'News Of The World' (1977)

Queen's timing was impeccable - the band made it big just as the next big pop fashion made a fetish of eschewing bigness, success, popularity, crowd pleasing, tunefulness, songcraft, musicianship, the lot ... Everything Queen stood for was publicly rejected by punk, and the music press and media predictably followed suit. It was a huge phony, rancid and mediocre, but appealed to people who preferred safe rebellion and fake politics to undertaking the challenges of the real things. Punk was for people who thought anger equated with effectiveness. Queen made it to the top only to find that the punk aesthetic now being embraced everywhere in the writers establishment of pop and rock; critics nurtured a visceral hatred of Queen, which got worse the bigger and more successful the band became. It was ludicrous, of course, merely inverting top and bottom to exalt the musical vices over virtues, fetishising the worst and sanctioning laziness. It was rubbish. It could occasionally be funny and entertaining, worth a passing laugh, but no more. The Stranglers were great, though.

The hilarious thing is that for all that it loomed large in the press, punk was not popular. The mass of people were elsewhere, with ABBA and Kate Bush and disco and all kinds of other stuff, and in this their instincts were right. The 'big' bands who were supposed to be dead in the water survived easily and, truth be told, became bigger. The Rolling Stones only started to make the really big money after punk; the same with regard to the likes of Fleetwood Mac. Genesis only became the huge band we now know after punk. But bad mythology, like lies and wishful thinking, dies a hard death. What was killed off was naff pop, which always dies a natural death in any case. And that laid back West coast sound went by the way too, and not before time. Long solos always went by the way. Things got tougher, louder, quicker, and livelier. A new era in pop had opened up. But why should Queen have been worried? They had the talent and the smarts to survive the challenge. If the rather grand pop of 'A Night at the Opera' and 'A Day at the Races' could be criticised as a tad self-indulgent and over-produced, you have to remember that at root this was a hard rocking band with musical substance. Queen remained majestically unperturbed by the supposed challenge of punk. On 'News of the World,' Queen stripped back the frills and turned up the thrills to deliver a raw, guitar-based album full of anthems and hooks. The album was recorded at the same time that The Sex Pistols were working on 'Never Mind the Bollocks' in an adjoining studio. Sid Vicious wandered into the studio one evening and muttered something about Freddie bringing ballet to the masses (this claim really did seem to obsess the punksters). Freddie addressed Vicious as 'Simon Ferocious,' asking him what he's going to do about that. And then he took Vicious by the lapels and threw him out. 'I think we survived that challenged.' Right said Fred. 'Is this man a prat?' asked Tony Stewart in NME. There are plenty of prats in the world. The only Nijinsky most working class people knew was the racehorse, claimed Stewart, expressing his contempt for Freddie's pretensions, and maybe the working class. But here is the difference - some people have expanded horizons and seek to expand the horizons of others, others reduce to the obvious, reproduce it, and reinforce it. The latter is easier and lazier.

News of the World (1977)

"We Will Rock You"

Basic, raw, and direct. The remarkable thing about Queen is that they were blessed with a huge musical imagination and the musical ability to take it to the nth degree, but could also strip the music right down to hardly anything at all - and still move the masses. There is hardly anything to this song - hand-clapping and foot-stomping replace drums to hammer out the most basic of beats, with Brian May's guitar only appearing at the end to bring the song to a close. Queen could do all that 'Figaro' and 'Galileo' stuff, but could also cut it all away in order to go direct to the gut. I loved it when critics would try to deflate the band's pretensions by claiming that 'bringing opera to the masses' took the form of repetitive chants in a sports' stadium. The appeal, as John Cale has said, is 'ubiquitous.' You can thump it out at sporting events, you can thump it out anywhere. It's so basic as to barely qualify as music. It connects directly with something inherent in all of us. It can stand for anything we want to stand for. 

All that said, my favourite version of the song is the live version, which I first heard on 1979's Live Killers, and with which the band would open their shows. It's fast, loud, and thrilling. You can see it paired with 'The Hero' opening the Milton Keynes concert and it's the greatest opening to a concert I've ever seen. The song comes over as a massive promise, which the band redeems within three minutes. The band recorded the fast version in the studio at the time. It would have made a superb opener to the album, with the slow version coupled with 'We Are the Champions' making for a great close.

"We Are the Champions"

'It's a playground skit!' the critics continually shouted, as if we couldn't hear the obvious. 'Ne ne ne-ne neh.' We hear it (it was impossible not to hear it). The song is also big, grand, and dramatic, a loud and powerful statement of facing and beating impossible odds - this is Queen's Impossible Dream re-imagined for the common people, not just the isolated would-be heroes amongst us. That's what I love about the band - they are unashamed and unabashed populists, appealing to each and all, the 'ordinary' folk, and not just the odds. For all its triumphalism, 'We are the Champions' is the national anthem of underdogs everywhere - that's all of us, as the band made clear umpteen times, in response to the typically uncomprehending critics who neurotically honed in on the reference to 'losers.' It's not an attack on losers at all, it is an invitation to all becoming the winners they have the potential to be. 

"Sheer Heart Attack"

I once heard Deep Purple lead singer Ian Gillan describe punk as heavy rock played badly. It was a pointless exercise for bands who could play and who had musical intelligence and imagination to try to play down in order to compete with punk. It was like Laurence Olivier trying to play the seedy and mediocre music hall act Archie Rice - he was good, but much too good to be true. But Queen could be loud, direct, and brutal when they needed to be. Whilst the song seems to be an obvious riposte to punk, its origins lie in the 1974 album of the same name. Which is to say that the song is 'punk' before punk. The song was written and sung by Roger Taylor, who plays almost all the instruments on the track. The track is also notable for being one of the few tracks on which John Deacon doesn't play. The song is a philosophical disquisition on young ladies who can bring on cardiac arrest in men who are foolish enough to go down that route:

Well you're just seventeen, all you wanna do is disappear

You know what I mean there's a lot of space

Between your ears

The way that you touch don't feel nu nu nothin'

Hey hey hey hey, it was the D.N.A.

Hey hey hey hey, that made me this way.

The strength of the song may be in the loud and heavy rock. 'Inarticulate' as the lyric says. With its frantic tempo, snarling vocal, and 'inarticulate' lyrics the song is some kind of a recognition of punk, offering proof that the band can rock harder and louder than the young upstarts. The need to offer proof of any kind strikes me as a loss of nerve. That said, the song found its way into the concert set list. Its writer seems somewhat proud of the fact that his song is somewhat ahead of its time. With its origins in 1974, Taylor offers it as an anticipation of the raw energy and anger of punk: "I started the song when we were doing the Sheer Heart Attack album, but didn't get round to finishing it. By the time I did, punk had come along. But the song came before punk." If it really was punk, it didn't need finishing, just make a racket, snarl, and put it out. The critics will love it.

"All Dead, All Dead"

'All Dead, All Dead' is a strange, almost medieval, sounding song, written and sung by Brian May. It is a piano ballad with the strangest of guitar harmonies. It is no wonder that the band made such a great thing of declaring 'no synthesizers!' on their album sleeves. That statement wasn't an attack on synthesizers, which they came in time to use (1980), but an attempt to make it clear that those incredibly weird guitar sounds that Brian May produced were just that - unbelievably strange guitar sounds unique to Brian May. The song is a spare, piano-based track which builds to a classic demonstration of Queen's trademark guitar orchestration. An album track that is hardly known by the wider public, this is, perhaps, the best guitar orchestration of Brian May's career. It was tracks like this that cemented the band's reputation and made their seventies albums something special. In the 1980s, I would say, the band focused more upon killer singles rather than, as in the seventies, killer albums. I'm simplifying, but not by much. This song makes the point that Queen albums were packed with an incredible array of music, all of the highest quality.

There is also the version of the song which has Freddie Mercury singing lead vocals. Finally we can hear the intro lyrics that were on the inner sleeve. It's a fantastic version, one that could easily have made it onto the album instead of Brian's version. You get so used to Brian May singing this song that it is most unusual hearing Freddie Mercury, which really is unusual given that he is the band's world-renowned frontman. There's no doubting Freddie's genius as a singer, but Brian's voice suits this song so well. Each singer brings a different quality to the song, and it is possible to appreciate both without having to choose. Freddie's version takes the song into the territory of those beautifully refined ballads of early Queen such 'Nevermore,' 'Dear Friends,' and 'Lily of the Valley.' Freddie's approach is studied and controlled, Brian's warm. The song deals with the loss of a friend.

"Spread Your Wings"

I'm still surprised at how little known this bone fide Queen classic is among the great public. Whilst it is a huge fan favourite, it was only a modest sized hit at UK#34. It's one of those immense seventies tracks that the old fans love but which tended to get overlooked in the aftermath of the band's expanded popularity in the 1980s. Written by John Deacon, it combines a poignant lyric about someone struggling on the wrong side of life's travails with incredibly emotional vocals and searing guitar. I remember Alexis Korner presenting a series on 'Guitar Greats' on Radio 1 in 1983. The show featured twenty of the world's best guitar players, and I was pleased to see that Brian May was counted among that esteemed company. The superb guitar that plays out 'Spread Your Wings' was offered as an example of May's greatness. I realised then that I had never quite appreciated the range and quality of May's guitar work in the Queen songs. To me, the song had ended and was now just playing out. Wrong. The guitar part brings the song to a beautiful heart-rending conclusion. 

As for the song's huge popularity among fans, I think the lyrics struck a chord. I've known a few Queen fans over the years; you get to know their oddities and eccentricities, and recognise them as your own. The message of the song resonates with those who are a bit on the outside, marginalised, on the fringes of things, refusing resignation to obscurity by forever dreaming of making something fantastic of their lives. It seems no more than a dream, of course, but is reassuring for all that. It's better than giving up and accepting the hard facts of meaningless oblivion in a miserable and unalterable reality. Freddie's emotional plea urges the protagonist to 'Spread your wings and fly away,' but the underlying sadness throughout suggests that most people won't ever have what it would take to go after their elusive dreams. Experience has knocked the ambition and the hope out of them: 'Since he was small had no luck at all, nothing came easy to him.' I think more than a few of us knew the feeling. 'Now it was time he'd made up his mind, this could be my last chance.' The protagonist seems doomed to be sweeping up the floor forever in the last chance saloon. His boss knocks him down once more: 'Now listen boy, you're always dreaming you've got no real ambition you won't get very far.' The song pans out with Brian May's superb guitar part, the mood being one of sad resignation rather than active hope. Definitely one of the band's elite group of songs. And light years from the triumphalism, even fascism, which is all the stupid critics can see in the band. 

"Fight from the Inside"

A gritty hard rocker written and sung by Roger Taylor. Thumping drum beat, grumbling bass, and guitar sounds from another planet. This has a great insistent groove. I rarely (actually, never) see this song mentioned in any 'best of' lists. It makes mine. 

Like many of Taylor's songs, 'Fight from the Inside' stands a little apart from the other songs on the album. There is a distinctive sound and feel to the song. It's not only Taylor's song-writing and singing that is distinctive about this song, but that he played almost all of the instruments on the track. The title, too, may be significant, indicating Taylor's fight for more creative space and musical identity within the band. It's probably not surprising that Taylor was the first member of Queen to release a solo album, 1978's Fun in Space, which contained the great single Future Management. 

'Fight from the Inside' is an overlooked classic, with a tough grinding rhythm, blanketed with funky guitar licks, and powered by drums and driving vocals. This is everything that Hot Space could and should have been, more funk than disco, backed by hard hitting drums and guitar. 'News of the World' is a strong album with a number of standout tracks. This song loses nothing in comparison.

"Get Down, Make Love"

The song is rather ... salacious, but has an irresistibly alluring combination of piano and guitar; it is an exercise in slow seduction. If you can, find the downright direct and gritty early take of this song, a raw and raunchy jam session. 'Oh, the piano fell down,' Freddie shrieks at one point. It must have been one hell of a session. For all that, the song is musically well-constructed. It sounds like its origins might well have been in a jam session, experimenting with sounds on other songs, before firming up into something truly substantial. In the middle of the studio demo of 'It's Late,' there is an interlude which has Freddie improvising with a delay machine, interjecting with the line 'get down, make love.' The song does indeed have an improvisational and experimental quality. 

Lyrically, it is certainly a provocative piece, not so much sexually suggestive as blatantly erotic. This is another of those 'striking' (alarming) Queen songs that never leave you unmoved. Neutral simply doesn't exist with a song like this. For all the physical talk, it is a song about sexual frustration 'Everytime I get high, you wanna come down.' The song is a very definite anticipation of 'Body Language,' so much so that the great reaction the latter provoked in 1982 is a cause for genuine surprise. Not only were the essential elements of 'Body Language' already much in evidence in 1977, 'Get Down, Make Love' was also a regular part of Queen live shows from the late seventies into the early eighties. Of course, when such a song is released as a single and accompanied by a video that spells everything out, controversy is likely. I remember having 'Live Killers' as my main Christmas present of 1979. My mother was rather keen to hear it and wanted me to put it on as the family sat around the table for Christmas dinner. Having heard 'Get Down, Make Love' earlier that morning I was mortified. I made excuses saying the album is very loud, much too loud for Christmas dinner. My mother took my reticence to mean I didn't like her great Christmas present. I was caught between competing emotions - sadness at my mother's sadness in thinking I had spurned her Christmas present and worry that said present contained a track that contained indulgences that would make a monkey blush. Sometimes in this life you just have to sidestep and swerve in order to survive. And I had preserved decency and decorum at the family table.

"Sleeping on the Sidewalk"

A blues boogie, in a decade of blues boogies. It's not bad, it's just that with Queen you expect something a bit more out of the ordinary, something more than others are doing, something more than a blues jam. I read that the song was inspired by ZZ Top. I would never have guessed that from the song. Brian's vocals strike me as more sleepy than angsty. The song was recorded in just one take and is certainly loose for a Queen song. Remarkably, John Deacon can be heard hitting some wrong notes on bass. I reckon it was done deliberately in an effort to sound spontaneous. May can be heard laughing at the end of the song.

"Although I messed around with the take a lot and chopped it and rearranged it, it was basically the first take, which we used, It has that kind of sloppy feel that I think works with the song, which we never would have dreamed with the previous albums. We always used to work on the backing tracks until they were a million percent perfect, and if they weren't, we would splice together two which were. We'd go to great lengths, but for this album, we wanted to get that spontaneity back in." (Brian May - BBC Radio One in 1983).

"Who Needs You?"

Another nice slice of relaxed pop balladry from John Deacon, and another new style to add to the already eclectic Queen mix: Latin. It's a light and easy song. The song doesn't remotely fit the sound and atmosphere of the album, taking on hard with soft, and some delicately picked guitars, a cowbell, and maracas. As such, 'Who Needs You?' is a much bolder response to punk than 'Sheer Heart Attack' could ever have been, confronting the aggressive new sounds rather than responding to like with like. Or, best of all, in just being plain unmoved and indifferent and going your own special way without a second thought for anything else. Freddie's on the cowbell, and Brian on the maracas. For all of the light and cheery qualities of the music, the lyric is actually hard-hitting, cutting much deeper than the 'no future for you' inanities being screamed daily at the time:

But it's dog eat dog in this rat race

And it leaves you bleeding lying flat on your face

Reaching out, reaching out for a helping hand

Where is that helping hand?

The breeziness of the song is such as to shuffle the bleakness of the lyric past you unnoticed. Incongruous and out-of-step, creating moods only to confound them - it's what Queen does best and what defines them as a band. 

Over the years I have noted the surprise and scepticism in people's reactions whenever I mention to them that not only am I a Queen fan, but Queen are my most favourite band of all and by a very considerable distance. People give me a funny look, which is a combination of disbelief, disdain, and worry. To the sceptics out there, all men and women of impeccably good taste and fine moral standards, Queen don't make an awful lot of sense. They never did. They were ridiculed as a joke before they hit big, and dismissed as tasteless, trashy pop when - against all expectations - they did make it big. Queen fans, like the band they follow, don't follow the obvious grooves; they go their own way in pursuit of a good time. They can be too much in all areas, loud, tasteless, and silly; they can be too long and too weird and too opaque. And too obvious, too. Queen either thrill people or baffle them. I was always one of the thrilled. As to why, the odd songs that would turn up out of the blue to confound expectations is one of a million and more reasons. And that's what I want from my favourite band - something quirky, that is both intelligent and entertaining; not some blur of impeccably good taste, but a rollercoaster of highs and lows: something memorable that doesn't leave you unmoved.

"It's Late"

An immense rocker written by Brian May, coming in at over six minutes. It's another of those ambitious Queen rock epics. May conceived the song as a three-act theatrical play, with the verses being referred to as "acts" in the lyrics sheet. According to Billboard Magazine, the music of the single version "shifts gear from subdued balladry to thunderous rock'n'roll." That's Queen in a nutshell. Or part of Queen. Rock opera. Epic!

"My Melancholy Blues"

As I looked forward to hearing 'News of the World,' a schoolfriend told me that the last track on the album sounded like Gracie Fields' 'Sally.' I thought he was putting me on, but he was deadly serious. Just listen to it, he said, adamantly. And he was right, too; this is beautiful late-night bluesy ballad that savours more than a little of 'Sally' in part. It's a spare blues ballad accompanied by piano and bass and is quite exquisite.

"Feelings Feelings"

This track was recorded at Basing Street Studios, London, in July 1977. Its origins may well have been in 'Feelings' from a few years earlier. The track was first released in 2011, on the double disc reissue of the 'News of the World' album, and again on the 40th anniversary boxed set in 2017. It's a hard rock number, with echoes of the Zeppelin influenced early style. That perhaps explains why Queen left the track off the album, having quickly moved well beyond their influences to their own style.

Of course, hearing this, many start to play the 'what if this instead of that' game. It allows people to pass the time discussing their favourite music, but it really is an exercise in curtailing Queen to fit certain musical preconceptions rather than allowing them to shape their own. The whole appeal of Queen lies in breaking the attempts of musical bores and neurotics to impose taste. One person comments that had 'Feelings Feelings' closed the album instead of 'My Melancholy Blues,' then the album would have been a classic instead of just great. This is errant nonsense. It is the variety and balance of songs and sounds on a Queen album that raise a record above greatness to classic status. The same people would have wanted 'Lazing' and 'Seaside' cut from 'A Night at the Opera' in favour of another rock record, and 'Bohemian Rhapsody' cut completely (spend any time on these forums and you will soon be confronted by the people who think 'Rhapsody' overrated, a sellout etc). There are other bands of predictably good taste for them to follow. Bore off! That said, this would have made a much better, and more genuinely spontaneous, addition than 'Sleeping on the Sidewalk.' It is much livelier.

Silver Salmon (1977)

Written by Tim Staffell, this song dates back to the Smile days and is in origin more of a sci-fi themed folk song than the hard rock number it became, characterised by heavy guitar and drums. As to the origins of this recording, Queen expert Gary Taylor, who assisted in the writing of the 2011 remaster liner notes, says this on queenzone.com: "the band would very often play around in the studio to new songs and even old songs before they would get down to actually recording new tracks for an album. Tracks like Feelings and Silver Salmon were often played in a band jam and they would even play other artists songs as part of this warm up."

It's a very heavy track, dominated by hard rock guitar and drums. It's a pity that Queen didn't finish the song, which further begs the question as to why they didn't. We can only speculate, again, that the song exhibits the Led Zeppelin influence that the band sought to bury as it developed its own sound. You can't do it all given constraints of time and energy. With further work, this track could have been a good album track. Those who claim it as a lost masterpiece are merely letting their enthusiasm get the better of them. The members of Queen were highly intelligent and knew what they were doing when it came to song selection. Beyond the hard rock - which is enough for some - there isn't much of a musical idea here. To my ears, it marks how much ground the band had covered since their early days. They quickly left this kind of sound behind and had more interesting avenues to explore.

"Batteries Not Included"

This track is rumoured to be from the 'News Of The World' sessions, and to have been written by either John Deacon or Brian May. There are no recordings of the track and it is entirely possible that this was just a working title that became known by another title. Unless the two remaining members of the band who are still active can be bothered to remember - or think such a thing worthy of being remembered among a billion other band details - the mystery will remain unresolved.