#hot space

Album cover crosstitches I've made! I'm aiming to make 9 and frame them if you have any suggestions for albums (not too complicated) id be happy to hear!

1. Night at the opera - Queen

2. Hot space - Queen

3. Rumours - Fleetwood mac

4. Full moon fever - Tom Petty

5. Belladonna - Stevie Nicks

6. Damn the torepedos - Tom petty & the

Heartbreakers

The Marauders as Hot Space by Queen album cover

is that what’s happening in this picture? Or is this something else entirely

Lol, no *this* is his reaction to it

May 1984, International Musician and Recording World magazine by Paul Gallotta

Topics: Hot Space album, The Works album, Bohemian Rhapsody music video, Fred Mandel keyboard player, Michael Jackson collaboration, Giogio Moroder collaboration, Radio GaGa, Equipment

Queen have always been one of those aggregations that critics love to wear out their thesauri on, looking for new adjectives with which to deflate what has become one of the highest-grossing bands in history. It isn’t their musicianship that has been questioned, rather, it has been their reliance on studio techniques. Until recently, Queen passed over synthesizers in favor of effects and a lot of overdubs, which made their music decidedly difficult to reproduce on stage.

With or without the overdubs and effects, in the studio or live, Queen command respect. Brian May is easily one of rock’s most innovative guitarists, wringing sounds from his hand-made axe, the Red Special, which range from a jazz horn section to a revving engine. Freddie Mercury (whose vocals may owe more to Liza Minelli than to Roger Daltrey) can rock out with the best of the competition, and yet his voice doesn't disintegrate when he sings ballads. And the rhythm section of John Deacon (bass) and Roger Taylor (drums) is one of the most powerful (and under-rated) around.

Queen formed in 1971 when May and Taylor, then in a band called Smile, teamed up with Mercury, a theatrical singer for a band called Wreckage. Last to join was John Deacon. They rehearsed for two years before releasing their self-titled debut LP in 1973. The next year, they were voted Melody Maker’s band of the year, outdistancing such heavy guns as Led Zeppelin and the Who. By 1977, England was going through the minimalist punk backlash, and Queen were singled out for particularly scathing criticism because of their musical “excesses”; however, it was also in 1977 that A Night at the Opera was voted the best record of the past 25 years by the British Phonographic Industry. In 1981, Queen played to the largest paying audience for a single act in rock history: In Sao Paolo, Brazil, over 131,000 people turned out to see them in action.

But their fortunes changed rather abruptly in 1982. Hot Space, an album with a heavy emphasis on synthesized r&b, almost cost Queen their crown. Its commercial failure caused tensions to mount, and amid the inevitable rumors of a breakup, Queen’s members took a much-needed sabbatical. Brian May recorded the mini-album Star Fleet Project with Edward Van Halen. John Deacon recorded a rather secretive rap record with some Jamaican musicians, while Roger Taylor recorded his second solo LP, Strange Frontier. Freddie Mercury teamed up with Michael Jackson and then with Giorgio Moroder to produce some as-of-yet unreleased material.

“Hot Space wasn’t really what people wanted to hear from Queen. It didn’t have that heavy content.” — Roger Taylor

Last August, Queen were back together again. Freshly signed with Capitol Records in the U.S., they began work on what was ostensibly the most important album of their 13-year career. After five months divided between Musicland Studios in Munich, the Record Plant in L.A., and their own private studio in Montreux, The Works hit the streets with a promising bang; the first single, “Radio Ga Ga,” debuted on the British charts at #4.

---

IM&RW: “Bohemian Rhapsody” was one of the first songs ever to be accompanied by a video. Where did that idea come from?

RT: It was actually the first rock video that was meant as such. It was our own idea.

JD: We knew we were going to tour England at the time, which meant we wouldn’t have the time to be on the TV program “Top of the Pops,” so we decided to make a film of some sort that could take our place.

RT: We shot it during the last night of rehearsals. It took about four hours, and when we were done, we all climbed onto the bus and drove straight to Liverpool and did the first gig for the A Night at the Opera tour.

JD: It was all rather enjoyable because it was done so quickly.

IM&RW: A lot of bands complain that it takes almost as much time to complete the video as it does to record the actual song. Do you find that sort of thing to be true with Queen?

RT: Well, we no longer work as intensely as we once did, so it isn’t that bad. And we no longer follow the cycle of “do the album, do the tour, do another album, another tour,” we’ve gotten out of that cycle over the past two years or so. We took a year off. We decided not to do another album until the time was right. Which is what we’ve done. To be perfectly honest with you, I find the sort of thing we’re doing now, this promotional work, the hardest thing we do.

JD: It is infinitely harder than recording or playing.

RT: The mental strain will get to you.

BM: Promotional work can be exceptionally difficult when you are on tour as well.

IM&RW: I’d imagine the talking part of the business could be really taxing on your voices, especially because Queen seems to use so many high harmonies, like the trills in “Bohemian Rhapsody.”

RT: It can be very painful, actually. I naturally sing quite high; my voice improves in the higher ranges, but they’re what we call “forcep jobs.”

IM&RW: How can you maintain that range night after night?

BM: Now we pace the shows accordingly. We don’t do five shows a week anymore.

RT: Fred’s voice is very powerful, and it takes a hell of a beating during the course of a show. That’s why we don’t do any more than three shows in a row, and we have at least a day off in between cities.

JD: But it is in fact worse when you have a few days off, because you lose the swing of it. I’d prefer to play seven days a week on a tour.

RT: (Laughs) Yeah, but the show we put on is a very energetic one, and we aren’t fitness freaks at all. The tours themselves will get you in a certain state that’ll keep you going. Also, we are not one of those bands that like to rush out of the building the second we climb off stage. We like to stay in the dressing room and unwind—and criticize each others’ performances (laughs). Then we get loaded.

IM&RW: On your last tour, you added an additional keyboard player, Fred Mandel, and The Works has even more emphasis on keyboards. Will you have anyone handling the keyboards on stage for this tour?

RT: I don’t think we’ll get Fred Mandel. He’s off with Elton John right now. But he is a very good keyboard player, and he helped the sound tremendously. He really lightened the load from Freddie’s shoulders.

BM: We’ll almost certainly have an additional player. It’s become an integral part of our sound.

JD: We’ll probably tour to support The Works, but we don’t really know when or where.

IM&RW: Who actually played the synthesizers on The Works?

JD: We all did. We used an Oberheim OBX and a Fairlight.

IM&RW: I understand you recorded most of The Works in Munich, but you own a studio in Montreux. Why not record it there?

RT: Good question . . .

JD: The guy we recorded it with, Mack, lives in Munich, and he’s very much at home with it there. In fact, he just bought the studio.

RT: We have done a bit of work in Montreux. Well, actually, the studio we have there is really nice, but the town is a bit small for us. And also, over the years, we’ve grown really quite fond of Munich. It’s really a very nice city.

BM: It helps when you are starting a new album to sometimes put yourself in a different situation, a different atmosphere. I think we know Montreux too well.

IM&RW: Did you write any of The Works while you were in the studio?

RT: Most of it, actually. A lot of the songs we didn’t use, but most of the creative work was done in the studio.

IM&RW: What happened if you all showed up one day and nobody could think of anything creative?

RT: We’d bite our nails . . .

BM: We have all four of us writing, so we usually never get to that point.

IM&RW: Whose idea was it to borrow the chorus of “Vesti La Giubba” (from the opera I Pagliacci) for the intro to “It’s a Hard Life”?

BM: That was Freddie’s idea. He really likes opera, and we thought it’d fit in nicely.

IM&RW: Was it Freddie’s idea to follow up on the rockabilly vein of “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” with The Works’ “Man on the Prowl”?

BM: Right, that was Freddie again. He was very much influenced by early Elvis, and his voice suits it very well.

IM&RW: I understand that he did some work with Michael Jackson.

RT: They were writing; they did some songs together.

JD: I don’t think they’ve actually committed any to vinyl yet.

RT: They had to go off and do different things, and they never finished. But I’ve heard the songs, and they were very good.

IM&RW: Do you think they’ll show up on the next Queen album?

RT: I really don’t know. At one point, one was going to be on Thriller, but they never finished it.

RT: I really don’t know. At one point, one was going to be on Thriller, but they never finished it.

IM&RW: I hear Freddie is working on something with Giorgio Moroder.

BM: Yeah. What had happened was that we had known Giorgio for a while—we had bumped into him in L.A.—and he had bought the rights to do certain things with Metropolis, this Fritz Lang movie from 1926, a really wonderful silent film. He’s writing music for it and is restoring it using his own resources, finding bits and pieces of it that have vanished over the years. We saw the film as he had it, and it sort of connected with some of our ideas. We thought it would be nice to use a piece of the film in a promotional way, a video. He said, “O.K., so long as Freddie sings one of the tracks in the film.” From there he sent us a track called “Love Kills.” Well, Freddie wasn’t too keen on singing it the way it was and largely rewrote it; as a matter of fact, we all worked on it.

RT: So it was like a swap. We used Metropolis for “Radio GaGa.”

IM&RW: I don’t quite understand the basis for that single. Queen never struck me as a band that would have any trouble getting onto a radio station’s playlist.

RT: People in America do seem to take it like that, but that’s not really what the song is about. It’s saying that radio isn’t as prominent as it once was. Perhaps there is a bit more garbage on it, but it isn’t about airplay or slagging off the radio. Radio has become a bit too formularized in America. It’s not what it was. But the song is a bit historical. Radio was once very important, even though the song isn’t really a precise statement. Now it seems that the videos are almost as important as the music. And of course we had to go out and make a video of the song! Ironic, isn’t it?

JD: That, to me, is the only down side of MTV. Every time you hear a song, you automatically picture the video.

BM: I like Toto very much, but I didn’t like their videos. They’re great musicians, but their music doesn’t translate to video very well.

IM&RW: In retrospect, Hot Space wasn’t exactly your most popular album.

RT: Cheers.

BM: Exactly.

IM&RW: What do you think was wrong with it?

JD: If you’re talking about selling a lot of records, then I guess there was something wrong with it.

IM&RW: Were you happy with it?

JD: We were when we released it.

RT: It was a different direction, but it wasn't what people wanted to hear from Queen, and perhaps it was too much in one direction. It wasn’t as varied as most of our albums are. It didn’t have that heavy content.

BM: I think it was also exceptionally bad timing on our part. The whole atmosphere was very wrong at the time. Most people were worried about rock being taken over by disco. A lot of people said that if we’d released it a year later, it would have done much better. It really wasn’t that good of an album in terms of what we could have done, I suppose. That’s why we took our time with this one. We wanted to make sure that everything was just right. But Hot Space was nothing that I regret doing.

IM&RW: As far as equipment goes, you really haven’t changed anything over the course of the past 12 years.

BM: Yeah.

IM&RW: I understand that Guild is working on a Brian May model guitar.

BM: They are. I’m very excited about it, and they’ve done a lovely job. I think it’ll be available here in about four months.

IM&RW: And you’re still using the Vox AC30?

BM: It’s a clean-sounding amp and it’s very warm. I like it because it’s different.

IM&RW: John, you’re still using the Fender Precision?

JD: Yeah.

IM&RW: Have you ever really tried anything different?

JD: Yeah, but the Fender Precision is the one I’m most comfortable with. I have others, but with the Precision, you just plug it in and you get a great sound straight away. Even in the studio.

IM&RW: Roger, it sounds like you’ve added Simmons to your collection.

RT: Actually, I’ve been using them for some time.

IM&RW: Your particular style seems to abuse the drums more. Does playing the Simmons hurt your wrists?

RT: Yeah, they are murder on the wrists, but it’s not so much the muscle I use when I play, it’s in the flick of the wrists. And now Simmons has this new kit where the drums are covered with foam. There’s also this new method of playing them where you don’t actually have to play them. I can use a sequencer, and all you have to do is press buttons. I use it in conjunction with the new Linn Machine.

IM&RW: Sounds like a lot less work.

RT: It is.

IM&RW: In the song “No More of That Jazz” you said, “Only football gives us thrills/rock ’n’ roll just pays the bills.” What exactly did you mean by that?

RT: That was taken very much in the wrong way. It was meant to be ironic. I really don’t like football. I guess I was trying to be too clever at the time. I really meant the opposite.