This Is Yesterday

I could have picked something more ‘cool’ or ‘trendy’ for my first music entry – and this is a midlife crisis blog for a 40 year old Dad, so words like cool and trendy will be used round these parts – but my first album that I truly loved and I played on repeat again and again was Queen Greatest Hits II.

And it was great. I haven’t listened to Queen of my own accord for decades, and almost didn’t need to to write this, I can just scan the list of the songs and know them straight away. These are basically their 80s hits but they on the whole don’t have that 80s sound like – for an easy reference – 80s Bowie. But I think I was 9 when I discovered the cassette, and just liked all the camp rock.

And obviously it’s camp. None more camp. That’s what made Queen what they were, and something that worked so well at appealing to me as a child I suppose, Freddie Mercury wanting to do something ridiculous and having a ball doing it. ‘Under Pressure’ for instance, when he sings “Let me out!” as “Litmeyow!” like Bowie’s just grabbed his balls by the fist. ‘I Want To Break Free’ could be an old fashioned crooner song if it wanted to be, and I feel that part of it does want to be, but it’s bashed into a sedately staccato rock song with a lazy solo. And it has that video – Freddie in drag with his tache and hoover, but Roger Taylor stealing the scene by looking very beautiful in his blonde wig… It seems to me that Queen at this point were beyond doing pretentious things like ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ and slightly unconvincing rockers like ‘We Will Rock You’ and going more for songs like ‘Bicycle’ a Syd Barrett homage that seemed more playful and interesting to me at a young age (although obviously shouting “Bismillah no! I will not let you go!” was pretty fun too). 

Either way, Queen was the first ‘adult’ band that I properly listened to, and really listened to again and again. My Dad in particular was sick to death of them. His music taste basically solidified in the 60s and 70s and he liked and still likes Hendrix, Cream, The Who, Clapton and so on. Serious guitar bands, with their serious constipated and haven’t found the laxatives expressions. Although he liked some of Queen, he was trying to persuade me of the pros of ‘All Along The Watchtower’ during this period. Hendrix didn’t impress me then though. Those people seemed to take everything very seriously. When you’re older, you want your guitar heroes to take their music seriously, but when you’re a child you want your entertainers to be having fun, and Hendrix didn’t sound like he was having much fun. He probably would have fared better with Cream actually, they have a few comedy moments. Anyway it probably didn’t help my dad that around this time my younger sister discovered the ABBA Gold compilation.  Better the devil you know, eh?

I also… remember hearing ‘I’m Going Slightly Mad’ and listening to it again it’s quite an astonishing song – there’s fear and defiance all through his voice sometimes in the same line (“It’s finally happened, happened”…). Of course this fear and defiance was certainly due to it being one of the last things he ever recorded before he died of AIDS at 45. I was 9 and thought it was a funny song about being mad and used to laugh out loud. That makes my toes curl slightly. Sorry Freddie. I didn’t even realise that he had died about the same time that I had discovered the Greatest Hits tape, I didn’t watch the news much. Maybe Mum and Dad didn’t want to burst my bubble, but I must have found out pretty soon after. When I was a little older, maybe 11 or 12 I read the biography his bereaved partner Jim Hutton wrote Mercury And Me which I remember being excellent. And that about wrapped it up.

Queen didn’t have a massive influence on my musical taste in the long run. I moved on and didn’t really go back. I don’t listen to Queen for pleasure now, though you can’t escape their presence in the UK. I certainly didn’t have any desire to see ‘We Will Rock You’, otherwise known as ‘How Ben Elton Lost His Artistic Credibility In Order To Pay Off His Mortgage’.

But. They were a formative influence. For a start they set the trend of me getting into things that were before my time, not at all popular amongst my peers but definitely a lot of fun. And I suppose that leads into my next ongoing attitude throughout life that if something wrong with it – which has a lot of flaws, but is generally sound when it comes to avoiding the wrong sort of pretension in modern culture. Most importantly, and this sounds so unimaginitive when written down but it is true – it made me a little bit iconoclastic, happy to be what I wanted to be and like what I wanted to like.