Right after Knebworth in August 1986 and filming the video for Who wants to live forever in September, the band decided to take a break. Brian worked on some solo stuffs, Roger formed The Cross (for which freddie recorded the Heaven for everyone-version possibly in the autumn 86') and Freddie went in to do some kind of project which turned out to beThe Great Pretender and Barcelona with Caballè. But when looking at demos like Holding on and It's so you it is possible to bealive that Freddie intended to release some sort of follow-up-album to Mr Bad Guy. Doing the Gegen Willy performance in march 87', releasing The Great Pretender and somewhere around this time recording (and releasing?!) In my Defence.But he eventually scraped the idea when he met Caballè in 1987, and started working on Barcelona instead. When Queen decided to join up again in 1988, he might gave up the idea for good.
We have songs like these:
In my Defence
The Great Pretender
It's so you
Holding on
Keep Smilin'/I can't dance
Yellow Breezes
When this tired old body wants to sing
Horns of doom
So what do you think? Did he intend to do a new solo album (without montserat) and how do you think it would have turned out? Better than Innuendo? Well.. We can only speculate.. but so what?? ;-)
I did read somewhere that Freddie's intention at the time was to realease another solo album since he was taking a break from queen, and I guess to redeem from MBG. All that stoped when he met Montsy.
I think that Freddie had some strong songs to realese but nothing too spectacular IMHO. It would've been nice to have another solo album from him though, too bad.
I wouldn't include The great pretender in that list, as far as I know Freddie just released it as a single not with the intention of using it in his new solo album.
Other than The Cross project and Barcelona, ALL other solo output from the band members just goes to show that the sum of the parts was always so much greater.....
I think he had not intention of make a new album! And if he had made it,, i had be worse that Innuendo.. Freddie was more famous in the band.. But a cd without Rog,Bri and John woudn't work more than Innuendo!
I read from somewhere that he had intended to start working on a covers album, which is why he initially recorded The Great Pretender. Then the idea was trashed when the works on Barcelona began. But who knows.
To my ear, a lot of the stuff Queen made as demos in the Miracle and Innuendo sessions don't sound all that much different from what the stuff on Freddie box had from around the Barcelona sessions. However, much the lyrical content of the demo songs both on the Freddie box and the leaked Queen demos remind a lot of the stuff on Mr. Bad Guy, so maybe he was going for a sequel for Mr. Bad Guy in some way. But, when you get to the futher depths of the mind of a songwriter, you'll probably find that the songs that didn't get finished were just some creations that had been worked on to avoid boredom, with no specific purpose in mind. =)
I think Freddie would've lost impetus to do more covers at that stage because at around the time he did Great Pretender, there was a lot of nostalgia crap coming along.
Neither Keep Smilin'/I can't dance or When this tired old body wants to sing were ever considered to be more than instantaneously disposable songs -one was meant for a young man in a coma, the other two for personal friends.
Personalised musical 'greeting cards' if you will.
No more - no less - and were never considered redraftable or revisitable. They were never meant to be demos in the traditional sense.
SBKP wrote:
In my Defence
The Great Pretender
It's so you
Holding on
Keep Smilin'/I can't dance
Yellow Breezes
When this tired old body wants to sing
Horns of doom
As stated above, 2 of those were for specific reasons. Heaven For Everyone was an AKOM outtake, In My Defence was recorded in late 85 for the Time musical LP.
Other than The Great Pretender, the rest could have been intended for what became The Miracle - th eonly reason they're on the FM set is that they're from a period when he was recording solo (ie the Barcelona album).