This is something I was meaning to ask concerning queen and freddie,namely some of the duets he did.
The first one with david bowie and Queen Under pressure will always be an iconic duet,and the one freddie did with
Montserrat Caballe like Barcelona will be a famous one yes. But I was just recently wondering why the sessions Freddie did with Michael Jackson only became demos and were never released as full fledged songs on like the Mr Bad Guy album,you know like more to life than this? I know there are some rare demos of fred and mike singing,I was just wondering why it never fully developed and why it's lesser known?
I mean,imo that was a rare first and last between the two legends and there's even a photo of mike sitting with freddie and john.
Anyone got any info as to the why's to that?
Really its just because they ran out of time. Freddie was touring when Michael wanted to finish the songs. So Michael asked if Mick Jagger could fill in and Fred was like "sure!'. Because Freddie's just awesome like that.
There's of course also the story about Michael and Freddie falling out after Mike caught Freddie snorting coke. Either way, it's good it was never finished or released because the voices just don't match. It's a perfect example of two very good artists coming together to work on something and the end result sounding like shit. See Michael and McCartney's The Girl is Mine or McCartney and Stevie Wonder's Ebony and Ivory.
Well I wouldn't go so far as to say the tracks sounded bad. There voices are incredibly different and didn't necessarily blend, but it was a very interesting pairing and I think, given more time, the tracks could have come out quite nicely.
YannickJoker wrote: There's of course also the story about Michael and Freddie falling out after Mike caught Freddie snorting coke. =============================================================================================
Yeah, MJ said it tasted better if you drink it chilled.
Freddie's duet with Billy Squier, 'Love is the Hero' is terrific. It can be found on his anthology 'Reach For the Sky' CD. In fact Brian and Roger also hasve played on his albums over the years and I felt sorry that he never got to perform at the memorial concert when the likes of Lisa Stansfield did! Very Underated Muso is Billy!
I wouldn't agree with you as to the Mercury/Squier collaboration.
Love Is the Hero is the perfect example of a powerful rock song but for me Freddie should have sang more on it.
But Lady with a tenor sax is a way better than the above, sadly incompleted. Wonder why they left the "work in progress" title on the FM Box ? And why couldn't they finish it :(? It's lacking just one verse from Freddie....
As to the FM Box itself I wonder if that's all what's in the archives. Guess not if you look at the recently leaked New York demo (even earlier take).
mondeo112 wrote:
As to the FM Box itself I wonder if that's all what's in the archives. Guess not if you look at the recently leaked New York demo (even earlier take).
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As much as that box set is nice, it isn't half padded out with some amount of shit. And some fake shit at that, i.e "Let's Turn It On" acapella - even though the notes say you can hear some "bleed" from the earphones, it's obvious that this is not an acapella version. I'm sure there's more in the archives, and that QPL where yet again being "perfectionists" by hand selecting the tracks and filtering out others. If you're going to publish an archive, then publish it right.
Russian Headlong wrote: Freddie's duet with Billy Squier, 'Love is the Hero' is terrific. It can be found on his anthology 'Reach For the Sky' CD. In fact Brian and Roger also hasve played on his albums over the years and I felt sorry that he never got to perform at the memorial concert when the likes of Lisa Stansfield did! Very Underated Muso is Billy!
I'm a fan of Billy Squier's music since the early 80's. A big shame he never made it in Europe.
This is his introduction (cut) of Love Is The Hero, Green Bay WI, July 21st, 2009
It's not like Freddie but still very powerfull.
The crowd is very noisy and they don't seem to notice (or care about) Billy mentioning Freddie.
mondeo112 wrote: But Lady with a tenor sax is a way better than the above, sadly incompleted. Wonder why they left the "work in progress" title on the FM Box ? And why couldn't they finish it :(? It's lacking just one verse from Freddie....
Lady with a Tenor Sax was not incomplete. It was officially released on Billy's 1986 album, but it only featured FM on vocals. I assume the original plan was that it should've been a duet, so they did some recordings of Freddie doing the leadvocals. Didn't work out for some reason, so on the released version only FM's backingv-vocals can be heard.
And complaining about the FM boxset is like complaining about March of the Black Queen being such a great song. The FM box is one of most extensive boxsets I've ever seen. Yes, editing takes together and making up content is also not my favorite part about the box, but the box is IMO still the best Queen(-related) release ever.