The 1984 song Freddie Mercury knew was a complete failure: “I blew it”
There aren’t many singers who can claim to have sung no wrong notes quite like Freddie Mercury could.
Even though every singer has their fair share of off days where everything doesn’t sound right, the fact that he could power his way through even the hardest working conditions and still sound like one of the greatest in his field is the reason why Queen are considered one of the greatest bands of all time. Mercury wasn’t going to make anything that he wasn’t proud of, but he felt that some tunes were so bad that they didn’t warrant seeing the light of day.
But it’s not like any of Queen’s records were completely awful from a performance point of view. Every single one of their albums usually had that glossy sheen that everyone knows them for, and even if there are pieces that just don’t work together that well, like Hot Space, they do at least hold together as a somewhat coherent mess. Then again, Queen were already starting to toy around with what made them famous by the time the 1980s kicked in.
No one wanted to keep rehashing the same sound over and over again, but where Brian May was more into heavier rock and roll, the dance scene was bound to have a lot more impact on the band than anything else. ‘Fun It’ was already the first sign of things to come in their catalogue, but when they started working on ‘Another One Bites the Dust’, they were initially going to ditch the entire song were it not for Michael Jackson.
As it turned out, ‘The King of Pop’ was a massive Queen fan, and his suggestion to put the tune on the album was absolutely the right call when it skyrocketed up the charts. The whole thing was so massive that Mercury had even suggested working with Jackson on a few of his songs for Thriller, but when listening to the kinds of tunes that his friend was making, Mercury felt that the song ‘State of Shock’ didn’t have nearly the same kind of hooks that he wanted them to have.
It was strange enough for Mercury to be in the studio and working together with Bubbles in the corner, but their conflicting schedules led to the Queen frontman feeling disappointed about not getting the song into shape, saying, “I think one of the tracks would have been on the Thriller album if I finished it, but I missed out. I was initially gonna be on Thriller. Can you imagine that? I blew it!” At the same time, it’s not like the song was going to be some undiscovered masterpiece when they began working on it.
Mercury liked the idea of making a couple of tunes, but if they were going to whip something into shape, it was going to require a lot more heavy lifting, explaining, “‘State of Shock’ I couldn’t complete. So Mick Jagger did it. I actually did the vocals. Timing is everything. At the time when he wanted me to finish it, I just said, ‘I can’t, I really haven’t got time.’ I was working with Queen. I was in Munich. He was in Los Angeles. He said, ‘Is it OK if Mick does it?’ I said, ‘Fine.’”
But given Jackson’s track record working with rock and roll stars, there was always a 50/50 chance that it would work out right. Eddie Van Halen worked wonders on ‘Beat It’, but the fact that pairing one of the biggest pop stars in the world with one of the greatest pop songwriters on ‘The Girl is Mine’ amounted to something that was just fine, it wasn’t like that creative lightning struck every time the right people got into the studio.
But the fact that Queen managed to make their own dance-oriented album and have it out in the same year that Thriller debuted is funny when you look at how history lines up. Jackson had suggested that Queen go in a dance direction, but the idea of songs like ‘Body Language’ and ‘Back Chat’ competing with the biggest pop album that the world has ever seen is adorable in retrospect.
