The Queen track Brian May thinks reflected the band’s “deep emotional trouble”
Queen. The word in itself already carries so much weight. Some might think of the monarchy, but most people, when presented with the word, are greeted with the sound of electric guitars, a pounding rhythm section and one of the best frontmen the world has ever seen. When you consider the legacy the band have left behind as one of the greatest musical outfits to take to the stage, it’s hard to imagine they went through periods of musical uncertainty, but they did.
The three pillars of rock are sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. All can work in moderation, but when bands start to engage with some of them in excess, it can lead to the downfall of some of the greatest musical minds in existence. In the early ‘80s, when Queen went to Munich to record their album Hot Space, it became quickly apparent that the glue which held the band together was slowly melting away as their sound adapted, the perils of a job in the music business sunk in, and the spoils of being a rock star took over.
When the band started making Hot Space, Freddie Mercury had recently started working with his new assistant, Paul Prenter. With the power of hindsight, everyone can now see their relationship as a bad move, but at the time, Prenter had a hold over Mercury as he tried to convince him to make music that was widely different from that which had made Queen famous.
While the band was always willing to experiment with their music, the synth-heavy style imposed on them throughout the making of Hot Space wasn’t much to the taste of members Roger Taylor and Brian May. It was heavily inspired by the club scene in Germany, and while the classic ‘Under Pressure’ slipped through the cracks and became a hit, the rest of the album has very much faded into obscurity.
“He wanted our music to sound like you had just walked into a gay club,” said Roger Taylor when discussing his disdain for the record, “And I didn’t!”
May agreed that the sound was far removed from what Queen and their fans were used to. He said there was something deeper at play than just alternating influences and that the haphazard nature of the album is a good reflection of the cracks forming within the band at the time. “We all got into deep emotional trouble in Munich,” he said, “Freddie more so.”
One song that highlighted the nature of the record was ‘Body Language’, an overtly sexual song filled with moans and groans and with a music video so shocking that MTV refused to show it. While Queen weren’t strangers to making music that shocked people, there is no escaping that this song, and this album, didn’t have the desired effect.
During a show in Milton Keynes in 1982, when Mercury announced (to the disdain of the audience) that they were going to play some songs off the new album, he said, “I mean it’s only a bloody record, people get so excited about these things!”
