Queen: The Complete Works (53 page)

Released as the only single from the album in November 1980, the song was edited down to under three minutes and retitled ‘Flash’, excising most of the album dialogue except for just enough to sum up a two-hour movie in two minutes; the single reached No. 10 in the UK and No. 23 in the US. A video was filmed by Mike Hodges while the band were working
on the song at Anvil Studios, showing them recording to film: specific scenes are projected onto a screen above the band, the method actual orchestras would use when recording music for a movie.

‘Flash’s Theme’ was performed live as part of a
Flash Gordon
medley between late 1980 and 1981, but was dropped just after the ‘We Will Rock You’ video shoot in November 1981. A live version, from the November 1981 concerts, was released on both
Queen Rock Montreal
and the 2011 reissue of
Flash Gordon
. The studio version was later used as the introduction for the 1982
Hot Space
world tour, but was not played as a song in its own right. A remix by DJ Mista Lange was included on the 1991 remaster of
Flash Gordon
, extending the song to nearly seven painful minutes. Avoid at all costs.

FLASH’S THEME REPRISE

(VICTORY CELEBRATIONS)
(May)

• Album:
Flash

The title says it all: coming at the end of the album, ‘Flash’s Theme Reprise (Victory Celebrations)’ is made up mostly of movie dialogue among Flash, Aura and Hans Zarkov. The song concludes in a gloriously over-the-top crescendo, with a final, echoed cry of “Flash!” and an orchestral outro before leading effortlessly into ‘The Hero’.

FLICK OF THE WRIST
(Mercury)

• AA-side: 10/74 [2] • Album:
SHA
• CD Single: 11/88 • Bonus:
SHA

By late 1974 Queen were a hot live ticket, with respectable album and singles sales, yet they hadn’t received the financial benefits they felt they were due. Freddie poured his frustrations into this acidic track which takes the stance of an unscrupulous manager manipulating a naïve entertainer with doublespeak and legal forms. The song spews venom from each line hissed by Freddie, and is an even more heated composition than ‘Death On Two Legs (Dedicated to .....’, which expressed similar sentiments toward Queen’s management.

The second song of the
Sheer Heart Attack
medley, ‘Flick Of The Wrist’ blends in effortlessly from Roger’s ‘Tenement Funster’ and features a fine ensemble performance, complete with a tortured guitar solo and some breathless drumming from Roger. Somewhat bewilderingly chosen as the counterpart to ‘Killer Queen’, ‘Flick Of The Wrist’ became a double A-sided release with that single, issued in October 1974 and peaking at No. 2 in the UK and No. 12 in the US. Understandably, due to its quirky pop sensibilities, ‘Killer Queen’ received the most attention, and its counterpart fell into obscurity, eluding inclusion on any of the
Greatest Hits
packages, despite a special, single-only stand-alone edit (finally released in 2008 on
The Singles Collection – Volume 1
) and never receiving a promotional video.

‘Flick Of The Wrist’ was performed live between 1974 and 1976, and a remixed version with a new lead vocal and guitar solo was presented on the band’s fourth BBC session on 16 October 1974.

FOOLIN’ AROUND
(Mercury)

• Soundtrack (Freddie):
Teachers
• Album (Freddie):
BadGuy
• Compilations (Freddie):
Pretender, FM Album, Solo Collection

With a dominant, triumphant synthesizer motif, ‘Foolin’ Around’ is another fine track from
Mr Bad Guy
, and neatly blends dance with rock – exactly what
Hot Space
should have sounded like. With the pulsating bass beat of Stephan Wissnet and random stabs of guitar from Paul Vincent, the song is otherwise bathed in synthesizers and drum programming, yet still sounds fresh and vital beyond its 1985 release date. As on ‘I Want To Break Free’, Fred Mandel provided a suitable synthesizer solo, with accompaniment from Vincent on Brian May-sounding guitar orchestrations, which later drew ire from Queen’s guitarist, who questioned the point in hiring a soundalike when a quality song could have become a Queen song.

Interestingly, the song was proposed to be a single, with a 12” extended version prepared; while it did feature in the 1984 Nick Nolte film
Teachers
(an earlier version appeared on the soundtrack album, with only subtle differences), the idea for single release was scrapped along the way. An instrumental mix was also prepared, and both of these versions were later released on
The Solo Collection
, but the most interesting find from the archives was an earlier version, recorded on 31 May 1984 at Musicland Studios. While some lines were later altered, it featured a completely new introductory verse as well as real drums (a drum-machine appears only on the album version), and is certainly essential listening. More mundanely, the song was remixed in 1992 by Steve Brown, with arrangements and instrumentation by Andrew
Flashman and Andrew King. This version appeared on
The Great Pretender
in the US and
The Freddie Mercury Album
in the UK, and makes the song even more danceable than in its original incarnation.

FOOTBALL FIGHT
(Mercury)

• Album:
Flash
• B-side: 11/80 [10] • Bonus:
Flash

An energetic performance from the band, Freddie’s ‘Football Fight’ is one of the few pieces from the
Flash Gordon
album featuring an ensemble performance. The song was included in the film in a humorous match between Ming’s henchmen and Flash, throwing around a metallic football, the song is every bit as camp as the sequence it accompanies. An early take from February 1980 was released on the 2011 reissue of
Flash Gordon
, and is unique in that instead of synthesizer, the song is played on piano. Freddie can be heard guiding the band through the song, and while it wasn’t intended as a finished recording, its roughness is charming and an interesting alternate to the polished, finished version.

FOREIGN SAND
(Taylor/Yoshiki)

• Album (Roger):
Happiness?
• A-side (Roger): 9/94 [26]

Just to show that Freddie and Brian weren’t the only ones who could produce mini-masterpieces, Roger outdid himself with ‘Foreign Sand’, clocking in just under seven minutes while trying to redefine the term ‘magnum opus’. This also marked one of the more successful collaborations that Roger would undertake over the course of his vast solo career, this time recording with Japanese musician Yoshiki. Born Yoshiki Hayashi on 20 November 1965, he started playing piano at the age of four but later switched to the drums after his father bought him a set; it was this very instrument on which he released his anger and pain when his father committed suicide in 1975. In high school, he and some of his friends formed the band X, which later enjoyed success in the late 1980s with the singles ‘Orgasm’ and ‘I’ll Kill You’. “I was contacted by a man called Yoshiki,” Roger explained in 1994. “We met, and we got on very well and we decided that we would do an ‘east/west’ collaboration. In the end, he wrote simply the music – this guy’s an amazing concert pianist – and also an incredibly able rock drummer. So he sent me the music and I thought the music was great, and we talked about that a little bit, then we changed it a little, and I sent him some lyrics and the top nine back.” Yoshiki explained, “When I was in London, Roger invited me to his house and we were talking about racial problems, discrimination, segregation ... I just told Roger, ‘Can we do something about that?’ and we decided to make some songs for singing about segregation.”

With Yoshiki performing drums, piano, synthesizer and arrangements, Jim Cregan on guitars, Phil Chen (who had previously worked with Brian in 1983 on
Star Fleet Project
) on bass, Dick Marx on strings arrangement, and Brad Buxer and Geoff Grace on programming, the instrumental arrangement is a triumph: with tremendous degrees of light and shade, building up to glorious crescendoes and falling silent to barely perceptible whispers of piano. But an epic ballad is only as good as its words, and, tackling the futility and pointlessness of racial inequality, the song urges the world to be more accepting and loving of each other. In the post-Live Aid musical climate, and at a time when grunge rock was seen as the antithesis of pacifism and harmony, the message of ‘Foreign Sand’ is naïve yet simple, and, given the subject matter of ‘Nazis 1994’, a much-needed message.

The song was issued as the second single from
Happiness?
in September 1994, with ‘You Had To Be There’ as the B-side (12” and CD versions added the re-recording of ‘Final Destination’ with Yoshiki). Understandably, the song’s running time was an issue, though Roger was willing to make a concession and edit the track to a more managable four and a half minutes, dropping and creating new musical sections. While the result isn’t quite as dramatic, it’s more digestible, and reached a well-earned No. 26 in the UK charts, becoming Roger’s final Top Thirty single as a solo artist. Because of Roger’s involvement with Yoshiki, the song was a hit in Japan, peaking at No. 13, with its success a catalyst for Roger’s first solo dates there.

A video for the single, also featuring Yoshiki, was filmed in July 1994 in Los Angeles, but has rarely been seen outside of promotional viewings and an electronic press kit. Directed by Jeff Richter, the video portrays Roger standing with hands folded on a beach, as images of gruesome race riots and IRA car bombings pass by behind him, superimposed on screens within picture frames, with grand, sweeping shots Yoshiki either behind a drum set or looking like a mad professor at a concert piano at sunset.

FOREVER
(May)

• 12” B-side: 9/86 [24] • Bonus:
AKOM

Though no match for the superior ‘Who Wants To Live Forever’, Brian’s melancholy ‘Forever’ is a gorgeous, instrumental piano version of the aforementioned epic. Performed exclusively by Brian, it shows his proficiency on piano, an instrument that, by 1986, was only rarely used for composition by the band. Included on the 12” issue of ‘Who Wants To Live Forever’ in September 1986, the song was also included as a bonus cut on the CD version of
A Kind Of Magic
.

46664 (THE CALL)
(Queen)

• Live:
46664

Credited to Queen but written by Brian, ‘46664 (The Call)’ was submitted for Nelson Mandela’s 46664 campaign, and recorded during the March 2003 Cape Town sessions. Imploring listeners to “make the call” to support AIDS research and charities, the message of the song is heartfelt and well-intentioned but is lost in approach: the arrangement is abrasive and confrontational, but in all the wrong ways, with Brian’s voice, normally well-suited for ballads, completely at odds with its heavy arrangement. It’s hard to fault Brian for this song and his message, but ‘46664 (The Call)’ is plain dire, and the nadir of the Cape Town sessions. The song was premiered on Capitol Radio in 2003, but, as with the rest of the original recordings from those sessions, rightly remains unreleased. In 2007, in anticipation of Queen + Paul Rodgers’ first studio album, a fan wrote to Brian’s website and asked him of the fate of ‘46664 (The Call)’, and if it would be on the new album; Brian responded that it would be something for him to consider, but, thankfully, the only 46664 song on
The Cosmos Rocks
was a rearranged ‘Say It’s Not True’.

FOXY LADY
(Hendrix)

• CD (The Cross):
MBADTK
• Live (The Cross):
Bootleg

A perfunctory run-through of Jimi Hendrix’s 1967 classic, The Cross’ version of ‘Foxy Lady’ hardly improves on the original, adding very little except for appropriate Hendrix-inspired guitar solos by Clayton Moss. The song was included only on CD versions of the album, as well as on a rare UK promo CD, but would have been fine as a non-album B-side if it meant including far superior original material like ‘In Charge Of My Heart’.

Not surprisingly, given its live-sound approach, ‘Foxy Lady’ was included in the set lists around this time, with a live version cropping up on the 1991 Fan Club-only release
The Official Bootleg
, recorded on 7 December 1990 at the Astoria Theatre. Roger would later revive the song for his 1994
Happiness?
tour. Nearly thirty years previously, Brian’s band 1984 had played the song shortly before they dissolved.

FREEDOM TRAIN
(Taylor)

• Album (Roger):
Happiness?

Backed by a pulsating drum beat, deliberately designed to resemble the chugging of a train, Roger’s terse ‘Freedom Train’ is an obvious highlight of the
Happiness?
album. Assisted by Jason Falloon on guitars and Mike Crossley on keyboards (Roger plays all the other instruments), the lyrics are delivered in a barely audible whisper as Roger sings of “troubled lands” and a “golden thread of circumstance”, his voice raised only for the chorus. Coming after the lyrically heavy ‘Foreign Sand’, ‘Freedom Train’ follows in a similar vein, with the pleas of racial harmony on the previous track being attacked more viciously. Concluding dramatically with with some impressive snare drum work, ‘Freedom Train’ is truly a magnificent composition.

Interestingly, the song was attempted by Queen either during the
Innuendo
sessions or shortly following those sessions for what would be released as
Made In Heaven
. Unfortunately, little else is known about Queen’s version except that Greg Brooks name-checked the song at the 2003 Fan Club Convention. If it indeed exists, it would undoubtedly be a gem and well worth the price of the anthologies no matter what form, embryonic or complete, it takes.

FRIENDS IN PAIN

Nothing is known of this unreleased track from the
A Kind Of Magic
sessions, except that it may be a John Deacon demo of either ‘Friends Will Be Friends’ or, less likely, ‘Pain Is So Close To Pleasure’ (or even a completely new song altogether).

FRIENDS WILL BE FRIENDS
(Mercury/Deacon)

• Album:
AKOM
• A-side: 6/86 [14]