Queen: The Complete Works (45 page)

On 10 November 1975, Queen assembled at Elstree Studios with their director-of-choice Bruce Gowers and filmed a video for the single, bringing to life the
Queen II
album cover and immortalising Mick Rock’s iconic image. The video was completed in four hours, and cost a miniscule £4,000 – a princely sum in those days, but hardly anything now. Brian said of the video, “Everyone thought that the film was a huge production, but it was actually shot in only four hours. It was really easy to do, and since then we’ve spent a lot of time on films that probably weren’t as good and certainly didn’t get the exposure.”

“People used to have clips before,” John explained, “but they were often shot on film. It was quite accidental ... at the time, we were touring England, and we knew we wouldn’t be able to get to record
Top Of The Pops
on the Wednesday. Our managers at the time had a mobile unit, so it was actually shot on video, in about four hours!” Roger explained it even further, saying, “Well, we didn’t actually see it until it was actually on
Top Of The Pops
, because we were just doing it at the beginning of a tour. We were finishing rehearsals and we shot it on the last day in Elstree – and we just sort of got on a bus at the end at about two o’clock in the morning and drove to Liverpool, because we had a show there the next night – so we’d never seen the video until it was on
Top Of The Pops
the next week.”

It would be impossible to list all the accolades and awards that ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ has ever received; consistently voted Number One in music polls across the world, the song earned the high honour of being voted Song Of The Millennium in 1999, which certainly speaks volumes about the song’s staying power and mass appeal. Perhaps the greatest honour, though, was when it was re-released in December 1991 with ‘These Are The Days Of Our Lives’ in the wake of Freddie’s death, securing the Number One spot (again) in the UK and raising nearly £2 million for the Terrence Higgins AIDS Awareness organization.

Obviously, such a popular song would fall victim to parodies. The most famous one aired in 1987 – comedy act, The Young Ones, who formed a Spinal Tap-like group called Bad News, lampooned ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ with an interesting blend of opera and metal. Queen fans were initially outraged, but were humbled to learn that not only did Brian produce the song, but that Freddie found it humorous as well (they really could have taken a lesson from the vocalist in terms of developing a sense of humour), thus receiving his stamp of approval. Special mention must also be made of Weird Al Yankovic’s ‘Bohemian Polka’, in which he recreated the song to the accompaniment of an accordion.

However, the most humorous re-enactment was in the 1992 US movie Wayne’s World, starring Mike Myers and Dana Carvey in a big screen version of the Saturday Night Live sketch. One of the sequences starts with Wayne (played by Myers), Garth (played by Carvey), and three friends sitting in a beat-up, blue AMC, driving down a major strip of their hometown and singing along to ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. When it came time for the rock section, the five started banging their heads and playing air guitar and drums; while it was common for such an occurrence to happen in metal acts, this was the first time that such a display had crossed over to rock (during a Queen song, no less).

A compilation video was structured, incorporating clips of Gowers’ original 1975 video with segments of the movie, directed by Penelope Spheeris, and was included on the 1992 video compilation
Classic Queen
. The single was re-released in the US in February 1992, reaching an impressive No. 2 in May, due to both the movie and Freddie’s death. Roger and Brian later said they loved the movie – as did Freddie, who watched a rough cut of it before his death – which calmed a nervous Myers, who had said in an interview that it was like “whizzing on a Picasso.”

BOOGIE

Considering the obvious homage to Jeff Beck, it’s likely that this song is actually ‘Jeff’s Boogie’, originally recorded and released by The Yardbirds in 1967. If not, then authorship is unknown, but the song was
performed by Wreckage on 31 October 1969 at Ealing College Of Art.

BORN ON THE BAYOU
(Fogerty)

Creedence Clearwater Revival’s 1969 hit was performed live by The Cross at the first Fan Club show in December 1992 at the Marquee, with Roger Daltrey providing lead vocals.

BORN TO ROCK ‘n’ ROLL

According to Dave Clark, he was so impressed with Freddie’s two contributions to the
Time
musical soundtrack that he was going to give him a third; unfortunately, he had already promised ‘Born To Rock ‘n’ Roll’ to Cliff Richard, though he had Freddie record a demo anyway. That demo remains unreleased, as it was not available for
The Solo Collection
, but a live version from Freddie’s 14 April 1988 performance at the Dominion Theatre eventually leaked onto the internet, and what little can be heard of Freddie (over the occasional scream and cry of his name by fans) is impressive and enjoyable.

BREAKDOWN
(Noone)

• Album (The Cross):
MBADTK

Peter Noone’s second of three songs submitted and recorded for
Mad: Bad: And Dangerous To Know
is a sombre, minor key power ballad, a description which makes the song sound worse than it actually is. ‘Breakdown’ isn’t a highlight of the album, nor is it either the worst song, but it’s standard, inconsequential fare, taking a swipe at the ubiquitous media and their sensationalist tactics. This tired subject matter, coupled with its generic arrangement, only confirms its status as filler material.

BREAKTHRU
(Queen)

• Album:
Miracle
• A-side: 6/89 [7]

One of the standout tracks from
The Miracle
, ‘Breakthru’ starts off deceptively as a melancholy piano ballad, originally a separate song written by Freddie titled ‘A New Life Is Born’, before exploding into a ferocious rocker, propelled by a chugging bassline and heavy power chords. Written by Roger, the song received praise from Brian, who commented, “I very much like this track – it’s a Roger track – full of energy. Of course the track is, speaking lyrically, about breaking through to the next part of your life. And on another level, it’s just a nice bit of fun.” Roger was a bit more critical, saying, “The song actually ended up more complicated than I wanted it. I think the others wanted to put a key change in – I really hate key changes usually, and that’s not one of my favourite key changes – but I think this song should have been kept simpler and it was just slightly over-arranged in the end, but it kept everyone else happy.”

Released as the second single from
The Miracle
in June 1989, ‘Breakthru’ was accompanied by an excellent video of the band performing the song atop a steam engine called The Miracle Express. “I suppose you imagine these things are done by trickery,” Brian said in 2003, “but we actually were on top of this train, going about forty or fifty mph, so you have to have incredible trust – if the driver had had to change speed even a tiny bit, we would have been off that thing and dead! So once we forgot that the train was moving and developed a sort of trust in the driver, we just behaved as normal.”

Roger agreed, saying, “It was quite fun, this, ’cause it was a steam train, but we kept getting smut in our eyes – I just remember it streaming into the eyes. It was a fun video, sort of gimmicky in a way, but just a nice idea: The Miracle Express. Sticky hot day, I remember.” It’s evident that the band are having a good time, especially Brian, who commented on the
Greatest Video Hits 2
DVD that his “personal life was starting to go to shit” and to be able to escape to the English countryside was a blessing. The entire affair was finished within two days, much to the relief of Freddie, who was appalled by the local hotel’s lack of air conditioning.

An extended remix of the track was created and is superior to the standard version since it includes several new segments: the song kicks off with an echoed Freddie chanting the title (the whole ‘A New Life Is Born’ intro is omitted altogether) before leading into an energetic, though brief, instrumental section, featuring some great power-chord work by Brian and with the bass mixed more prominently. This version, coming close to six minutes, was included on the 12” and CD versions of the single, and was released on
The 12” Collection
in 1992, but was kept off the reissue of
The Miracle
.

BRIGHT LIGHTS, BIG CITY
(Reed)

This Jimmy Reed tune was played live by 1984.

BRIGHTON ROCK
(May)

• Album:
SHA
• Live:
Killers, Wembley, On Fire, Montreal

• CD Single: 11/88 • Live (Brian):
Brixton

• Live (Q+PR):
Return, Ukraine

Though the origin of ‘Brighton Rock’ dates all the way back to the Smile track ‘Blag’ from 1969, that was only the multi-tracked guitar solo which constitutes a majority of the song. With a set of lyrics that highlights a love-torn couple engaging in a holiday affair, the real star of the show here isn’t Freddie or his singing (especially when he takes the role of the female, which makes for a jarring listen) but the excellent performance of the instrumentalists. Roger and John hold together a tremendous rhythm section, with the bass allowing plenty of improvisation and even mirroring sections of Brian’s guitar extravaganza.

The spotlight is all on Brian, though, who turns in an engaging performance, showing just how versatile his homemade guitar is over any traditional build: employing custom pickups and delay, he is allowed complete freedom to move about his solo. For guitar enthusiasts, it is a real treat; for regular fans, it’s a special bonus since it shows how unique a guitarist Brian is. “I’d gotten away from listening to Hendrix quite a bit by that time,” Brian explained in a 1983 BBC Radio One interview, “and I’d like to think that that was more sort of developing my style really. Particularly the solo bit in the middle, which I’d been doing on the Mott The Hoople tour and sort of gradually expanded and has got more and more ever since. Although I keep trying to throw it out, it keeps creeping back in. That involves the repeat device actually using it in time, which I don’t think, had been done before up to that time. It’s a very nice device to work with because you can build up harmonies or cross rhythms and it’s not a multiple repeat like Hendrix used or even The Shadows used, which is fairly indiscriminate, sort of makes a nice noise. But this is a single repeat, which comes back, and sometimes I’ll add a second one too. So you can actually plan or else experiment and do a sort of ‘phew’ type effect. So that was at its very beginnings on ‘Brighton Rock’, and [it] became more developed after that.”

As mentioned above, the solo started life five years before its transformation into a real song; when Brian brought the song to Queen, it found its way into ‘Son And Daughter’, an excellent example that can be found on the
Queen At The Beeb
album, which extends the song well past seven minutes. Originally submitted (but rejected) for the
Queen II
sessions in August 1973, the song was developed in concert over the following year before it became an actual song recorded for the
Sheer Heart Attack
album, with several different working titles attributed to it, among them ‘Happy Little Fuck’, ‘Happy Little Day’, ‘Blackpool Rock’, ‘Bognor Ballad’, ‘Southend Sea Scout’, ‘Skiffle Rock’ and ‘Herne Bay’. Obviously, the band – and engineer Mike Stone, the culprit of these titles – were in a playful mood, but the song’s eventual released title is a reference to a type of hard candy that is sold only on the front at Brighton Beach.

Of the officially released versions, the ultimate display of musical versatility was in 1979 on the
Live Killers
disc, which find the band blazing through a twelve-minute interpretation, complete with additional, quieter guitar portions and an extended timpani solo from Roger. Though the guitar solo always became a nightly feature of any Queen show, the actual song was dropped from the set list occasionally; an example of this was on the
Live At Wembley Stadium
CD, which is retitled ‘Brighton Rock Solo’. However, a decent live version is no good without visuals, which often showed Brian running around the stage as the lighting rig would pulsate and swirl, creating a truly awesome spectacle. The song was first officially introduced to the set list during the
A Night At The Opera
UK tour in 1975 and remained until the final show on 9 August 1986. Never one to drop a good thing, Brian incorporated variations of the solo into the Brian May Band’s set between 1992 and 1998, with the only officially released version on
Live At The Brixton Academy
in February 1994 under the title ‘Guitar Extravagance’.

Inexplicably, the studio version was released on the CD single of ‘Killer Queen’ in November 1988; this marked the song’s only release on a single anywhere in the world.

BRING BACK THAT LEROY BROWN
(Mercury)

• Album:
SHA
• Bonus:
SHA

Showing Queen’s versatility in all kinds of musical styles, ‘Bring Back That Leroy Brown’ is a throwback to the 1920s music hall style that would be explored more in-depth with ‘Seaside Rendezvous’ on
A Night At The Opera
. Though this song was a hidden gem on
Sheer Heart Attack
, it would become a staple of the medley between 1974 and 1976, where an up-tempo version was performed with minimal vocals.

Freddie’s story of Leroy Brown (which alludes
to Jim Croce’s 1972 song ‘Bad, Bad Leroy Brown’) is accompanied by a terrific jangle piano and ukulele backing, and is an energetic performance which also features John’s first attempts on a double bass; Brian even gets in a short but sweet banjo solo. While the results have divided Queen’s fans for years, there’s no denying the song is an excellent slice of Freddie’s eccentricity and musical creativity.

BROTHER OF MINE

Reportedly written by Brian and dating from sessions for
The Miracle
in 1988, ‘Brother Of Mine’ has been a rumoured track for years, recently revealed to be a slow ballad that may have evolved into an officially released track, either by Queen or on Brian’s solo album.