It Ends With Pessimism

36 years ago today in 23 January 1984 Queen released Radio Ga Ga as a single from their The Works Album.

The song written by Roger Taylor.

The single was a worldwide success for the band reaching number one in 19 countries, number two on the UK Singles Chart and the Australian Kent Music Report and number 16 on the US Billboard Hot 100.

They performed the song at every concert from 1984 to their last concert with Mercury in 1986, including their performance at Live Aid in 1985

The music video for the song uses footage from the 1927 silent science fiction film Metropolis . It received heavy rotation on music channels and was nominated for an MTV Video Music Award in 1984.

Queen had to pay the German government to use clips of it in the video.

Roger Taylor wrote this as a critique of radio stations, which were becoming commercialized and playing the same songs over and over (and this was before radio was deregulated, allowing companies to own multiple stations in a market, resulting in more corporate ownership, less competition and generally bad radio).

Taylor claimed that he was inspired to write this after watching MTV. He noticed that lots of kids were watching the channel instead of listening to the radio.

Roger Taylor was quoted:

"That's part of what the song's about, really. The fact that they [music videos] seem to be taking over almost from the aural side, the visual side seems to be almost more important."

The inspiration for this song came when Roger Taylor heard his son utter the words "radio ca-ca" while listening to a bad song on the radio while they were in Los Angeles . After hearing the phrase, Taylor began writing the song when he locked himself in a room with a Roland Jupiter-8 and a drum machine . He thought it would fit his solo album, but when the band heard it, John Deacon wrote a bassline and Freddie Mercury reconstructed the track, thinking it could be a big hit. Taylor then took a skiing holiday and let Mercury polish the lyrics, harmony, and arrangements of the song.

Creators.

Bastille- Pompeii (Live on SNL, 2014)

The song Bastille made for the John Lewis advert is already available...

Talking about the We Will Rock You musical