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.