Freddie's Output in the '70s vs. '80s

drink, drugs, sex and (most importantly) wealth made him lazy. also, factor in the increased smoking - not looking after his voice, generally, the 80s were pretty poor output-wise from Freddie.

From 82-86, the band did the heavy lifting (writing), Freddie was no longer the creative force he once was.

Couple of points of issue:
♦ he wasn't a master arranger in the 80s - all of his greatest arrangements were prior to 1979.
♦ giving him credit for helping with other's penned hits is irrelevant, they ALL helped each other - a lot. also, his involvement in other's tunes shows that he was struggling with ideas himself
♦ it's unfair to single out the "latter day" hits (Freddie had health concerns by that time). to be fair, you need to look from when he first dried up - around '82. the hits-song-writing burden from 82 onward (i would say) fell to Roger, John and Brian - in that order. generally speaking Brian didn;t pen many monster hits - tops 10s, but not huge hits. Roger and John carried the bulk of the commercial burden.

Maybe one of the reasons the band decided to attribute songs to 'Queen' in the later years was because Freddie wasn't coming up with much in the way of songwriting?

In my opinion Freddie during early 80s had many ideas, he wanted to envoled further as a singer and songwriter.

For me his output up to 1983 was like he was trying to sound fresh and new.
I believe that his songs were clever, but they didn't suit Queen, also the production didn't help.

During 1984-86 Freddie was "stuck" in the writing, while he wrote some great songs like Made in heaven, I was born to love you, Princes of the universe and It's a hard life. There was nothing more in his ideas.

I think he was more productive and enthusiastic, when he was involved into others songs (one vision, time) rather on his songs.

By 1987 he found his sparkle again since he co-wrote for Barcelona and also he was doing something different and new.

During the miracle, despite his illness he gave the title track and was all worth it.
Party is, a weak son, g but its instrumental version is a different story.
By the end of 1989 he co-wrote Innuendo, Don't try so hard and Delilah maybe and Bijou.


As I have said before not only Freddie's, but some 80s Queen songs from rest members could have a better faith, if they had different orchestration, production and even if they were given to other artist, since they didn't suit to Queen.

I would venture that 99% of those songs were better than anything on Hot Space, save for Under Pressure.

Roger said recently in the Telegraph
“ Taylor believes a significant key to Queen’s artistic progress and internal harmony was sharing songwriting royalties. “Freddie and Brian were the main writers at first and then John and myself sort of took over in the Eighties. And Fred came up with a wonderful solution. He said, ‘Look, everything is under the heading Queen, so we split it equally.’ Which actually didn’t go that well for me, because I was writing most of the hits by then. But I can’t complain.”

Plausible: Freds idea.

the OP talked about writing, my reply was about writing - on topic. yet you cite "singing" and "trying different styles" it's not about singing or trying different stuff . I listed all those other bands who did dance tracks to demonstrate that Freddie's branchline in to dance via SP, BL etc was neither innovative nor good writing. Many other artists had done it so much earlier and significantly better to boot. Freddie's dance songs are sloppily-written and it shows. However, I will add; Brian, Roger & John should take some blame here too. The band served as it's own quality control, vetos should've been applied to songs going on LPs. Roger was writing much better stuff - all that ended on his solo LPs, but which wouldn't improved both The Game & HS. I think they lacked the guts to collectively tell Freddie his coke-induced efforts were not good enough.

Freddie's ONE solo LP is living proof that he had dried up. it's awful, the writing is sloppy over half of the LP, the musicianship is poor, and the better tracks on the album were improved 200% when they appeared on 1995's MIH - BECAUSE Brian, John & Roger reworked them.

nobody anywhere can call AOBTD (reversing techiniques) pioneering. c'mon. reversing techniques (aka backmasking) were used as far back as 1959 in popular music, but even Thomas Edison used it in 1878.

that's subjective. it wasn't "new" - even for Queen. By the time of Hot Space they'd already been there with AOBTD, Dragon Attack & Don't Try Suicide in 1980.
one fact - Freddie's writing for HS didn't work - it reduced the overall quality of the album. had HS been successful, then the return to the "classic queen sound" for Miracle and Innuendo would never have been needed and would've backfired, wouldn't it?

i never said you did.

again, where have i said you claimed otherwise? you're arguing for the sake of it.

you've gone off topic again. the OP was referring to Freddie's writing - not instrumentation and or arrangement - or even who performed them. however this IS where we disagree. you can put as many ribbons on as many turds as you like, but BL and Sp are pretty much the turds of Freddie's 1980s writing - closely run by much of his solo LP.

a producer mentioning a technique does NOT make it pioneering - especially if it had been a common studio technique almost 20 years prior to AOBTD; Beatles, Zep, Who, Floyd, Yes, CS&N, Hendrix, Sabbath, ELO and countless others used reversing techniques - and (IMO) to better effect - including Queen with Ogre Battle.

anyhow, each to their own.

Sp live has a new life, which for me suggests that a different approach in orchestration can give to a song a better credit.

About AOBTD is not only the sampling which for its time was great, is about the whole production. Mack usually is not blessing his works.

It may be that Freddie suggested it as a way to speed the process of doing a album along. He knew he was sick and likely had very little time left.  In 1987-88 the length of time most people were living after an AIDS diagnosis was being extended in real time so he may have thought he only had weeks/months at the time they started recording. 

Great post, Frank. He did write some great songs in the 80's, and I also put Barcelona up there with the very best of Queen. Unfortunately, It took getting sick to get that motivation. Innuendo was mostly a Freddie/Roger song as per Brian, it's one of the best songs they ever did.

Damn true. A brilliant song!

This is quite an interesting phenomenon to me, because it's something that a lot of acts suffer at some point. I'm going to say something that seems incredibly cruel and glib, and to some it may be missing the point, and I am expecting backlash from this but here goes:

Nobody in Queen was a trained musician, not one of them had a good theoretical background in music, and to that end they were amateur musicians who hit the big time. They wrote very much by feel, and their lack of technical knowledge - that is, the technical language of music itself and not technical as in electronics - led to the creative juices drying up. Freddie's 80s masterpiece which is the Barcelona album was co-written by Mike Moran who is a trained composer, and that training makes a HUGE difference when it comes to being creative. Another example, one of the greatest songwriters and arrangers of the last century is without a doubt Quincy Jones. Quincy Jones studied with Nadia Boulanger at the Paris Conservatoire and I think he had some lessons from Igor Stravinsky. This is not to in any way diminish Queen's achievements, but it does explain something. Trained composers often get better as they progress through their career, with Mozart, Beethoven, Liszt, Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev, Shostakovich and Stravinsky all being great examples of composers whose music got better as they honed their skills - and some of them were actually very wealthy for their day, including Mozart (it's a myth he was poor, he was just crap at accounting).

Now, we're talking about rock and pop music here, so it's a little bit different save for the Quincy Jones case. There's the market to contend with, and the 80s were a much more streamlined time than the 70s in terms of fashion and popular music, and I'd say that some of Queen's hits of the 80s veered into the easy listening side of pop. Freddie and Brian's prog-rock operatic styled compositions of the 70s wouldn't work in the 80s. Bohemian Rhapsody was just one song in that style, and that period really ends with "It's Late", but even by then their writing was much more streamlined.

Freddie in the 80s had some good ideas for songs, he was writing some nice tunes including Love Kills, and some of the Mr Bad Guy tracks are really nice but he didn't take enough care over the production for them to work well commercially, and also the bombastic vocals which are actually brilliant in retrospect were found to be a bit irritating to the 80s audience. Roger had better pop sensibilities than Brian and Roger, and John was always a secret weapon to the band since You're My Best Friend, but it's my own personal feeling that Freddie's style became quite irrelevant to the market during that time, so it was better to let the others write.

The Barcelona project was right up Freddie's street, and I think that led directly to Freddie returning to that more sectional operatic style of writing that he loved in the 70s, with Was It All Worth It and Innuendo being examples of that - and I know that Innuendo wasn't a fully-fledge Freddie composition but it does have a Bohemian Rhapsody type feel to it. I do feel that had Freddie lived we'd have seen a return to form through the 90s, especially if he'd stayed away from the party lifestyle. When he became unwell he channelled all his energy into his creativity, and in putting much more effort into his work, his work improved immensely.

I feel that I've just said a lot of unfair things about Queen but I do stand by much of what I've said. Freddie basically didn't have the skill set to be creative in the 80s, he couldn't be bothered, and he was under the influence of drugs too often.

nice opinion, but my opinion is you're talking nonsense. So, Freddie had the skill set too create those great songs on Opera and Races, but all a sudden didn't have the skill set In the 80's? How does that make sense? Don't over think It, the ideas dried up by 1982, his return to form album was Barcelona, working with top musicians helped, but it's not a coincidence that he was out of the party lifestyle by that time. Just like an athlete, you could get away with abusing yourself in the beginning, but it catches up to you over time. In 1987 to 1991 you had a focused Freddie, and It showed In his work.

mike71, Ok you think I'm talking nonsense, but we actually agree on Freddie being more focused after 1986 directly correlating to an improvement in his work, and that his return to form was Barcelona for which he turned to a trained composer for help. Actually I don't think Freddie intended or even cared if Barcelona was a commercial success, this was an artistic project for him, and he knew by then that he wasn't going to live to need the money for a lavish lifestyle anyway (morbid but true).

How does it make sense that Freddie had the skill set for Opera and Races but not the 80s albums? Well, what I tried to say and admittedly didn't say very well was that Freddie's music in the 70s was more accepted, and it fitted in well with what the public wanted. His song writing in the 80s shows a certain kind of awkwardness, he found it hard to be succinct, although Living on my own became a big hit after he died and while some of that was because of his death, it was also because the song itself worked well as a dance remix.