Queen: The Complete Works (40 page)

AIN’T PUT NOTHIN’ DOWN
(Moss)

•Album (The Cross):
Blue

Written by Clayton Moss and released on
Blue Rock
, ‘Ain’t Put Nothin’ Down’ (for you verbalists out there, parse your way around the double negatives in that title!) is a slight but enjoyable track that would have
benefited from an additional remix to bring Roger’s voice to the fore a bit more. The song is a plea to remain optimistic when all else fails but, unfortunately, the weak lyrics detract from the message considerably.

The song was performed live on the 1991
Blue Rock
tour, usually as the third number, with a live version appearing on the Fan Club-only cassette release
Live In Germany
, and was included in the set lists for the remaining few shows between 1992 and 1993. ‘Ain’t Put Nothin’ Down’ was also released as the B-side of the ‘New Dark Ages’ single in 1991, with a unique single mix, extending the song by thirty seconds but adding very little except for a marginally longer intro and outro.

AIRHEADS
(Taylor)

• Album (Roger):
Fun

Dominated by drums, much like ‘Let’s Get Crazy’ and ‘My Country I & II’, ‘Airheads’ is a chunky rocker with Roger riffing manically while singing a set of disposable lyrics about his “less than refined” group of friends. The bass work is the most interesting aspect, as he achieves a more distorted sound than John Deacon was known for, but the song itself is a slight blemish on an otherwise excellent debut solo album.

ALL DEAD, ALL DEAD
(May)

• Album:
World

Written about the death of Brian’s childhood pet cat, ‘All Dead, All Dead’ is a mournful paean to lost friends, years ahead of ‘The Show Must Go On’ and Brian’s solo track ‘Another World’. Assuming a childlike naïveté and illustrating a simpler view of death, the song is set to a grand piano backing track with lead vocals from the guitarist and harmonies from Freddie on the choruses.

“That’s one of my favourites,” Brian said in a 1983 interview with
Guitar
magazine. “That was one of the ones which I thought came off best, and I was really pleased with the sound. It always gives me a surprise when I listen to it, because it was meant to really bring tears to your eyes. It almost does it to me.”

ALL GOD’S PEOPLE
(Queen/Moran)

• Album:
Innuendo
• B-side: 5/91 [14]

Fifteen years after first attempting gospel with ‘Somebody To Love’, Queen once again revisit the style with ‘All God’s People’. When asked about the song in an interview in
Guitar World
, conducted by Extreme guitarist Nuno Bettencourt, Brian said, “I love it too. I had less to do with that than I did with most of the stuff on the album. That was originally something Freddie was going to do on a solo album, and gradually we all played on it. I went in and played guitar and it seemed to work very well. John went in and played bass, Roger put the drums in, so it became a Queen track. I love it. Not many people have spoken to me about it, but I think it’s great. It’s got a lot of depth to it.”

Written by Freddie and Mike Moran (who contributed keyboards to the recording) in 1987 and recorded as a demo for
Barcelona
, with the working title of ‘Africa By Night’, the song was dusted off for inclusion on
Innuendo
, and while it’s not completely unsuccessful (delivering a message of peace and hope for the human race and sung with ever-growing power by Freddie), ‘All God’s People’ shifts styles too frequently, beginning with the gospel intro, before becoming suitably African, then jumping into an awkward blues pastiche. Unlike ‘Somebody To Love’, though, ‘All God’s People’ sounds thin, due to an undeveloped arrangement and a flat production at odds with the rest of
Innuendo
.

ALL RIGHT NOW
(Fraser/Rodgers)

• Live (Q+PR):
Return, Ukraine

An epic, swaggering blues rocker extolling the virtues of a one-night stand, ‘All Right Now’ became Free’s biggest and best-known song, and still features in regular rotation across radio waves worldwide. Released on the 1970 album
Fire And Water
, the song was issued as a single in May 1970 and established Free as a top-class act. In fact, The Faces were so enamored with the band that they not only played several Free songs in their live sets, they also recorded their own response to ‘All Right Now’ in 1971, which was titled ‘Stay With Me’.

The first performance of the song with a Queen-related member came on 19 October 1991, which was also the first time Paul Rodgers worked with a member of the band. Brian had organized the Guitar Legends Concert in Seville and asked several premier artists to contribute to the show. Paul Rodgers was one of those artists, and played a short set of Free and Bad Company songs towards the end of the concert: ‘Can’t Get Enough’, ‘Feel Like Making Love’ and ‘All Right Now’, with Brian contributing guitar on all of them. In 1994, Brian guested on the number on three further
occasions, but the first real sparks between guitarist and vocalist wouldn’t ignite until over a decade later.

On 11 November 2004, Queen were inducted into the UK Hall of Fame. Since neither Brian nor Roger felt up to the challenge of singing the songs themselves, they asked Paul Rodgers to sing on ‘We Will Rock You’ and ‘We Are The Champions’, then decided to incorporate ‘All Right Now’ as the final performance. When the performance aired on television, the general vibe was positive, which Brian commented on shortly thereafter, and the wheels were set in motion for a full-scale tour, announced the following month. ‘All Right Now’ became a mainstay, was performed at every show (allowing Brian to really get into an extended solo) and quickly became a crowd-pleaser.

ALL THE WAY FROM MEMPHIS
(Hunter)

• Album (Brian):
World

As with his previous solo album, Brian deconstructed a popular track by his peers and transformed it into a full-blown Queen treatment. Whereas before it had been ‘Rollin’ Over’, a track previously written and recorded by the Small Faces (contemporaries of Smile), this time Brian rocked up Mott The Hoople’s 1973 glam single ‘All The Way From Memphis’, based on an arrangement on their
Live
album. Brian played most of the instruments except for drums – done by Cozy Powell – and the backing vocals, provided by Shelley Preston, Nikki Love and Becci Glover. The stars of the show – Brian’s Red Special and Cozy Powell’s thundering drums – duel with each other magnificently as Brian howls Ian Hunter’s words (Hunter himself shows up in the middle of the song as a guest raconteur), but it’s difficult to imagine the guitarist living the life he was singing about, especially at that stage in his career.

“The first proper gig we had as Queen,” Brian explained in 1998, “we supported Mott The Hoople, which was a brilliant stroke – the best thing that could possibly have happened to us. We were doing a few small gigs around England, but really not getting incredibly far. I mean, there was a sort of reputation building up, but what we did was go out with [Mott] who had the proper audience already there. You know, they’d worked on their audience, they had it down, and anyone who was into state-of-the-art rock ‘n’ roll at the time would have been there. So they saw us, which was just the best thing that could have happened. I saw Mott The Hoople play this song all round England and all round the States and it was a storm every night. It was something exemplary – to see an audience erupt and react that way to that song. I wish it was still possible to see [them] do that. But I’m gonna do it, which is why I put it on the album, ’cos I damn well wanna play that song live. I just love it so much. It’s got all the right elements. Ian had it taped – you know, it’s got light and shade, changes of pace, it’s got suspense, and you think, ‘When is it coming?’ and he’d milk that for all it was worth, and [now] I’m gonna milk it!”

Indeed, Brian did just that, and ‘All The Way From Memphis’ – certainly the highlight of the three cover versions on
Another World
– became a concert favourite on his 1998
Another World
tour. The studio version was also included on the cleverly titled
Moth Poet Hotel
(an anagram of Mott The Hoople) tribute album, on which Brian was by far the most well-known musician.

ALL THE YOUNG DUDES
(Bowie)

Though Queen had just started out when David Bowie became a star, they took a cue from the artist by experimenting with different sounds, techniques and genres. It came as no surprise, then, that the band approached Bowie in mid-1973, asking him to produce their second album. He respectfully declined since he was tied up with another of Britain’s glam rockers, Mott the Hoople. He provided them with ‘All The Young Dudes’, and it shot them back to the top of the charts.

In November 1973, Queen were asked to support Mott the Hoople on a countrywide UK tour; the band, eager to gain exposure, agreed, and backed a fast-rising Hoople to great success. On 1 December 1973, when Mott performed the encore of their biggest hit, ‘All The Young Dudes’, Brian, Roger and Freddie were asked to rejoin them and provide backing vocals for the song.

With Ian Hunter as a performer at the Concert For Life, instead of choosing a Queen song to tackle, he instead grouped with David Bowie and Mick Ronson following Bowie’s performance of ‘Under Pressure’ to provide an electrifying version of ‘All The Young Dudes’. Backed by Roger, Brian, John and Spike Edney, the song featured practically inaudible saxophone from Bowie, additional guitar from Ronson, and rhythm guitar and lead vocals from Hunter. The backing vocals were provided by Miriam Stockley, Maggie Bell, Chris Thompson, Peter Straker, and Gary Cherone and Nuno Bettencourt from Extreme. This
version later appeared on Ronson’s posthumous 1994 album,
Heaven And Hull
.

THE ALSO RANS
(Taylor)

• Album (The Cross):
Blue
• Live (The Cross):
Germany

Opening the second side of Blue Rock is this superb composition by Roger, sounding like an update of his own 1974 composition, ‘Tenement Funster’. The focus is on Roger’s voice as he tells a tale of street misfits, struggling to fit into a society that shuns underachievers. There are callbacks aplenty to other artists, with an obvious nod to Bruce Springsteen’s many lyrical woes of growing up as a working class hero. The opening line (“I was born on the 22nd floor of a bird cage”) references two singles by The Rolling Stones: ‘Get Off Of My Cloud’ (“I live on the corner of the 99th floor of my block”) and ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ (“I was born in a crossfire hurricane”), while the outro backing vocals, provided by Candy and Clare Yates, mirror almost exactly Lou Reed’s 1972 single, ‘Walk On The Wild Side’.

‘The Also Rans’ was performed live occasionally on the 1991
Blue Rock
tour, usually as the penultimate number of the show, with a live version appearing on the 1992 Fan Club-only bootleg,
Live In Germany
.

AMANDLA
(May/Stewart/Anastacia/Louw/Bonsu)

• Live:
46664

Credited as a Queen track, ‘Amandla’ was written and recorded for the 46664 project in 2003. The song started off as a jam between Brian and Dave Stewart and then blossomed into something beyond Brian’s original vision, making its credit as a Queen track all the more dubious. Featuring a prayer by Andrews Bonsu and a harsh vocal performance from Anastacia, the song is about as atypically Queen as a song can get, but Brian contributes the piano and the Red Special even makes an appearance towards the end.

THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN
(May)

• CD single (Brian): 3/95 [37]

One of the more curious diversions in a Queen solo artist’s history, ‘The Amazing Spider-Man’ was a BBC radio series that involved Brian’s wife Anita Dobson in the role of Liz Allan, a high-school classmate of Peter Parker and a minor love interest in the original Spider-Man series. This would explain Brian’s involvement in writing and recording the music for the series, which was titled
The Amazing Spider-Man
and credited to ‘MC Spy-D + Friends’.

Following the successful radio series, the best bits of the music and dialogue were edited into a CD single and released in March 1995, two months after the series had aired. In what can only be described as a ludicrous proliferation, several remixes were released as part of the CD single, with the main theme, the four-minute ‘Mastermix’, technically being the A-side. Additional remixes – including an eight-minute ‘White Trouser Mix’, a two-minute ‘Sad Bit’ and two dance remixes known as ‘Solution Mix’ and ‘Solution Chilled Mix’, as well as a short burst of guitar called ‘The Amazing Spider Person (Brown Trouser Mix)’ and a collection of sound effects titled ‘The Amazing DJ Perk (MC Spy-D’s Favourite Stings)’ – were also issued, each more monotonous and puzzling than the last.

As it is, the original ‘The Amazing Spider-Man’ is a lot of fun, and Brian’s music is well-arranged and performed, though depending far too heavily on the radio show to make any kind of sense on its own. Nevertheless, the success of the radio series translated into the single’s sales, helping it reach No. 37 in the UK charts. Brian, however, had already moved well beyond the song, giving it little promotion and preferring to work on ideas for his next solo album and Queen’s own posthumous
Made In Heaven
.

ANOTHER ONE BITES THE DUST
(Deacon)

• Album:
Game
• A-side: 8/80 [7] • CD Single: 11/88 • Live:
Magic, Wembley, On Fire, Montreal
• Compilation:
Hits3
• Bonus:
Wembley
• Live (Q+PR):
Return, Ukraine

Queen were always keen on experimentation and pushing the limits of not only the studio and their creative team, but themselves as artists and musicians, and it was usually either Freddie or Brian who instigated the most memorable and adventurous departures from the norm. In early 1980, John – the quiet one who had been content writing strictly pop songs – opened up a whole new avenue for Queen by successfully introducing them to funk.

“I listened to a lot of soul music when I was in school, and I’ve always been interested in that sort of music,” John modestly explained shortly after the release of the song. “I’d been wanting to do a track like ‘Another One Bites The Dust’ for a while, but originally all I had was the line and the bass riff. Gradually, I filled it in and the band added ideas. I could hear it as
a song for dancing but had no idea it would become as big as it did. The song got picked up off our album and some of the black radio stations in the US started playing it, which we’ve never had before.”