Too Much Love Will Kill You 8
76. You And I 7
76. Tear It Up 7
76. A Winter's Tale 7
77. Man On The Prowl 6
78. Dead On Time 5
79. Fight From The Inside 3
79. In Only Seven Days 3
79. Back Chat 3
79. Delilah 3
80. Staying Power 2
80. I Go Crazy (B Seite) 2
80. Party 2
80. It's A Beautiful Day 2
80. My Melancholy Blues 1
81. Kashoogis Ship 1
81. Bijou 1
82. Letzter Platz (0 Punkte):
The Night comes down
Seven seas of Rhye (Instrumental)
Procession
The Loser in the end
Funny How Love is
In the Lap of gods
Dear Friends
Misfire
Bring Back That Leroy Brown
She Makes Me
Sweet Lady
Seaside Rendezvous
Good Company
God Save The Queen
Sleeping On The Sidewalk
Who Needs You
Fun It
Leaving Home Ain't Easy
Need Your Loving Tonight
Don't Try Suicide
Coming Soon
Dancer
Body Language
Action This Day
Put Out The Fire
Life Is Real
Calling All Girls
Machines
Rain Must Fall
Hang on in There
Chinese Torture
I can't Live with you
All God's People
The Hitman
Made In Heaven
Let Me Live
My Life Has Been Saved
Yeah!
Alles von Flash Gordon bis auf 3 Songs
Alles von The Cosmos Rocks
Leider etwas unübersichtlich, da die reinkopierte Tabelle die Anzahl der Zeichen überschreitet.
1. Bohemian Rhapsody 712
2. Innuendo 553
3. Don't Stop Me Now 411
4. Who Wants to Live Forever 387
5. The Show Must Go On 380
6. The Prophet's Song 375
7. Spread Your Wings 345
8. March of the black Queen 342
9. I Want It All 340
10. Killer Queen 330
11. Somebody To Love 317
12. Princes Of The Universe 213
13. Tie Your Mother Down 209
14. Love Of My Life 207
15. White Queen 186
16. '39 174
16. Fat Bottomed Girls 174
17. We are the champions 170
18. Stone Cold Crazy 165
19. Under Pressure 164
20. Now I'm Here 161
21. Another One bites the Dust 156
22. Keep yourself alive 150
23. One Vision 138
24. Death On two legs 136
24. Hammer to Fall 136
25. These Are the days of our lives 133
26. Radio Gaga 125
27. Seaven Seas Of Rhye 121
28. Ogre Battle 120
28. Brighton Rock 120
29. Great King Rat 110
29. It's late 110
30. Father To Son 109
31. Liar 108
32. We will rock you 105
33. I Want To Break Free 101
34. Breakthru 97
35. A Kind of Magic 95
36. Flick Of The Wrist 92
36. Flash's Theme 92
37. It's A Hard Life 83
37. Sheer Heart Attack 83
38. Save Me 76
39. Gimme The Prize 71
40. Was It All Worth It 69
41. Mustapha 68
42. Headlong 61
43. I'm going slighty Mad 59
44. The Miracle 52
45. Doing All Right 51
45. White Man 51
45. Good old fashioned lover boy 51
45. Ride The Wild Wind 51
46. Scandal 49
47. Tenement Fuster 48
48. All Dead All Dead 45
48. Crazy Little Thing Called Love 45
49. In The Lap Of Gods (Revisited) 44
50. Is this the world we created? 42
51. Nevermore 41
51. Teo Torriate 41
52. Dragon Attack 39
53. My Fairy King 38
53. Don't Try So Hard 38
54. The Millionaire Waltz 36
54. Las Palabras de Amor 36
55. You're my best Friend 33
55. No One But You 33
56. Let Me Entertain You 32
57. The Fairy Talles Master Stroke 31
57. I'm in love with my car 31
58. One Year Of Love 30
58. Friends Will Be Friends 30
59. Play The Game 28
60. You Take My Breath Away 26
60. Keep passing the open windows 26
61. Son and Daughter 25
62. Modern Times Rockn Roll 23
62. We Will Rock You (Fast Version) 23
63. Lily Of The Valley 22
63. Get Down, Make Love 22
63. Bicycle Race 22
64. Don't Lose Your Head 21
65. The Invisible Man 20
66. Jesus 19
66. You Don't Fool Me 19
67. Dreamers Ball 17
67. Flash to the Rescue 17
68. Rock It (Prime Jive) 15
69. The Hero 14
69. I Was Born To Love You 14
69. Heaven For Everyone 14
70. If You Can't Beat Them 13
70. Pain Is So Close to Pleasure 13
71. Drowse 12
71. Mother Love 12
72. My Baby Does Me 11
72. It's A Beautiful Day (Reprise) 11
73. Lazing On A Sunday Afternoon 10
73. More Of That Jazz 10
74. Some Day One Day 9
75. Long Away 8
75. Jealousy 8
75. Sail Away Sweet Sister 8
75. Too Much Love Will Kill You 8
76. You And I 7
76. Tear It Up 7
76. A Winter's Tale 7
77. Man On The Prowl 6
78. Dead On Time 5
79. Fight From The Inside 3
79. In Only Seven Days 3
79. Back Chat 3
79. Delilah 3
80. Staying Power 2
80. I Go Crazy (B Seite) 2
80. Party 2
80. It's A Beautiful Day 2
80. My Melancholy Blues 1
81. Kashoogis Ship 1
81. Bijou 1
82. Letzter Platz (0 Punkte):
The Night comes down
Seven seas of Rhye (Instrumental)
Procession
The Loser in the end
Funny How Love is
In the Lap of gods
Dear Friends
Misfire
Bring Back That Leroy Brown
She Makes Me
Sweet Lady
Seaside Rendezvous
Good Company
God Save The Queen
Sleeping On The Sidewalk
Who Needs You
Fun It
Leaving Home Ain't Easy
Need Your Loving Tonight
Don't Try Suicide
Coming Soon
Dancer
Body Language
Action This Day
Put Out The Fire
Life Is Real
Calling All Girls
Machines
Rain Must Fall
Hang on in There
Chinese Torture
I can't Live with you
All God's People
The Hitman
Made In Heaven
Let Me Live
My Life Has Been Saved
Yeah!
Alles von Flash Gordon bis auf 3 Songs
Alles von The Cosmos Rocks
Zuletzt bearbeitet:
GrafZahl666
Deaf Dealer
Hab das Debüt jetzt 12-13x gehört, ist tolle Musik und ich kann jetzt schon sagen, macht mir mehr Spaß ein Album am Stück zu hören als Greatest Hits oder einzelne Songs der Band zu hören. Ganze Alben kenne ich nur spätere, bin mal gespannt, wie es weitergeht. Noch paar Durchgänge, dann kommt II.
@JustPriest
Danke noch mal. Bei jedem neuen Album werde ich mir deine Texte durchlesen. Erst mal grob, und wenn ich dann zum Ende bei einem Album komme, dann noch mal intensiv, weil ich dann halt "drin" bin. Wertvolle Arbeit, alles schön auf den Punkt gebracht. Dazu noch die Kommentare der anderen, allesamt Spezialisten, Merci!
@JustPriest
Danke noch mal. Bei jedem neuen Album werde ich mir deine Texte durchlesen. Erst mal grob, und wenn ich dann zum Ende bei einem Album komme, dann noch mal intensiv, weil ich dann halt "drin" bin. Wertvolle Arbeit, alles schön auf den Punkt gebracht. Dazu noch die Kommentare der anderen, allesamt Spezialisten, Merci!
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