The Works

The Works arrived nearly two years after Hot Space: Queen's eleventh studio album, and their first for Capitol in America after leaving Elektra. Queen and Mack produced it. For the first time the band began recording in Los Angeles, at the Record Plant from August 1983, and finished at Musicland in Munich early the following year, with their touring keyboard player, the Canadian Fred Mandel, now on the records too. Roger Taylor's "Radio Ga Ga", the first single, was the first Queen single with a catalogue number of its own, QUEEN 1; it reached No. 2 in Britain and No. 1 in nineteen countries, and much of its texture comes from Mandel's programming of the vocoder and bass line. John Deacon's "I Want to Break Free" is remembered for its video, with the band in drag sending up a British television soap, and for a solo often taken for guitar that is Mandel on synthesizer. Freddie Mercury's "It's a Hard Life" opens on a melody drawn from an aria in Leoncavallo's Pagliacci. Brian May wrote the hard rockers "Tear It Up" and "Hammer to Fall", the latter an instant concert staple. Mercury's "Keep Passing the Open Windows" came from a line in the novel The Hotel New Hampshire, whose film the band had been asked to score and turned down, and the closing May–Mercury song "Is This the World We Created...?" was written in response to television pictures of poverty and famine in Africa. EMI released the album in Britain on 27 February 1984. It entered the chart at No. 2, topped the charts in Portugal and the Netherlands, and went platinum in Britain and gold in America, where it reached No. 23. After "Radio Ga Ga", "I Want to Break Free" reached No. 3 in Britain, "It's a Hard Life" No. 6 and "Hammer to Fall" No. 13. At Live Aid in July 1985 Queen played "Radio Ga Ga" and "Hammer to Fall", and the Wembley crowd clapped "Radio Ga Ga" in time, as in the video. In Japan, where Toshiba EMI released it in March 1984, it reached No. 7; the current Japanese CD is the SHM-CD UICY-15093.