What do you hear if you play Another One Bites the Dust or
other songs backwards?"
"God works in mysterious ways... Mysterious ways" is what is said at
the beginning in the deep voice. The first part is Freddie, and the
second "Mysterious ways" is Brian. And, yes, Freddie *really* does end
the song with "Gimmie Gimmie Gimmie Fried Chicken", even though the lyrics
in the booklet say just "one vision". There is a lot of video of the
filming of this video in the Magic Years videos, and you can see both of
these things in the video.
The Summer '84 Fan Club magazine ran the words as supplied by Roger:
"Think I'll have my eggs poached for breakfast again
I'd like to be Clint Eastwood
Jimi Hendrix, he was great
Let's try William The Conqueror
Now who else do I like?"
A lot of people are not sure that this is quite right, though!
"'39" is a sort of science-fiction song dealing with the problems of
relativistic space travel. It is about a man who goes off into space
for a hundred years Earth time, but only ages a year. So, when he comes
back to Earth and goes home, he returns home to his child (or grandchild),
not his wife. On an emotional level, it is a sad love song. Brian has
also said that on another level, the song is about emotional journeys. As
As an interesting side-note, '39 is the 39th Queen song counting in order
from the beginning of their first album up through this song on the fourth.
(This is on the original albums, not later ones with bonus tracks.)
The song is most likely about one of Queen's ex-managers, Norman Sheffield.
He cheated them out of a lot of money on royalties to their first few
albums. The break with him was not an amicable one, to say the least.
According to _As it Began_, when he heard the song, he assumed the song was
about him and threatened to sue both Queen and EMI.
In the album _Live Killers_ when Freddie dedicates this song, the words
are bleeped out. They do NOT name the person. The phrase that is bleeped
out is "This is dedicated to a real mother f***** of a gentleman".
"Mad The Swine" is the b-side to "Headlong" in the UK, and was also
a bonus song on the Hollywood re-issue of Queen I. This was made in
1973 written by Freddie. It was originally supposed to be on Queen I,
but the band didn't like the way Roy Thomas Baker mixed it. Neither
the band nor Roy would change their minds, so Queen chose to leave it
off their album. There were a few mixing changes made before it was
released with Headlong.
The bit at the end of "Dancer" that is difficult to figure out is
actually in German. It's a recorded wake-up call from the Munich
Hilton. People have reported hearing two slightly different things:
"Guten Morgen, sie wuenschten geweckt zu werden." or "Guten Abend, ..."
The translation is "Good Morning, you wish to be woken up." or
"Good Evening, ..." (Thanks to Thomas Sundt, Jim Willis and whoever
the other person was-- I lost your message!)
It is model Debbie Leng who is Roger’s girlfriend and mother of his
two youngest children. She used to be featured in Cadbury Flake
commercials in the UK.
Beginning with _The Miracle_, Queen decided to credit future song writing
to the group as a whole. They decided to do that to cut down on internal
quibbling and to help bring each member into the development process for
all the songs. They said that before, although they all worked on all
the songs, that it was very easy to want to spend the most effort on
"their own" songs, and less on the other's.
Song credits on _Made in Heaven_ were slightly different. Tracks with
previously credited vocals retained their original credits, and all
of the new songs were credited to "Queen" with the exception of "Mother
Love" which is credited to May/Mercury.
Elisabeth Riba, a former QMS member started compiling a list of the tracks
on The Miracle and Innuendo along with verifiable quotes indicating which
member came up with the original idea for some of the songs. Along with
this, the RV fan club has confirmed a bunch of the songs through
interviews and through the OIQFC. I have taken these lists and some other
information and combined them. If you have concrete quotes for songs that
aren't listed, please let me know. Remember that this is a guideline to
who came up with most of the lyrics for a song or who originated the idea.
The band did work together on these!!
The List of Song Credits for The Miracle and Innuendo
Yes, it is available on the "Enter Sandman" single and on the Electra
Compilation album "Rubiyiat". Also, Weird Al Yankovic did a version
of "Another One Bites The Dust" entitled "Another One Rides The Bus"
years ago, and more recently did "Bohemian Polka." The list of cover
versions is still expanding, with covers having been done by quite a
few bands, some of them fairly obscure. A fairly complete list of
cover versions is available in the archives.
No, "Blurred Vision" does not have any different lyrics. The song is made
up of bits of One Vision remixed together. It is mostly made up of the
rhythm parts of the song, and doesn't really include lyrics, as such. The
version from The Magic Years was just Queen fooling around in the studio,
not something intended to be released.
Translation to Teo Torriatte Word forword translation of the Japanese portion of the song from theQMS archives.
Mark Lamki, a QMS member, transcribed as much of the lyrics as he could.
The lyrics for Mustapha
There is no known recording of a complete version of "New York, New York".
During the question and answer session at the OIQFC convention in 1995, Spike
Edney said that he was there for the recording of this song and that a complete
version had not been made. More recently, in the Winter 1995 OIQFC magazine,
Brian May seems to say that there wasn't a complete version of the song
recorded. The only bootlegs that have this song have the clip recorded directly
from the Highlander movie, complete with bits of dialog.
Probably whatever you want to hear. It has been rumored that this song
says 'Its fun to smoke marijuana' when played backwards. After much
discussion, the QMS decided that there was absolutely no truth to this.
Several people also tried recording the words "another one bites the
dust" themselves and then playing them backwards. They decided that those
words just coincidentally sound vaguely like that particular phrase.
The beginning of 'Ogre Battle' is actually the same as the end of the
song, but played backwards. There are a number of songs where backwards
bits are used (A Kind of Magic, Headlong), but those places are very
obvious and not attempts to hide subliminal messages.
This page created by Sheri Hurt. If you have comments or additions please
e-mail me at unicorn@mayniac.com
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