On Friday, dear reader, I completed a quest that was begun on 8 March 1986. Basically I am a more noble version of Sir Lancelot, King Arthur, Sir Galahad and a taller, less hairy, Frodo I set out to compete an unimaginably difficult task and saw it through at great personal cost.
In point of fact it hasn’t been a bed of roses, no pleasure cruise, I considered it a challenge before the whole human race and I wasn’t going to lose. Word up your mother.
After falling in love the first time* with Queen at Live Aid I borrowed a friend’s sisters copy of Queen Greatest Hits (I suspect entirely unknown to her) and there perusing the inner sleeve a quest was born. I would buy all Queen’s LPs – an almost impossibly big ask for a young man of extremely limited means**.
So I started with Jazz in March 1986 and ploughed on from there, the first 7 LPs in the 1537 were all Queen and then I may have got a touch distracted.
So it came to pass that the only one I’ve needed for about a decade now was The Game, the follow-up to Live Killers and the point at which they cautiously started to embrace the synthesiser and move away from 70’s hard rock flavours. It was never a big favourite, despite contributing 3 cuts to Greatest Hits which is possibly why I left it to last.
Playing it on Friday night was confirmation that it is kinda good-mediocre^^ at best. The title track is cod-Beatles bollocks at its worst and ‘Crazy Thing Called Love’, never a favourite, sounds worse with every passing year, while ‘Don’t Try Suicide’ is bad enough to actually invert the song’s message.
BUT ‘Another One Bites The Dust’ is genius anyway you slice it, or question its authorship; ‘Dragon Attack’ is built around some particularly great bass work by John Deacon; ‘Sail Away Sweet Sister’ is genuinely rather affecting and ‘Save Me’ has been a real favourite since I was 13 years old^*.
So your classic curate’s egg then. The production by Queen with Mack is excellent and I quite enjoy the inner sleeve where each member of the band has clearly been instructed to look as awkward as they humanly could on a balcony overlooking a snowy Bavarian scene; all very ‘Snowblind’ behaviour.
I’m really happy I own The Game at last. It strokes all the right bits of my collector’s brain and it is a nice object in its own right, who knows if I tick off some more of these goals I may even be able to progress beyond my own adolescence and become (gulps) a grown-up?! Save me!!
1233 Down (still).
*and this time I knew it was real.
**I had taped them from a network of friend’s and acquaintances within about a year and a half. Plus the beasts were hardly fighting fair by continuing to release new stuff^.
^incidentally I’m only interested in LPs released while Freddie was alive.
^^sorry Deke, I know you like this one.
^*although we all used to sing ‘Shave Me’ in reference to Mr Mercury’s luxuriant ‘tache.
Mercury was the best writer in early Queen, IMO. But by this time, May was the most consistent, ‘Sail Away Sweet Sister’ and ‘Save Me’ are good deep cuts. And ‘Dragon Attack’ rules!
I agree with you, Mercury’s writing was more unpredictable. I do have a real soft spot for John Deacon too.
My sentiments on ‘The Game’ exactly! Absolutely love ‘Save Me’, maybe their most under-rated single? And seeing Freddie on the catwalk with all the hands coming out of it on Top of the Pops for ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’ made an impression on me. But neither the library nor any of my friends’s older siblings had this which should have told me something… I’d forgotten how good ‘Sail Away Sweet Sister’ and ‘Dragon Attack’ are, I’d forgotten how bad ‘Don’t Try Suicide’ and ‘Rock It (Prime Jive)’ (deliberately ommitted from your assessment?) are, and I’d forgotten how forgettable ‘Need Your Loving Tonight’ is. But next up we had ‘Hot Space’…
Cheers Tim – I am slightly worried for you that you are actually becoming me? sort of like single white female, but without the sex (one hopes)?
I loved Dragon and Sister, I really did and yeah Save Me is never far away from m affections.
Good taste is good taste! But fear not, I’m a slightly older model, lacking the many impressive features. And I’m not Welsh. I think our vaguely aligned genes diverged when I got my copy of ‘Ride the Lightning’ and my first issue of Metal Hammer!
I’m sorry you’re not Welsh Tim. Please try not to blame yourself, it isn’t fair but there probably isn’t much you could have done about it.
There’s probably a support group or something.
Never could get into this one as much as all their previous albums. Some good tunes though. What’s the authorship deal with ‘Another One Bites The Dust’?
John Deacon allegedly stole the bass line from Chic, I think, and the fact that ‘…Dust’ was so successful because of the bassline rankled with Bernard and Nile, especially as it was around the whole ‘disco sucks’ backlash time.
Interesting! Did not know about that. Cheers Tim.
Tim beat me to it!
There was also a race element too – a white man doing this, appropriating a black artist’s work was embraced by rock radio, when the original artist wasn’t.
My big regret with Queen was that they played Sun City 7 times in 1984; my family were very involved in the anti-apartheid movement and it really did rankle when I found out later on via Steve Van Zant.
When I first heard “Crazy Little Thing Called Love,” I thought it was an unreleased Elvis song.