The album that landed Queen in “deep emotional trouble”
While Queen are known for their theatrical take on rock music, with cuts such as their defining single ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, this light-hearted angle doesn’t account for all of their work. Just like some of their most prominent peers, Queen could also be filthy.
One of the most glaring examples of this is ‘Body Language’, a track taken from the 1982 album Hot Space. Following the worldwide success of the single ‘Another One Bites the Dust’, the quartet entered a new creative realm, forsaking their overtly glam-oriented sound for an experimental blend of funk, disco and soul. As a result of this decision, ‘Body Language’ emerged.
The song, the second single from the record, is an explicit paean to sex. Featuring ample groaning and moaning from frontman Freddie Mercury, it was so racy that the music video was the first to be banned from MTV for its nudity, despite the group members being fully clothed.
Due to this newfound style and the growing influence of Freddie Mercury’s personal assistant, Paul Prenter, on the creative process, the track and the album’s recording sessions in Montreux, Switzerland and Munich, Germany, were a tense time for the band. Recalling how the songwriting process became difficult, drummer Roger Taylor told the Days of Our Lives documentary in 2011: “[Prenter] wanted our music to sound like you’d just walked in a gay bar…and I didn’t”.
Echoing this in Mark Blake’s biography, Freddie Mercury: A Kind of Magic, the album’s co-producer Reinhold Mack claimed that Prenter – who is widely reported to have been a negative influence on the frontman – hated rock music and was constantly in Mercury’s ear throughout the recording of Hot Space. In the same book, Queen’s roadie Peter Hince asserts that “none of the band cared for him [Prenter], apart from Freddie”.
It wasn’t just the music that was giving Queen trouble at the time, though, it was the band themselves and their actions outside the studio. In the 2011 documentary, guitarist Brian May reflected on the period spent in Munich. He claimed that the group’s recording took much longer than usual, and they all got into “deep emotional trouble” in the city, inferring that a mixture of drink, drugs and partying culminated in the creative process losing its way.
The pronounced disco angle of Hot Space, and in particular ‘Body Language’, wasn’t well received by longtime Queen fans. Famously, some felt so put out by the new sound that they would bring ‘Disco Sucks!’ signs to shows. Mercury dismisses the hate in the Queen on Fire – Live at the Bowl DVD, which captures their iconic 1982 show at Milton Keynes Bowl. He announces: “We’re gonna do some songs in the funk, black category – whatever you call it” before maintaining, “I mean, it’s only a bloody record; people get so excited about these things!”
