Queen: The Complete Works (27 page)

The first indication that wheels were in motion came in the summer of 1993, shortly before John and Roger’s involvement at the Cowdray Park charity concert, where they played with David Gilmour, Eric Clapton and Genesis. Jacky Smith, co-organizer of the Queen Fan Club, reported, “Roger and John have been discussing future projects, and Roger tells me that they both feel ‘very positive about the future’.” Indeed, Roger mentioned the activity in a BBC Radio One interview in May 1994: “I’ve seen quite a lot of John and a little bit of Brian. And we have started work on finishing some stuff that we started with Freddie. In due course of time I think that will appear as a complete album. And it sounds very good, although it’s still in its reasonably early stages. We had started things ... and he’d done his parts on. He was working right up to the end, with the full intention of those works coming to fruition. So it’s sort of a duty to finish them. And they’re very good, it’s some wonderful stuff.” John, too, revealed in the winter 1994 issue of the Fan Club magazine, “Roger and I spent several weeks in the studio last year working on various Queen tracks. We played along with some of them, adding improved bass and drums to the songs.”

Brian was put on edge by an increasingly persistent John and Roger, who decided to go ahead with recording sessions in his absence. He masked this in his letter to the Fan Club in spring 1994: “For the past four months I’ve been delving into those last Queen tracks which we started with Freddie nearly three years ago. Of course, the remaining new material is very precious stuff, and in my mind the most important consideration is that this final collection must be worthy of the name Queen, so I’ve been delving very deep. I’m now very excited about how it’s turning out, but only when I’m sure that Freddie is coming across in his full glory, in the way he would wish, will I begin to feel happy. Anyway, you can be sure that John, Roger and I will have put in the maximum amount of loving care (and the usual arguments!) by the time this thing hits the shops!”

“After [Freddie] died,” Brian told
Q
in 1998, “my way of dealing with it was to go out on tour. But Roger and John became very impatient with me and started working on the tapes. I didn’t want this stuff to go out without my involvement, so I took the tapes off them, felt that they’d done it wrong and spent months putting it all back together. Doing
Made In Heaven
was
like assembling a jigsaw puzzle. But I wouldn’t have put my seal of approval on it if I hadn’t thought it was up to standard.” He opened up in a 1998 interview with
Guitar & Bass Magazine
, venting his spleen at the rhythm section: “In fact, when I went on the
Back To The Light
tour, I heard that the other members of Queen had already taken the decision to go ahead with this last album, without even asking my opinion. I was even more furious than before; I was not convinced that releasing this album was a good idea. As soon as I heard the news, I contacted Roger and John to make my disapproval known to them. To that they answered, that if it didn’t suit me, they would go ahead without me! I was already fuming to have been treated that way, but even that was nothing compared to the anger I had after having listened to what they had put down on tape during my absence: it was truly catastrophic!”

With his mind now set on finishing the album to the standards he believed Queen’s albums were held to, Brian perched himself in front of a computer for the next eighteen months, working furiously on assembling suitable pieces of music comprised of existing vocals. Roger and John cooled off and met up with Brian throughout 1994, with the bassist reporting in the spring of 1995 that “the recording and mixing of Queen material is progressing and I hope we will be able to release the end results this year. I am sure that everybody will have varied and different comments and opinions on the finished work. It has not been easy as even Roger, Brian and myself see things differently and coming to an agreement between us takes time! Anyway, we will do our best as that is all we can do and I hope you feel that it was worth all the work to release a final Queen album!”

In the summer 1995 issue of the Fan Club magazine, Brian revealed, “As I write, we have only a few weeks to deliver all the finished mixed tracks, and all the artwork, if we are to meet the deadline for a Christmas onslaught! It feels a bit like the old days, but of course we’re all very different in our ways now. I remember us working flat out in three studios simultaneously to deliver
A Night At The Opera
in 1975. At the moment work is going on in London, and at Roger’s Mill, and at my own studio in sunny Surrey ... we may even make it! For me, I can hardly believe that most of the last eighteen months or so of my life have gone into this – ‘What, just for a few four-minute songs??!!!’ Well, they’re pretty precious songs, and I keep remembering this is really the last chance I’ll ever have to work with Freddie’s wonderful voice. Let’s hope you all like this stuff.”

“The time has come to put to bed this last studio album from Queen, a difficult child indeed!” Roger revealed in the autumn. “In content of songs, emotion, and, above all, in power and quality of performance from Freddie, the work is strong indeed. Boy, could that one sing. Some of the songs have never been heard before, including the last lyric and performance of our singer, others you might recognize but in totally different form and hopefully now improved.”

The first signs of renewed Queen activity came in October, when ‘Heaven For Everyone’ was issued as the band’s first true single in nearly four years, and promptly went to No. 2 in the UK charts. Then, on 6 November, almost four years to the day after Freddie’s death,
Made In Heaven
was issued. What unfolded over the course of the album was a sombre though surprisingly optimistic listening experience, and while the lyrics and subject matter deal mostly with the inevitability of death, the album is still a fine counterpart to
Innuendo
.

The album is a veritable rollercoaster of emotions ranging from optimism (‘It’s A Beautiful Day’, ‘Heaven For Everyone’, ‘My Life Has Been Saved’) to sorrow (‘Mother Love’) and tranquility (‘A Winter’s Tale’). Upon first listening, it’s difficult to take everything in since the whole album sounds decidedly sombre (only ‘I Was Born To Love You’ and ‘You Don’t Fool Me’ err towards the upbeat), but it’s a strong collection of songs with messages of hope and a celebration of new life.

The presence of solo material – ‘I Was Born To Love You’, ‘Made In Heaven’, ‘Too Much Love Will Kill You’ and ‘Heaven For Everyone’ – and the previously released B-side, ‘My Life Has Been Saved’ are easy to date, but many fans had assumed that the remaining six songs were all recorded during the post-
Innuendo
sessions. In reality, only three of those tracks – ‘You Don’t Fool Me’, ‘Mother Love’ and ‘A Winter’s Tale’ – were recorded during Freddie’s final sessions, while the other songs – ‘It’s A Beautiful Day’, recorded in April 1980, and ‘Let Me Live’, recorded in September 1983 – were leftovers. However, the mix (supervised by David Richards) is superb, and all the tracks sound fresh, as if they really were recorded during Freddie’s final years.

Unfortunately, there is a decided dearth of rock songs on the album, and the only time that the band really take the opportunity to let loose is on the remake of ‘I Was Born To Love You’ and the reprise of ‘It’s A Beautiful Day’ – otherwise, the album is a sobering collection, full of mid-tempo ballads though offering at least some diversity, specifically the gospel
of ‘Let Me Live’ and the dance-floor thumper ‘You Don’t Fool Me’.

“We were trying to make an album up to the same performance and arranging and producing standards of the others, and I think we succeeded,” Brian told
Classic Rock
in 1998. “It’s definitely a kind of fantasy album. It’s like what if Queen had still existed, because there was no such thing at that point. It had its moments of great joy and discovery, but a lot of hard slog and a lot of hard bits emotionally.” Roger was more diplomatic on the recording process, and name-checked the album in a 1998 Radio Five interview as one of his favourites.

There wasn’t any middle ground with the reviews; critics either loved it or hated it. Only
Rolling Stone
was mildly complimentary, calling the album “a strange, often discomfiting listening experience”, while
Melody Maker
was disdainful: “
Made In Heaven
(I don’t want to think about the nuances of that title) sounds exactly like every Queen record since
A Kind Of Magic
... Some have called using the prerecorded voice of the late Mercury on this album necrophilia. Not me. I have no problem with Freddie making records while dead. No greater problem than I had with him making them while he was alive.”
NME
was even more vicious, letting fly their hatred for the album: “
Made In Heaven
is consistent with the ongoing programme entitled Freddie: The Remake. He’s now perceived as being warm, selfless and tragic – his physicality quite literally replaced on the cover by a bronze statue giving a straight-arm salute. Lovely ... Just what did the other band members feel they were gaining by bolstering up these fragments of Fred? Was it a satisfying mission – multi-tracking like mad, covering up for the missing lines and layering up a gigantic parody of the Queen sound to cover for the crappy material? At least the grave-robbing principle that launches The Beatles’ latest venture [‘Free As A Bird’] has some kind of historic, sentimental value. You’ll not excuse this record in the same way ...
Made In Heaven
is vulgar, creepy, sickly, and in dubious taste. Freddie would have loved it.”

The Times
also mentioned the recent activity by The Beatles in a complimentary review: “Frankly, the impending battle of the bands with dead singers is not an alluring prospect. But while the regrouped Beatles have, by all accounts, been forced to work with some pretty scant contributions from the late John Lennon, the remaining members of Queen were bequeathed a generous album’s worth of surprisingly full-blooded performances by Freddie Mercury ... Despite its overdue delivery,
Made In Heaven
stands up remarkably well as the closing chapter in a spectacular pop odyssey.”
The Guardian
, too, was hesitant with its praise: “As usual with Queen, the lyrics, as opposed to the music, take centre stage. Musically,
Made In Heaven
simply takes up where
Innuendo
left off, with a dash of gospeloid chanting here, a creaky outburst from one-trick guitarist Brian May there ... [Freddie] poured out his heart, and his words have a throat-aching poignance. Even the record’s opening verse, ‘It’s a beautiful day / The sun is shining / I feel good’, which would have seemed banal at another time, assumes a painful significance.”

Entertainment Weekly
in the US called it “the perfect theatrical epitaph for a life dedicated to gorgeous artifice” and “a surprisingly organic work with no shortage of highlights.”
Vox
proudly proclaimed, “Heaven’s great!” and claimed that the album “contains some of the finest material of the band’s career ... Queen have surpassed all expectations with
Made In Heaven
. This album will break your heart, shake your soul and, at the right volume, undermine the foundations of your house.”
The Sunday Times
was also pleased with the album: “Aside from the dark, bluesy inflection of ‘Mother Love’ – a track Mercury recorded only weeks before the end – the mood here is upbeat and furiously triumphalist in the way that only Queen albums know how to be ... Vacuous lyrics, novelty effects and sonic bluster have their part to play here, too, of course, but by the rather routine standards of Queen’s output up to and including 1991’s
Innuendo
, this rates as a superior effort and a more-than-worthy epitaph to the great entertainer himself.”

Indeed, Brian, Roger, and John assembled an album of fine material that not only sounded cohesive, but honored Freddie’s last recordings without deluging them in sickly-sweet poignancy.
Made In Heaven
exhibits the right amount of humour and sadness, joy and pain, light and shade. While
Innuendo
was the quintessential conclusion to a varied and wonderful career,
Made In Heaven
was a fitting and perfect coda.

QUEEN ON FIRE: LIVE AT THE BOWL

Parlophone 863 211 2, October 2004 [20]

Hollywood 2061-62479-2, November 2004

‘Flash’ (1’54), ‘The Hero’ (1’44), ‘We Will Rock You’ (3’17), ‘Action This Day’ (4’52), ‘Play The Game’ (4’30), ‘Staying Power’ (4’03), ‘Somebody To Love’ (7’53), ‘Now I’m Here’ (6’18), ‘Dragon Attack’ (4’16),
‘Now I’m Here (Reprise)’ (2’20), ‘Love Of My Life’ (4’22), ‘Save Me’ (4’00), ‘Back Chat’ (5’00), ‘Get Down Make Love’ (3’39), ‘Guitar Solo’ (6’22), ‘Under Pressure’ (3’47), ‘Fat Bottomed Girls’ (5’25), ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’ (4’15), ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ (5’38), ‘Tie Your Mother Down’ (4’09), ‘Another One Bites The Dust’ (3’49), ‘Sheer Heart Attack’ (3’25), ‘We Will Rock You’ (2’08), ‘We Are The Champions’ (3’28), ‘God Save The Queen’ (1’24)

Musicians
: John Deacon (
bass guitar, rhythm guitar on ‘Staying Power’
), Brian May (
guitars, vocals, piano on ‘Save Me’
), Freddie Mercury (
vocals, piano, acoustic rhythm guitar on ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’
), Roger Taylor (
drums, vocals, Syn-drums
), Morgan Fischer (
piano, synthesizer, keyboards
)

Recorded
: 5 June 1982 at Milton Keynes Bowl, Milton Keynes by Mack and Mick McKenna

Producers
: Justin Shirley-Smith, Brian May and Roger Taylor

After the success of the
Live At The Wembley Stadium
DVD and CD releases in June 2003, rumours regarding the next live simultaneous release abounded. Some sources said the band’s appearance in Budapest from July 1986 would be next, but to release a show from the same tour (the
Magic
tour) with an identical set list would have been a poor decision. Instead,
Greatest Video Hits 2
emerged that October, and the inclusion of ‘Staying Power’ from Milton Keynes set tongues wagging yet again.