The most difficult album Queen ever made: “Some dark moments”
Throughout the 1970s, Queen were rightfully regarded as one of the most creative acts for how they managed to blur the boundaries of pop and rock music and dominated the world with it.
Of course, like any band, they had to grow from somewhere in their infancy as a group, and while the first couple of albums they released were impressive and stellar attempts at capturing their identity, they were commercially unsuccessful and didn’t do much in the way of propelling the band towards the heights they would eventually reach.
Throughout the mid-to-late 1970s, the band would rapidly grow into something spectacular through releasing some of their most expansive material, with records like Sheer Heart Attack, A Night At The Opera and A Day At The Races all being fine examples of how they showcased a more progressive flair that blended both their symphonic pop and glam rock tendencies.
This upward trajectory kept going as far as record sales were concerned, and it was during this period that they’d find themselves dominating the charts in the US as well as in the UK, something that only a select few acts can manage to do, even at the peak of their popularity.
The change of decades, however, proved to be a tough transition, and while they were still on top commercially in the 1980s, being asked to do film soundtracks like Flash Gordon, it was also the tipping point for the band creatively, with them struggling to reach the same heights as they previously had done, and phoning in their flair for experimentation and lavishness in favour of straightforward pop glitz.
Their 1982 album, Hot Space, proved to be a catastrophe and is widely regarded as the weakest studio release in the band’s otherwise impressive catalogue. While it may boast one of their biggest hits in ‘Under Pressure’, a song that gained immense popularity as a result of it being a collaboration between them and fellow titan David Bowie, the rest of the record is an underwhelming mess generated by a group of burnt-out individuals striving to regain the creative spark they once had.
‘So what exactly went wrong for the band during this period?’ was a question guitarist Brian May had to confront when he spoke to Uncut in 2013 about the torrid time that the band endured trying to piece together the album, and how their relationships almost reached a tipping point and destroyed the band.
“We moved out to Munich to isolate ourselves from normal life so we could focus on the music,” he explained, trying to justify the lull in their artistry. “We all ended up in a place that was rather unhealthy, a difficult period… We weren’t getting along together, we all had different agendas… It was a difficult time for me, personally – some dark moments.”
It may have ‘Under Pressure’ sitting at the end of the tracklist – an arguably overrated song that’s only popular because of the two names attached to it – but that doesn’t save the rest of the album from its own mediocrity, and while it shouldn’t be considered a miracle that they managed to salvage their careers from the wreck, it’s something of a relief that it didn’t spell a premature end for one of Britain’s greatest rock acts.
