The Deacon/Mercury Funk Dance Thing Revisited?

[QUOTE] [b]cmsdrums wrote:[/b]
The John interview from '86 might be admitting it was the worst point of their career, but that doesn't necessarily mean that he disliked the album. Freddie loved it but it was still their worst moment from a career point of view, so the two aren't mutually exclusive.[/QUOTE]

Quite an interesting point and I hadn't considered that option. I do remember, though, him confirming at least twice elsewhere that he didn't like it.

The fact is that the only two band members who've publicly slammed that album are John and Roger. Brian's admitted it's not his favourite but he still defends it (which makes sense, this is not B/W), even going to the ridiculous extreme of claiming that without it there'd have been no Thriller.

Maybe for John it was an act of contrition. Roger was the sort to make no bones about it. He was saying there were tracks on the album he didn't like when it came out. But for John, well maybe it was his mea culpa.

Sorry, double post.

Another interesting point to note about the songwriting credits is the shares of dance/funk songs that each member wrote or shared in the writing of. Under Pressure had already been released as a single, so it wasn't part of the Hot Space writing sessions. But of the other tracks:

Freddie wrote 2 and a half tracks (Staying Power, Life is Real and half of Cool Cat), so Freddie's dance/funk percentage is 60%.

John wrote 1 and a half tracks (Back Chat and the other half of Cool Cat, so his dance/funk percentage is 100%.

Roger wrote two tracks (Action This Day and Calling All Girls) so his funk percentage is 50%.

And lastly, Brian wrote three tracks (Dancer, Put Out The Fire and LPDA), so his dance/funk percentage is the lowest at 33.3%.

Maybe those stats say something about each members musical preferences at that time. Interesting also to compare those stats to the fact that Freddie and John were still writing the closest songs to the dance/funk genre on The Miracle at the end of the 80's, yet neither Roger nor Brian were going there at all by that time.

UP *WAS* part of the HS writing sessions, as they began in June 1981. Cool Cat, LPDA, CAG and POTF were reportedly written around the same time as UP.

Hi Sebastian. Thanks for that bit of additional info. So that changes the figures a tad and increases the proportion of non dance tracks. But not by much, as I assume each Queen member gets one fifth of a songwriting credit along with Bowie. Unless Bowie gets half the credit, but I guess it would be more likely to be an equal share for each person involved. Not sure though on that.

But not a huge difference I would think. And from what I understand, UP came out the five of them jamming. So it might have been more of a spontaneous thing and therefore come out of a different process. But it still counts in terms of songwriting credits I guess.

[QUOTE] [b]Heavenite wrote:[/b]
But not a huge difference I would think. And from what I understand, UP came out the five of them jamming. So it might have been more of a spontaneous thing and therefore come out of a different process. But it still counts in terms of songwriting credits I guess.
[/QUOTE]

The lyrics would have been improvised with Bowie, but most of the backing track was already there on the previously recorded Feel Like.

Ad-libbing is a more appropriate term than jamming, and you can still hear it in the final version of Under Pressure.

Thanks Tero!
You guys certainly know much more about the detail than me.
In any case, I think the intuition I had seems to have some evidence to support it. My hunch with those Miracle tracks does seem to suggest that Freddie and John were still dance music sympathisers many years later, despite what happened to Hot Space critically and commercially.

Nothing wrong with that I guess. In fact it may well have added to the creative mix, and may have also broadened the range of Queen fans out there. I mean AOBTD certainly did that.

To be fair, Invisible Man is far more dance than RMF or MBDM... so then again, no - it wasn't a John+Freddie exclusive, not at all.

Fair point Sebastian.
I'd completely forgotten that one. When I think about that song, it definitely has a dance beat to it. Not sure I can distinguish it from the others at all.
I take it someone else wrote that one then? Because as you know it just says Queen on those later albums. I'm guessing Roger Taylor. Surely not Brian?!! :-O

Why not? Is there a physical law that dictates the universe will implode if Brian composes anything other than heavy metal?

BTW, the song is not Brian's, it's Roger's, but it doesn't mean that Brian can't or couldn't come up with one of those had he wanted to.

Hi Sebastian
It was said in jest, because Brian seemed to be the furthest away musically from writing dance/funk music.

Fortunately there is no physical law dictating the universe would implode if Brian composes anything other than heavy metal as he wrote Dancer on Hot Space and we wouldn;t have even have made it that far as he wrote other softer tunes that weren't heavy metal like '39 off Night at the Opera beforehand...lol.

I guess in hindsignt, Roger did do the Shove It album, so he had made move moves after Hot Space towards the dance/funk genre before Miracle came along.

I know for a fact that Brian is physically incapable of writing a proper dance track. He tried it once and his hair went white. Try again, and his nuts will fall off. 100% true.

Not just before The Miracle, but before Shove It as well ... there's some dance/funk influence on his solo albums too.

LOL Holly, ya think?