Queen: The Complete Works (123 page)

JOHN PEEL’S SOUND OF THE

SEVENTIES (SESSION 6)

•
Recorded:
28 October 1977 •
Broadcast:
14 November 1977 •
Venue:
Maida Vale 4 Studio

•
Producer:
Jeff Griffin •
Engineers:
Mike Robinson

‘Spread Your Wings’ (5’20), ‘It’s Late’ (6’31), ‘My Melancholy Blues’ (3’10), ‘We Will Rock You’ (4’19)

... while this is the most satisfying BBC session Queen recorded. Their sixth and final session presented four electrifying selections from their
News Of The World
album (released the same day the session was recorded) with nary a pre-recorded backing tape in sight, with the minor exception of the introductory foot stomps and handclaps of ‘We Will Rock You’. It had also been over three years since the band recorded a specific session for the
Sounds Of The Seventies
programme, which unfortunately meant that no material from
A Night At The Opera
or
A Day At The Races
was ever attempted. In fact, the band’s only direct BBC involvement had been on
Top Of The Pops
in order to promote ‘Good Old-Fashioned Lover Boy’, four months before this recording session.

‘Spread Your Wings’ starts off the proceedings, and is a drastic reworking of the subdued album version: taken at a marginally faster pace, the song is more stripped-down and concludes with an exciting, uptempo finale that would unfortunately not be attempted on stage. Freddie’s piano playing here is exciting and inspired, while Brian’s guitar is more understated than usual, providing capable rhythm parts not present on the more familiar take. ‘It’s Late’ is the least satisfying number, replacing the improvised-sounding middle section with a ‘Get Down, Make Love’-type sequence with harmonizer and vocal effects that sit awkwardly in what is arguably Queen’s finest rocker. ‘My Melancholy Blues’ follows, and in its original form was a moment of sublime beauty; it’s difficult to imagine how it could possibly be bettered. Brian is present this time around, and adds some tastefully appropriate guitar accompaniment, but Freddie is still the obvious star of the show. The concluding burst of laughter sends shivers down one’s spine.

The session concludes with what starts out as a perfunctory rendition of ‘We Will Rock You’, the band finally launching into a full-on rock version of the song, turning it into something akin to ‘Tie Your Mother Down’. The band was really in fine form here, with an amazing guitar riff and even a short bass solo. The concluding drum feature and Freddie’s confident shout of “All right!” are merely the icing on the cake in what is undoubtedly Queen’s finest BBC session.

The official party line of the strange reading that separates the slow and fast versions of ‘We Will Rock You’ is that it was a BBC recording of Herman Hesse’s
Siddhartha
and, upon listening to the playback of the song, the band were amused to discover the short, accidental interjection and decided to keep it. However, keen-eared fans noted that this text wasn’t written as such in
Siddhartha
, and that it may instead be from a BBC radio analysis on Hesse’s novel.

Over the years, bootlegs of this session have been widely circulated as live versions. This is an easy mistake to make, as the session was originally broadcast with rather annoying audience overdubs (screaming, whistling, applauding and the like), not only as the songs start and conclude but during most of the performance as well. This mars what is inarguably Queen’s best BBC session, one which has often been erroneously labelled as a show from Manchester in 1978; they didn’t play Manchester in 1978.

In 2002, as part of a marketing ploy for the
We Will Rock You
musical,
The Sun
issued a three-track promotional CD of the title track, editing out the “slow” version and presenting a stand-alone “fast” version instead. This remained the only song to have been officially released from these sessions for nearly a decade, when ‘Spread Your Wings’ and ‘My Melancholy Blues’ were released on the 2011 deluxe edition of
News Of The World
.

B. VIDEO

Queen were justly renowned for embracing rock video. For every major single release starting with ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ in 1975 through Freddie Mercury’s final onscreen appearance for ‘These Are The Days Of Our Lives’ in 1991, Queen made sure to stress the importance of visuals in enhancing their music. Following Freddie’s death in November 1991, Queen Productions have largely concentrated on upgrading the videos for every available format – be it VHS, laserdisc or DVD – for all generations of Queen fans to enjoy.

At the same time, Queen’s concerts were always a visual spectacle, and their lighting rigs and pyrotechnics were an impressive display. Queen first toyed with releasing a live video in 1974, with their legendary Rainbow Theatre concert filmed for potential release; it, and another concert at Earl’s Court Arena in 1977, was scrapped as the band’s first live video release. It wouldn’t be until 1984 that
We Will Rock You
(filmed in November 1981) served as Queen’s introduction into the live rock video world. As the tours grew progressively larger and more grandiose, the band was sure to employ the finest directors to film their shows.

Individual videos are covered under the appropriate entries in Part Three; what follows is a guide to Queen’s official video releases.

GREATEST FLIX

• 1981 (90 mins) • PMI MVP 99 1011 2 •
Directors:
Bruce Gowers, Dennis DeVallance, Rock Flicks, Derek Burbridge, Kliebenst, Brian Grant, Daniella Green, Keith McMillan, Don Norman

‘Killer Queen’
(montage)
, ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, ‘You’re My Best Friend’, ‘Somebody To Love’, ‘Tie Your Mother Down’, ‘We Are The Champions’, ‘We Will Rock You’
(slow)
, ‘We Will Rock You’
(fast live)
, ‘Spread Your Wings’, ‘Bicycle Race’, ‘Fat Bottomed Girls’, ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’, ‘Love Of My Life’
(live)
, ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’, ‘Save Me’, ‘Play The Game’, ‘Another One Bites The Dust’, ‘Flash’

To commemorate Queen’s tenth year as an active live band, a trilogy of compilations appeared in November 1981: the familiar blockbuster,
Greatest Hits
, a seventeen-track onslaught of the band’s greatest Top Thirty hits from ‘Seven Seas Of Rhye’ to ‘Flash’; Greatest Pix, a ninety-six-page photographic history from the band’s first photo sessions to their triumphant South American concerts; and
Greatest Flix
, collecting the seventeen official promotional videos so far onto one ninety-minute videocassette, along with an introductory photo montage set to the tune of ‘Killer Queen’ (a precursor to the now-standard photo gallery on DVD releases).

Greatest Flix
is an excellent collection, starting with the revolutionary ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ and working its way chronologically through to the then most recent video, ‘Flash’. There are some omissions: both versions of ‘Keep Yourself Alive’ and ‘Liar’, for whatever reason, were not included on the release, nor was the now commonly accepted promotional video of ‘Killer Queen’, filmed for
Top Of The Pops
in October 1974. One more grating aspect of the collection is that each video segues into one another, so the beginning and end of each video is cut off slightly. But these are easy to overlook since it was meant to be a complement to
Greatest Hits
and not to offer anything extraordinarily comprehensive; in that respect,
Greatest Flix
succeeds admirably.

Unfortunately, the video has been out of print for years in the US and was replaced by the well intentioned but ultimately inferior
Classic Queen
and
Greatest Hits
collections in 1992, while the video remained largely in print for many years in the UK. Now considered obsolete thanks to the DVD release of
Greatest Video Hits Volume 1
in 2002,
Greatest Flix
has become something of a collector’s item, an intriguing curio from a time when Queen were still an active, working band.

LIVE IN JAPAN

• 1983 (85 mins) • Apollon APVG 4004

‘Flash’, ‘The Hero’, ‘Now I’m Here’, ‘Put Out The Fire’, ‘Dragon Attack’, ‘Now I’m Here’
(reprise)
, ‘Love Of My Life’, ‘Save Me’, ‘Guitar Solo’, ‘Under Pressure’, ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’, ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, ‘Tie Your Mother Down’, ‘Teo Torriatte (Let Us Cling Together)’, ‘We Will Rock You’, ‘We Are The Champions’, ‘God Save The Queen’

Featuring a Brian May-dominated selection of songs (of the seventeen featured, twelve were written or arranged
by him),
Live In Japan
was released exclusively in Japan (no surprise there) in early 1983 and is just one of many video releases that has yet to see a revamped and expanded release. Filmed at the Seibu Lions Stadium in Tokyo on 3 November 1982, the video sees Queen trawling through a (heavily edited) set at the end of an exhausting tour, and it’s easy to see that tensions are high among the four. There are some wonderful performances here: the ‘Now I’m Here’ medley is as high energy as it gets, while ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’ finally shows the band in good spirits, with Fred Mandel’s piano accompaniment an absolute highlight and one of the reasons the band continued with the extended jam.

Also nice is the first-ever release of ‘Teo Torriatte (Let Us Cling Together)’, a song that was performed only in Japan and took on a more poignant slant when sung in perfect English by the natives in the audience. Because the video was filmed at the end of a seven-month trek round the world, Freddie’s voice in particular struggles throughout, and the band look extremely weary and exhausted. But
Live In Japan
remains an unavailable (in the Western hemisphere, at least) release offering a rare glimpse into some of the less explored aspects of Queen’s tours. Thankfully, eight of the seventeen songs (‘Flash’ through the ‘Now I’m Here’ reprise, ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’ and ‘Teo Torriatte’) were released as bonus tracks on the 2004
Queen On Fire: Live At The Bowl
DVD, along with the sound of this concert’s previously unreleased ‘Calling All Girls’ set to a photo gallery from the 1982
Hot Space
tour.

WE WILL ROCK YOU

• 1984 (90 mins) • Peppermint 6122

•
Director:
Saul Swimmer

‘We Will Rock You’
(fast)
, ‘Let Me Entertain You’, ‘Play The Game’, ‘Somebody To Love’, ‘Killer Queen’, ‘I’m In Love With My Car’, ‘Get Down, Make Love’, ‘Save Me’, ‘Now I’m Here’, ‘Dragon Attack’, ‘Now I’m Here’
(reprise)
, ‘Love Of My Life’, ‘Under Pressure’, ‘Keep Yourself Alive’ / Drum Solo / Guitar Solo, ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’, ‘Jailhouse Rock’, ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, ‘Tie Your Mother Down’, ‘Another One Bites The Dust’, ‘Sheer Heart Attack’, ‘We Will Rock You’, ‘We Are The Champions’, ‘God Save The Queen’

Though filmed in November 1981 at the end of a triumphant year for Queen,
We Will Rock You
didn’t see release for nearly three years. The delay wasn’t due to sound issues or problems with the band’s performance; instead, financial wrangles plagued the film from the start, and the projected theatrical release for the summer of 1982 came and went. A premiere was scheduled for March 1983 at Daytona Beach in Florida, but issues with the outdoor screen (which kept blowing over due its the sheer size – sixty by eighty feet) delayed the event for well over a year. It was finally issued on videocassette on 10 September 1984, the same day that ‘Hammer To Fall’ was released.

Two versions of the film were originally issued: a sixty-minute version, with (unknown) omissions, and a full ninety-minute version. The film was restored to its full ninety-minute running time for a 1997 US laserdisc release, being converted to DVD the following year. This release restored the sound somewhat, making it more listenable than before, but it wasn’t until 2001 that the film was released with vastly improved picture and sound quality.

15 OF THE BEST

• 1984 (60 mins) • KTEL NU 3240

Not much is known about the video companion to the 1984 US-only compilation
15 Of The Best
, but it’s likely that it contains videos for the following (judging by the track list of the album): ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’, ‘We Will Rock You’, ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, ‘Killer Queen’, ‘Fat Bottomed Girls’, ‘Tie Your Mother Down’, ‘Somebody To Love’, ‘Another One Bites The Dust’, ‘Bicycle Race’, ‘We Are The Champions’, ‘Body Language’, ‘You’re My Best Friend’, ‘Calling All Girls’, ‘Save Me’ and ‘Play The Game’. If so, this marks the first video appearance of the two
Hot Space
tracks, ‘Body Language’ and ‘Calling All Girls’.

THE WORKS VIDEO EP

• 1984 (20 mins) • PMI MVT 99 0010 2

•
Directors:
David Mallet, Tim Pope

Queen’s first video EP collected the four promos filmed for
The Works
– ‘Radio Ga Ga’, ‘I Want To Break Free’, ‘It’s A Hard Life’ and ‘Hammer To Fall’ – and, despite its success, has since been rendered obsolete by the plethora of video collections available throughout the world.

LIVE IN RIO

• 1985 (90 mins) • PMI MVP 99 1079 2

•
Director:
Aloysio Legey

‘Machines (Or ‘Back To Humans’)’, ‘Tie Your Mother Down’, ‘Seven Seas Of Rhye’, ‘Keep Yourself Alive’, ‘Liar’, ‘It’s A Hard Life’, ‘Now I’m Here’, ‘Is This The World We Created...?’, ‘Love Of My Life’, ‘Brighton Rock’, ‘Hammer To Fall’, ‘Radio Ga Ga’, ‘I Want To Break Free’, ‘We Will Rock You’, ‘We Are The Champions’, ‘God Save The Queen’

On 19 January 1985, Queen took to the stage at the Rock In Rio Festival at approximately two in the morning, to play to a packed stadium of about a quarter of a million Brazilians. Their performance was dodgy and the band were clearly worn out, but the band felt such an affinity with the locals that they implored Jim Beach to purchase the rights to release the footage on video. One has to wonder why: Queen’s performance was indeed ragged, but it sounds even worse here, with a synth-heavy mix and a severely edited song selection that does little justice to the extended set list present on the 1984/85
Queen Works!
tour.

Live In Rio
should be avoided at all costs, though there are two redeeming performances. Not only does it mark the first – and only – live appearance of ‘It’s A Hard Life’ on any video compilation, it also allows for the poignant sight of a chorus of 250,000 people taking the lead on ‘Love Of My Life’, with Freddie visibly moved and more than willing to let them sing.