A wise man once said "Everyone has a great book inside them". He’d have been just as correct if he’d said "Everyone has a godawful album in them". Of course, the latter mostly applies to general plebby members of the public, but sometimes it happens to wildly popular pop groups, too. They release an album and it manages to be so bad that everyone turns their back on them, if only for a little while. This is known as the band’s Boo-Boo Album.
Seeing as Live 8 is this weekend, we’ll start with the heroes of the original Live Aid concerts, Queen (DVDs). And their desperately awful Boo-Boo Album Hot Space.
Queen have always been a stunningly inconsistent combo. For every decent song they’ve released, there’s a terrible song. For every Bohemian Rhapsody, there’s an I Want To Ride My Bicycle; for every Don’t Stop Me Now, there’s a Radio Ga Ga. But none of the lows have ever been quite so low as with Hot Space, a collection of dribbling, babble-faced goonery that even the Cheeky Girls would be ashamed to call their own.
People try to defend Hot Space as a disco experiment. But it
came out in 1982 – long after disco could be seen as remotely cutting
edge. So don’t think disco. Think Tom Jones singing Kung Fu Fighting. Think Let’s Hear It For The Boy from the Footloose soundtrack. Only a thousand times worse.
Queen even managed to misfire on the cover – a series of four garish
Warholesque individual portraits of the band. This was 13 years ago,
though. So maybe the cover art has dated badly. Or maybe it always
looked crappy. Who knows?
As for the songs – ah, the songs. Staying Power is all Seinfeld bass and, by the sounds of it, someone repeatedly pressing the ‘orchestra hit fill’ button on a 10p Casio keyboard. "See what I got/I got a hell of a lot", sings dear old Freddie. Well, a hell of a lot of teeth, maybe.
Dancer sees Brian ‘I can play the guitar standing on top of Buckingham Palace’ May unleashing some power chords. It’s almost a good song – that song being No Sleep Till Brooklyn – but it’s about a dancer, for God’s sake.
Body Language has no tune, features the classic lyric "you’ve got snakes in your eyes" and is a serious contender for worst song of all time. Back Chat sounds like Cliff Richards doing the soundtrack to a 1980’s schools programme about amino acids. The rest of the album is equally mind-churningly inane.
And then there’s The Hit: Under Pressure. The presence of David Bowie alone makes this easily the best song on the album. But, midway through, a strange thing happens. Freddie Mercury starts going "Edadeedo boobayao" all over the place. Like the Crazy Frog. And that’s Hot Space all over.
Pre Boo-Boo Album: Queen were hard rocking international champions of the world.
Post Boo-Boo Album: America turned it’s back, but Queen became more popular than ever elsewhere. Their music became the basis for We Will Rock You, which took musical theatre to crashing new depths.
[story by Stuart Heritage]
Cristina says
OK, I know this is an old article… but you have no taste…