Man On The Prowl is underrated

I like several songs on The Works better than I Want to Break Free. I could never really get into that song. Just wanted to throw that out there.

Perhaps their public perception as a 'singles band' actually led them, whether it be consciously or not, towards making albums where the singles were the good songs and the rest (broadly speaking) was filler. This can definitely be said for Magic..

Magic is my least favourite album too, but its still got some good songs on it, usually the heavy ones. Gimme the Prize is a ripper in my book and Don't Lose Your Head isn't half bad either.

I think Freddie's voice is the weakest it was over his entire career on that album. Songs like Just One Year of Love and Friends Will Be Friends mught have been a whole lot better if Freddie had sung them they had sung on earlier albums.

Makes me wonder if smoking was affecting his voice at that point. I know he never stopped completely, but maybe he pulled right back on it in later years because of his illness.

Not sure if anyone else can shed some light on this.

Smoking didn't affect his voice at all. A Kind Of Magic is one of his best vocal albums (from a technical view). His voice was really strong on all the tracks.

Jazz is his weakest vocal album (he actually cracks on some higher notes and is on the verge of cracking on some songs).

Thanks for the response Greg. Technically you may well be right, although I think the richness of his tone is affected in some bits on AKOM. Bits like "There's always a rainy day without you" in "One of Love" are the sort of things I'm talking about. His voice seems raspy and forced to me on those high notes. I haven't noticed that sort of thing happening on Jazz although I couldn't rule it out.

Well on AKOM, Freddie's vocal style changed to more of a "chesty belting" type of style. On most songs, he was showcasing power and didn't really sing "soft" on that album (although "Pain Is So Close To Pleasure" has some really nice falsetto singing). On "One Year Of Love," Freddie was going for a more "soulful" vocal style and was deliberately constricting his throat to produce that strained tone on the song (like on "there's always a rainy day without you").

Hi Greg
Yes, I had never considered that he might be deliberately singing in that more "chesty belting" type of style. I can barely criticise anything Freddie ever did, so you may be right. Not my favourite style of singing though, if that's the case. Although in hindsight it does seem quite deliberate what Freddie is doing there.
The only other thing I was thinking is that maybe his view was deeper in the 80's, thus the chestiness came in part from having a lower vocal register as he grew older. Havings said that, it is much less in evidence on Innuendo and Mother Love especially.

Well his voice did mature and deepen over the years! As for the later albums (The Miracle onwards), he started to lose power (especially on his chest voice), due to his illness progressing. He compensated by singing with a lighter tone (plus his vocal technique was at its best from the mid 80s-onward), which allowed him to hit his higher notes with more of a mix/head voice sound.

For the singing styles on AKOM, there's songs where he sings with a heavy chest connection (One Vision, One Year Of Love, Gimme The Prize, Princes Of The Universe), but there's songs where he drops the "belting" style like "Pain Is So Close To Pleasure," "A Kind Of Magic" (which has nice 5th octave notes in mixed voice), and "Who Wants To Live Forever" has great vocals!

Very interesting your comments there Greg. I guess for me if Fred was going to sing a soft one, then I preferred the vocal on something like Who Wants to Live Forever to the one on One Year of Love. Not that crazy about the falsetto vocal on Pain is So Close to Pleasure either, although Freddie was great at trying different things and I guess it was fair enough.

Interestingly you mention One Vision as being a song where Freddie used that belting style. I actually think his voice was still pretty much the same as it was on The Works on One Vision. Of course One Vision was released in advance of the album by a few months, so it seems to me that the change in style in Freddie's voice was first noticeable to me on AKOM. It definitely wasn't there on Mr Bad Guy the year before either.

Just on your points about Freddie using a mix/head voice sound, its rather ironic to me that as Freddie got sicker his voice came closer again to the way I had always loved it. I love just about all the vocals on Innuendo and Made in Heaven, whereas the vocal on Breakthru off The Miracle was another that I didn't enjoy as much because of the type of vocal that Freddie was now delivering. Having said that, I thought his belting style was perfect on songs like Party, Khashoggi's Ship and I Want It All.

A lot of the vocals from Made in Heaven are from the 1980 - 1988 era.

Hi Sebastian
Interesting! I don't know much about the source of the stuff on Made in Heaven. The only one I have heard is that Mother Love was the last song Freddie worked on. A pretty amazing vocal to finish off with.

Worst song, as bad as that song about windows thing.

I used to think that Marcos, but it really grew on me.

Hi Marcos
Yes, it amazes me how taste can be so different. I have always loved Mother Love but the "windows thing", as you put it, took a long time to grow on me. Now my least favourite tracks on The Works are the two rockers, although I think Hammer to Fall isn't too bad and is way way better than Tear It Up.

Keep Passing The Open Windows is surprisingly good in my opinion. Sadly condemned to obscurity though.