While Queen and David Bowie had a big hit in 1981 with “Under Pressure,” Queen guitarist Brian May wasn’t pleased with the outcome because he didn’t get his way.
He tells Total Guitar magazine, “It was all done spontaneously in the studio very late at night after we had a meal and a lot of drinks, and it was a pretty heavy backing track. When it gets to ‘Why can’t we give love,’ we were all working on it together, and it sounded like The Who. It sounded massively chord-driven.
“And I was beaming because I liked The Who. I remember saying to David, ‘Oh, it sounds like The Who, doesn’t it?’ He says, ‘Yeah, well it’s not going to sound like The Who by the time I’ve finished with it!’ You know, in a joking kind of way. But he didn’t want it to be that way…
“It was very difficult…because we all had different ideas of how it should be mixed.
“I think it’s probably the only time in my career I bowed out, because I knew it was going to be a fight. So basically it was Freddie [Mercury] and David fighting it out in the studio with the mix. And what happened in the mix was that most of that heavy guitar was lost.
“And even the main riff, I played that electric, pretty much in the sort of arpeggiated style, which I do live now. But that never made it into the mix. What they used was the acoustic bits which were done first as a sort of demo.”
But, like Paul McCartney finally accepting Phil Spector‘s adding strings to The Beatles‘ “The Long and Winding Road,” May has come to accept “Under Pressure.”
“I do recognize that it works. It’s a point of view, and it’s done very well. And people love it. So we play it quite a bit different live, as you probably noticed, it is a lot heavier and I think it benefits from it.
“I mean, David was an awesome creative force. But you can’t have too many awesome creative forces in the same room. It starts to get very difficult! Something has to give.”
The song peaked at number-29 on the Billboard Hot 100 and is part of Queen+Adam Lambert‘s set list as they wrap up their Rhapsody Tour in Japan tonight.
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