The Works is in large part a response to Queen’s previous album Hot Space. Brian May wrote Tear It Up deliberately harking back to the band’s earlier sound, for example. Fortunately, the album is not at all a rehash of their previous work. Instead, it’s a healthy combination of what Queen know best, lessons learnt from their experiments with disco and a more refined 80s hard rock sound.
Queen took a year off between the release of Hot Space and the recording of The Works, with most of the band members taking time to work on solo projects. I think this time apart did them some good and that when they returned to record the album it was because they wanted to and were ready to.
Radio Ga Ga is one of the songs that bears the mark of Queen’s recent experimenting. It was written by Roger Taylor on a synthesiser and drum machine, and was originally intended for his solo album, but it was reworked as a Queen song for this album. I really like it.
I want to mention It’s a Hard Life for two reasons. The first is that it’s a very typical Mercury composition, with themes about hard work and love - the opening lines are even lifted from an opera. The song also features solely the regular Queen ensemble (lead vocals, backing vocals, piano, guitar, bass and drums). The other thing I want to mention is that I love the transition into the guitar so much, with the lead line being passed from the piano to the guitar.
I Want to Break Free is a very significant song for a number of reasons. It was written by John Deacon and it’s a great example of his limited songwriting contributions being massive hits. The song features a very prominent synthesiser solo, which Deacon explicitly sought out, bringing in Fred Mandel (who’d toured with the band the previous year) to play it. This solo fucks.
The song is best known for its music video. The music video parodies the soap opera Coronation Street and features all four band members in drag. It’s awesome. It also did not go down well in the United States, and is usually credited with the band’s significant drop in popularity. I find it quite interesting how differently this song was interpreted around the world. In the UK, where cross-dressing in theatre, panto and on telly is common and doesn’t come with queer connotations, the music video was interpreted as intended: a little bit of fun without any deep meaning. In the United States, however, everyone thought the video was gay as fuck, and they hated it. What I found more interesting though, was how in many other countries it was interpreted as an anthem against oppression, which I don’t think is how the band intended it, but it’s still a perfectly reasonable interpretation.
Hammer to Fall, however, was written with some explicit political intentions1. Primarily the song is about the inevitability and equality of death, but I think its references to the cold war give it a secondary meaning of disarmament and opposition to war. It’s also an absolute banger, being one of Queen’s 80s hard rock anthems.
The final track on the album, Is This the World We Created? is comfortably the most political of the songs on the album. It was inspired by news reports about poverty in Africa. The song references poverty, war and colonisation and laments that these are problems we have created. The instrumentation is very light, being just Mercury on vocals and May on acoustic guitar.
The Works shows Queen back on form. As the album’s title implies, it contains a little of everything, from the more electronic Radio Ga Ga and I Want to Break Free, to more hard rock Tear it Up and Hammer to Fall, with the Presley-inspired Man on the Prowl and the ballad Is This the World We Created? For me it marks the beginning of Queen’s second really solid period, with this album leading right up until their final normal album Innuendo, all of which are really good. 4 stars.
In interviews Brian May has kinda downplayed this but I choose to disagree with him. The song references nuclear weapons (“We who grew up tall and proud / In the shadow of the mushroom cloud”) and the “hammer” in the title can easily be interpreted as a reference to the hammer and sickle, though in the lyrics of the song it does have a slightly different meaning.