“A gay anthem”: The song Brian May said Queen should have never made
There are hardly any other rock stars who have been as diplomatic as Brian May.
As much as Queen may have gone in a thousand different directions, May was always willing to try out anything that came into his bandmates’ heads, even if he wasn’t 100% sold on what they were working with. But even in the days when they were willing to work with anything and everything, there were more than a few times when May had a little bit of trepidation before going into making one of their classic hits.
Then again, a lot of Queen’s greatest songs tend to come from how May wrote his tunes or added the perfect guitar flourish to one of their tracks. No one could really imagine ‘Killer Queen’ without those layers of guitars in the breakdown, and even if May was dialling things back when breaking out the acoustic guitar on ‘39’, people were going to have that sea-shanty-esque melody stuck in their heads until the end of time, within the first five seconds of them listening to it.
But for someone who had an anthem like ‘We Will Rock You’ under his belt, it’s not like May was against giving people something to sing along to. Simplicity was often the best way to go when making some of their hits, but given where Freddie Mercury was in his life, May didn’t feel altogether comfortable when he started writing tunes like ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’. The extravagant lifestyle was starting to wear on the rest of the band, and there were bound to be a few strange looks going around the studio when Mercury sang about no one else standing in his way.
It’s one thing to be offended by the lyrics, but the music itself usually is doing most of the heavy lifting. While there’s not really much of an excuse for them to have made a song like ‘Chinese Torture’, you can at least respect that they were making a fun bit of sound design, but in between them becoming operatic juggernauts and pop superstars, Hot Space was always going to be the black sheep of the Queen canon.
They didn’t necessarily have a bad idea on their hands by trying to follow up ‘Another One Bites the Dust’, but since the first half of the album was based around dance music, it didn’t really have that much room for May to shoehorn in any of his ideas. But even if the guitars took a bit of a back seat, ‘Body Language’ was one of the few times that he spoke up and thought that the band shouldn’t play one of their tunes.
For as much as Mercury may have revelled in being flamboyant, May felt that the song’s erotic undertones would have alienated some of their fanbase, saying, “I can remember having a go at Freddie because some of the stuff he was writing was very on the gay side. I remember saying, ‘It would be nice if this stuff could be universally applicable because we have friends out there of every persuasion.’ It’s nice to involve people. What it’s not nice to do is to rope people out, and I felt kind of roped out by something that was very overtly a gay anthem.”
That could have easily come off as homophobic in some cases, but looking at where the song goes, the biggest crime it commits is being painfully unsexy. You have to give it to Mercury for at least trying to make something that was a bit more risque, but since the rest of the album gives up on this idea halfway through is a good sign that the central idea of the record wasn’t working properly.
What makes this even worse is knowing that a lot of what they were trying to capitalise on was happening right around the time that Michael Jackson’s Thriller. ‘The King of Pop’ had been the one that suggested the band release ‘Another One Bites the Dust’ in the first place, but to think that this was the kind of record that they were using to rival every other pop album at the time is almost painfully tragic.
