News of the World (October 1977)
Here's some boring, forensic information about Queen's sixth album: it's entitled News of the World. It was recorded in 1977, between July and September, and released in October of that same year. It was the second album in a row the band produced by themselves in conjunction with engineer Mike Stone and was mostly recorded at Wessex Sound Studios in London, but also in West London's Basing Street Studios. The cover was painted by famed Sci Fi artist Frank Kelly Freas and is based on the cover he painted for the October 1953 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. There are eleven songs on the album, with all four band members writing at least two each.
Now here's all you need to know about News of the World: it is Queen's greatest album. It was better than everything that came before it, and they'd never record anything this good again. A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races are outstanding, containing some of their finest songs. Any other band releasing records that good could never record another note and retire happily, knowing they'd left their mark on popular culture.
But News of the World contain's Queen's two greatest anthems, their heaviest song, and a finalist for Greatest Queen Song of All Time, among other gems. The album's misfires - and there are three of them - do not alter the fact that six songs here easily qualify as top-tier Queen songs, some of the best work the band ever did, and among the best the 70s had to offer.
Music magazine writers never miss an opportunity to remind everyone that News of the World must always be viewed through the lens of the rise of Punk Rock. It was, of course, Queen for whom the Sex Pistols substituted on December 1, 1976, when they cursed on live television, precipitating a cultural uproar. And, as been written about innumerable times, the Sex Pistols were also at Wessex Studios in 1977, recording Never Mind the Bollocks as Queen recorded NOTW. Whether or not Queen had already decided to record something more basic on their own or felt pressured by Punk's encroachment depends on which member of the band you talk to, and what year. Roger Taylor, in 1978: "Our music has got much simpler recently, really, despite what people may think. In terms of studio use and recording techniques 'We Are the Champions' is the most simple track in the charts at the moment." Brian May, in 2017: "We'd already made a decision that... [after] A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races, we wanted to go back to basics for News of the World." Roger Taylor, around 2010: "We couldn't reinvent ourselves as a punk band, but we wanted it a little bit more simple... To be more of the times, I guess we made a more straightforward record."
Not frequently mentioned in discussions about NOTW is that two albums after dropping Roy Thomas Baker as their producer, the band proved as capable in the control room as they were playing their instruments (with an invaluable assist from Mike Stone). As well as being their best album, NOTW is Queen's best sounding album. The rhythm section in particular never sounded as glorious as it does on NOTW. Roger Taylor's kick and snare are beautifully full and earthy. John Deacon's bass tone has the perfect amount of bite. Having set aside millions of vocal and guitar overdubs for the moment, Queen sounded like a straight-up rock band.
Sleeping on the Sidewalk is one of the most forgettable songs in the band's catalog. Queen were never a blues band, and why Brian May thought attempting another blues number was a grand idea, four years after having ripped off Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee with See What a Fool I've Been, is a mystery. The Latin American vibe conjured up by John Deacon's Who Needs You should be a lot more memorable than it is. Even a nifty acoustic guitar lead (presumabley played by May, although Deacon plays acoustic guitar on the track) doesn't save the song from its undistinguished-ness. Freddie's My Melancholy Blues amusingly evokes a smoky lounge and can even be kind of cathartic if you're drinking alone at home late at night. The singer liked his album-closer enough to record it during one of the band's BBC sessions (dig Brian May's solo on the BBC take!) and keep it in the set during the band's 1977 tour. It sounds much better live.
All Dead, All Dead is a bit overwrought, and ventures perilously deep into old-time, epically-overdubbed Queen circa Queen II at the 1:55 mark, but is more than redeemed by some great lyrics in the final verse and chorus, and some beautiful Beatles-esque harmonies throughout. Written at least partially about Brian May's recently deceased cat, it is one of the biggest downers the band ever recorded.
A pretty ballad that featured in three straight Queen tours, Deacon's Spread Your Wings benefits enormously from the fact that the bassist happened to play in the same band as Brian May and Freddie Mercury. Freddie's vocals give the verses with much-needed verve, and May, as he did on You're My Best Friend, spices things up with simple but tastefully tuneful leads. During a BBC session recorded the day NOTW was released, the band taped an even better version of the song, with Taylor doubling the tempo in the outro. It's exhilarating stuff. Why in hell didn't they do this on the album version?
Freddie's Get Down, Make Love is ridiculous and indispensable. It's been called funk-metal and the freak-out middle section has been called psychedelic, but what astonishes - aside from Mercury's hilarious, intentionally over-the-top lyrics - is the musicianship. With all sorts of space in which to stretch out during the staccato stop-start verses (a rarity in the Queen catalog), Freddie's bandmates rise to the occasion, each adding key flavoring and tension to a song that should be way more popular than it is. Taylor's fills, alternating between snare and roto-toms, snap your head like a whip, sometimes slow and heavy, sometimes fast and cracking, always keeping you suitably off kilter (16 of them - 0:11, 0:19, 0:25, 0:32, 0:46, 0:59, 1:23, 1:30, 1:37, 1:43, 1:50, 2:03, 2:10, 3:18, 3:24, and a superb fill at 1:56). Brian May's feedback sets the mood early from 0:03 to 0:11, and some perfectly placed power chords beef up the song at 0:50, 0:55, 1:52, 1:55, 2:11, 2:14, and 3.26. He also adds precision menace at 0:12, 0:26, 0:29, 0:36, 0:46, 1:24, 1:43, 1:46, 2:04, and 3:20.
But all of this would be academic without John Deacon's inspired work. You can trace the "funk-metal" label directly to the colossal fills he delivers at 0:31, 0:41, 0:48, 1:25, 1:39, 1:49, and 3:23.
Finally, there's Freddie, in total command of this magnificent aberration, sleazy vocals to the fore ("I suck your mind - you blow my head," etc.), mirrored by some impeccable piano playing (1:40). If you ever doubted the band's genius, listen to what happens at the end of the third and final verse. Instead of clipping it off and heading into the chorus with a drum fill, as happens the previous two times, May Plays over Taylor's fill, dropping to A flat (the song is in the unorthodox key of E flat), falling almost grudgingly a step down to G flat, and then up a half-step to G for the chorus. A flat, G flat, and G, all in a row. The effect is heavy and even momentarily disorienting (did these guys just change keys? No, wait...). It doesn't get much better than this, kids.
Taylor's Fight from the Inside - the 1st of two tracks that are essentially Roger Taylor solo songs on NOTW, both of which address teen angst and disaffection - continues in the funk-metal vein, another bass-heavy, borderline sinister song. The bass and guitar are about as nasty as you'll find in Queen's recorded output (guitarist Slash cites it as a fave), and Taylor's lyrics may fairly be described as political, what with his writing off the unnamed teenage protagonist as a "money-spinner tool." The only thing the drummer did wrong in an otherwise perfect song is a misstep in the chorus. It starts going from E flat to F twice, then switching to B flat to F. He should've switched back to E flat/F one more time when he sings "you can't win with your hands tied," for maximum effect. The entire Ranting Russell staff strongly recommends that he re-record the song with this change.
Queen take their genius another order higher with Taylor's other composition on NOTW, Sheer Heart Attack. This is one of those rare moments when all the best pieces of the universe fall miraculously into place for one fleeting instance and you're reminded that life really is a gift. Begun in 1974 but not finished and recorded until 1977, it is the most punk rock song ever recorded by a non-punk rock band and is right up there with the best songs recorded by The Sex Pistols, The Damned, and The Clash. It is a pile-driving tour-de-force. It erupts in your face with a squeal from Brian May's Red Special, assaulting your skull relentlessly over its entire three minutes and 28 seconds. Taylor accentuates the assault with explosive crashes at 1:29, 1:37, 1:45, 2:08, and 2:20, the last leading into May's "solo," twenty seconds of excruciating, high-pitched NOISE (don't believe me? Listen to it all the way through on high volume. It hurts). played over a single, pounding bar chord that is mercifully squelched by Taylor's propulsive drumming, taking us back to a final, crazed chorus that ends in an instant, falling off a cliff. No outro, no fade. Just over. For the essence of teen angst, look no further than Freddie singing "I feel so inarticulate" at the end of each chorus.
"As years have passed," Chuck Eddy wrote in 2009, "News of the World has come to be best known as The Album With 'We Will Rock You' And 'We Are The Champions' On It." This is an unfair appraisal, given all the other great songs on this record, but the We Are the Champions/We Will Rock You double A-side single remains a worldwide phenomenon 43 years after it stormed the charts, with both songs played in every soccer, football, basketball, and baseball stadium in every nook and cranny of planet earth on a daily basis. Critics - especially contemporaneous critics - delighted in pedantically heaping scorn on the songs, begging the question: do music critics actually like music? We Are the Champions is one of the most deliriously tuneful things I've ever heard. It's the ultimate pop song - you can sing along to it the first time you hear it. The choruses are epic. I lose myself in every note Brian May plays on this track. Yes, the lyrics are arrogant and pretentious. (Like there's not a lot of that in rock'n'roll music.) It's Freddie Mercury, for Pete's sake. Why get worked up about the small things?
And true genius is May's work at the end of We Will Rock You. Listen closely: when the guitar feedback comes in at 1:21, it's in E. But when he hits that gargantuan first chord at the end of the final chorus, it's a C. But when the solo proper begins at 1:35, it's in A. Dr. May fools you twice. Bloody brilliant.
But not quite as brilliant as It's Late, the final Six-Minutes-Plus, Lots-Of-Parts tune of Queen's career. Built around three "scenes" in a love life fraught with peril, It's Late's lyrics are familiar territory for Queen fans. The music, however, is as electrifying as anything recorded within a radius of 20 years. With John Deacon and Roger Taylor locked in as tight as any rhythm section could ever hope to be, the song builds ruthlessly, sporting two sections where Taylor doubles the tempo, driving the song into a fever pitch, and Brian May schools every other guitarist on the planet from beginning to end. This was the guitarist's only significant foray into the hammer-ons favored by Metal guitarists, but he eschews the million-miles-an-hour solos championed by the likes of Eddie Van Halen and Yngwie Malmsteen, instead playing very deliberately, bending almost every note into position, ratcheting up the tension by making a lot of it sound almost out of tune. After two key changes Taylor doubles the tempo, and some out of left-field chord changes and a titanic drum fill take us back to one last verse and chorus. Moving back to the song's original tempo after the frenetic guitar leads is almost gleefully sadistic on the band's part (see additional kick drum beat at 4:41), but right when the song appears to be over at 5:50, another furious Taylor fill starts an explosive outro, culminating in a crazed one-chord bludgeoning that ends the song.
Two years after owning the #1 spot for nine weeks with one of the most complex, overdubbed songs ever recorded, Queen stripped down their sound and recorded their best album. NOTW was a worldwide hit, and broke them in America, the dream of every British rock band. There was no need to issue statements slagging off all the smug, self-important music critics that relentlessly castigated them in print, no need to ask them point blank, whaddya think now, creep? The last laugh was always theirs: Queen simply couldn't help putting out hit records and being wildly popular. All that was left to do was top the charts with an album that was even more offensive to the critics who hated them.
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