"Which future for Queen?" - article from Italian magazine 'Ciao 2001', 1984

Hi everybody.

In 1984, Queen made their first trip to Italy as a band. In February they did a mimed performance at the '34th Sanremo Song Festival', while in September they returned in the country as a part of their European tour of 'The Works', playing two shows at the old Palazzetto dello Sport in Milan.

Unfortunately, those were the only two occasions in which Queen were in close contact with the Italian crowd. After the two gigs in Milan, the Italian press reported those two nights; a well known magazine of the time, called Ciao 2001 (active from 1968 to 2000) also published an article about Queen's career until that time.

This interesting article, originally entitled QUALE FUTURO PER I QUEEN? (translated as Which future for Queen?), was written by Italian journalist Federico Ballanti and was published in the issue of Ciao 2001 of 23 September 1984 (pages 56-57). I wanted to translate the article (not exactly laudatory) from Italian to English...and here it is.





A critical analysis of the career and artistic production of Freddie Mercury's group, exhibited in Italy in recent days. Eleven years of activity between controversies and sensational successes. From the hard rock of the beginnings, to the great and famous success built on recording and concert skills. All this in conjunction with their first time in Italy...



The first cover of Queen, the one of their debut album from 1973 "Queen", was already a stylistic-aesthetic program. Against a background of purple-pink light a large beam of dazzling light crossed the whole space of the table diagonally to illuminate the singer in the position of celebrant. The arms turned upwards, the microphone stand as the focal point of the rite in progress, the whole body stretched out for the evident tension that the celebration entails. Just a black corner of the platform which forms the base of the singer is represented on the table. The Place is the Light, the Space rather than the concrete stage of wooden planks. An aesthetic program, we said. For two reasons. The first exterior to Queen and rather referable to a good part of the rock scene of the first half of the seventies, when all rock, proceeding on the path undertaken at the end of the previous decade in California with the so-called counterculture, was attributed a catalyzing function and was connected to an alleged cultural universe expressed by world youth united by rock itself (as a conventional language). The artworks of the record covers, together with the content they covered, were critical coins in the construction of the meanings then claimed. In some way they enclosed, synthesized concepts that would then be taken up on a larger scale inside, between the black grooves of the vinyl.

So Queen weren't the first in wanting to conceptualize their album covers. We remember in 1973 the covers of "Houses Of The Holy" by Led Zeppelin or "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" by Elton John or "The Dark Side Of The Moon" by Pink Floyd, a few years before the albums by Jethro Tull and by King Crimson. A widespread trend, therefore, which Queen does not shy away from. But the most important reason, the second, is more closely connected with the identity of the group itself. Queen, according to a widespread theory that has accompanied them since their birth in 1973, are a product wanted and imposed on the market by EMI, the powerful English record company that at that time was looking for artists to compete (and possibly supplant in the charts) to two scary monsters of the British and non-British youth of the time: Led Zeppelin and David Bowie. We will then return to this theme, which is important to understand Queen in their essence. Meanwhile, let's say that that first cover was somehow a confirmation of these insinuations. Consciously or not, Queen felt in any case the continuers and perhaps the modernizers of the two styles that the names mentioned above impersonated with greater credibility: hard rock and glam rock, that is, the pounding and strong-colored rock and the ultra-electric one, transsexual (or rather asexual, since in general rock is considered male...) and decadent.
A demanding and almost prohibitive program. After all, the band of Freddie Mercury, vocals, Brain May, guitar, Roger Taylor, drums, and John Deacon, bass, could be considered nothing less than a group of rookies with rosy prospects, and this only considering that the individual qualities and personalities they were already of a good standard. In fact, listening to the first two albums, this commitment can be seen more in a trend key than in its actual realization. Plus an underground tension, a creative and technical urgency that emerges with arrogance (for example in the classic "Seven Seas Of Rhye" from 1974) even if it is inevitably held back by the lack of maturity of the group, maturity that must be evaluated in comparison with subsequent works , and with the unfamiliarity with electronic equipment capable of providing the decisive technological support to fully realize the ambitions of innovation.

But let's go back for a moment to that mention made above regarding the insinuations on the falsity of Queen as a group, that is, on the hype of its international launch. It is now difficult to evaluate things, eleven years later, with the necessary clarity. What is certain is that Queen's advertising launch was enormous, a clear sign that the record company was confidently aiming, at least apparently, on the band. What is certain is also the fact that Led Zeppelin were tarnished in Europe after the long absence due to the continuous American tours, and "Houses Of The Holy", contributed to accentuate their crisis (which did not happen in America, on the contrary). It is also certain that David Bowie in 1973, after the disappointment due to the bad reviews received for the album "Aladdin Sane" announced during the long English tour (sixty dates) his intention to retire from the rock scene (May 1973 at Hammersmith Odeon). So Queen can be seen as those who threw themselves headlong into the void that opened in England. Where in any case the demand for heavy rock and decadent pop was still very strong.
The problem is, if anything, to verify if the birth of Queen, and the immediate success that the band achieved, was a normal handover or if this passage was solicited and stimulated by the industrial pressures to which Queen submitted supinely. The truth is probably a more balanced version of the two opposing theories. The void was there and had to be filled. Queen were the right band at the right time and, albeit with some initial stylistic difficulty (the debt to Led Zeppelin was evident at the beginning) they were able to more or less carry out the more or less conscious program they had in mind in the 1973. And perhaps indirect proof that Queen were more suitable substitutes for that moment of crisis that Led Zeppelin and Bowie went through (who as we know have largely recovered) we have it from another band, Cockney Rebel, who as Queen played very electric and decadent rock, albeit with different outcomes. That band debuted the same year as Queen but soon learned from circulation: the cliché generally doesn't pay off, and if Queen survived it's because they have more resources on their side than originally suspected.

That premonitory cover of the first album, with that decadent and tense atmosphere at the same time and that promise of a Rite that would be celebrated, was therefore successful. But at first she was greeted by a unanimous chorus of criticism and accused of plagiarism.

The chamaleons of rock

Another great polemic that has always accompanied Queen is that of their protean and ingenious, for some, shrewd and ill-concealed, for others, ability to know how to adapt to the subsequent trends that emerge in the music consumer market and dominate from time to time the charts. Queen have at various stages of their history, which has been going on for eleven years now, stylistic wrenches, always lucky changes of direction, always able to allow the band rankings and sales of albums in increasing quantities. "Sheer Heart Attack", the third album of 1975, with the two hit singles "Killer Queen" and "Now I'm Here", allows Queen to make a splash in America, Japan and throughout Europe. The album marks the first real realization of the program they mentioned at the beginning: Queen move towards a rock with very different climates, no longer monolithic, but faded in its results, always less substantiated and richer, on the other hand, of adjectives, perhaps less virile than that of his debut but more endowed with the typical characters of international music. Transactional rock, basically refined melange suitable for any audience.
And here we return to the doubts and criticisms: cunning operation or simple artistic evolution of a growing and expanding group? The results of the third album, not to mention the true stylistic explosion of "A Night At The Opera" of 1975 and of the subsequent twin "A Day At The Races" of 1976, recall those underground tensions and those trends that emerged already in some passages of the first works. It is evident that an effort in this direction, made collectively but in particular by Freddie Mercury (both "Killer Queen" and the following "Bohemian Rhapsody" and "Somebody To Love" are from his pen, three hits that in the space of three years consecrate Queen all over the world) begins to bear the fruits that at first were only hoped for. And also the group, which at first focused only on muscular rock and wild and aggressive shows, matures in the direction of more mature shows and complex albums in the conception and realization. Think of the thousands of overdubs and manipulations of all kinds that the albums just mentioned have undergone to be able to reach that high standard that they are able to offer.
With these observations we certainly do not want to support the great artistic quality of the band, but only the stylistic-aesthetic coherence that has characterized the group from its beginnings. Coherence that is superficially difficult to grasp but which with a minimum of reflection is not impossible to evaluate as a whole. Of course, kitsch and unconscious parody are always lurking when certain paths like the one taken by Queen in the mid-seventies are disconnected. And in fact, if on the one hand they removed the faithful followers of the beginnings, on the other they approached the consumer group with less specialized tastes but belonging to less selective consumption areas. Queen's entry into this larger and richer market allowed the band to rapidly grow in wealth and therefore support equipment, setting up one of the most spectacular traveling bandwidths in the rock world. In the late seventies, Queen boasted the most powerful stage system in the world, superior to that of the Rolling Stones. And with such impressive equipment, Mercury and May's group set out to make the turn, or rather the decisive retouching to definitively become a world rock lederband.

Before tackling the last stylistic chapter in Queen's evolutionary history, let's go back to kitsch for a moment. there is no doubt that both the baroque choruses of "Somebody To Love" and the quotations from the operetta of "Bohemian Rhapsody" (with that nineteenth-century realist novel text published in the fulleittons) constitute on one side a tribute to the hybrid taste of the masses, all based on fragmented quotations learned on television and mistaken for culture, and on the other hand an ironic but in any case convinced parody that leads (as in the case of "Somebody To Love") into the opposite excess, to the point of turning into aestheticism an end in itself, even rococo and mannerist. But it is also true that operations such as those mentioned require complete expressive and technical mastery, as the goal to be achieved and the necessary stylistic profile are high. All qualities that do nothing but confirm the first thesis, that is an unconscious but firm trend towards modernization of rock as they had encountered it in 1973. That it is then a downward modernization (ie with purely consumer purposes) and not for creative purposes, this is a fact.

Which future?

Queen in the Eighties are Queen after "We Are The Champions". The great anthem that truly established them as world champions, at least for a couple of years, and that paved the way, providing Queen with enough confidence in the resonance of their name, to the next step. In conjunction with the expression of the cult for one's own body, the return to beauty, health, optimism that marked the beginning of the eighties, in contrast to the cold and dark seventies, even Queen are changing their skin. Here comes the hard and punctuated funky of "Another One Bites The Dust", comes the macho look, comes the conquest of South America and the American black music market. Queen truly becomes the group for everyone, a rock band without stylistic boundaries, able to cover with sufficient certainty all fields of today's musical expression.
Queen conquer nightclubs and proselytize everywhere. The magic moment of the band, however, seems to be interrupted precisely with the last work, "The Works", which went below the forecasts almost everywhere, but especially in America where it was hardly noticed, sandwiched between Michael Jackson and Van Halen, modern gods from overseas audiences.
Maybe Queen's last step was the fake one? it is too early to draw such drastic conclusions. In fact, their formula is showing its limits. It takes a stretch of the imagination on the part of Mercury and associates to guess the new direction in which to move. An effort that this time will be exclusively technical and cerebral. Many years have passed since they dreamed of becoming the greatest of all. That first cover is testimony to a youthful dream.