Hullo all. Just wondering if anybody knew of working titles for some of Queen's songs. I know of some of the most well-known: 'Woolly Hat' is 'Back Chat', 'Tin Dreams' is 'Tenement Funster', and 'Psycho Legs' is 'Death On Two Legs', but I came across an article from Record Collector where some of the titles were 'Under Dispute', 'Don't Say Now', 'Banana Blues', and 'Young And Crazy'.
Any thoughts or info?
I found this on Brian's site, in an online transcript from Record Mirror: link
Should be on the second page.
EDIT: djaef, that's what I thought about 'Tenement Funster'. 'Banana Blues' sounds like a Freddie song, and isn't 'Don't Say No' a Billy Squier album/song? But I don't think 'Under Dispute' is a working title of 'Under Pressure' - maybe Mr. Stuart can shed some light?
Banana Blues was My Melancholy Blues.
don't be confused though, some of these were more nicknames for the songs rather than actual working titles. For example, Tin Dreams WAS a working title, but Wooly Hat was a nickname, as was Happy Little F*ck.
(these were in an old Record Collector issue, from 2003 I think?)
>Under Pressure's working title was "people On Streets"
Penetration Guru has been reading the Q/Mojo special edition then...... Don't believe what you read in that crock of shit - it's littered with mistakes.
It's difficult to read something published by Greg and actually believe it to be true, however, the only way we have of knowing is to get hold of the tape boxes that the reacordnigs are on.
I guess that even Greg can't get a working title wrong if it's actually written on a tape box.........but then again, The Concert File.....
I suppose the fact that you can have working titles, nicknames, definite names and changed names for songs is confusing matters here a bit.
In the case of UP, it had at least 3 different names in a sense. The original skeleton of the song, which is basically just an ad-libbed jam to my ears, got labelled as 'Feel Like'. I've no idea as to whether this demo was ever actually really called that by the boys or not.
Once the song started to take shape and got more finalised, it may well have had a different working title; a provisional name that chiefly serves to identify the song, which is usually never intended to be the final, proper song-title.
Then once the song is completed, a name must be settled on, and like Zeni and PG said, UP was originally to be officially called People On Streets (I think that was what Bowie wanted). However, at some point it was decided that Under Pressure was the better title.
In this case, it seems more that UP evolved from a jam called (perhaps unofficially) 'Feel Like', was honed into the song we know as UP, possibly with a different working title, was then to be officially called 'People On Streets', before a last-minute name change to 'Under Pressure'.