FREDDIE MERCURY – "Living On My Own"

I’ve been missing the No.2 watch as well, so here goes:

2 weeks for “The Key: The Secret” by Urban Cookie Collective – not as good as Living On My Own but about 5000 times better than the next No.1 which I absolutely detest

I suppose “what if’s” are part of what makes pop fandom interesting. I’m sure back in the 50’s you could draw comparisons with Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochrane. Imagining their career development and benchmark it against the career of Elvis. Would they have become part of some revival movement? Or would they have adapted to changes in the direction music was taking? Maybe it would have been a case of disappearing into obscurity.
In the 60’s when Rock became a standard-bearer for virtually everything, Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix would have undoubtedly eventually become derided as Rock curmudgeons and held up as examples of why the hippie dream f*cked us all up, in much the same way Waters and Clapton have been, despite a small army of over-protective fans defending their corner. Better then, to have passed on and their respective legacies remain pretty much intact (although many would vociferously argue their legacies are and should be fair game).

Freddie however, is intriguing because he embraced so many different genres of music. Had he survived, would Queen have made another half-dozen albums of varying quality? I suspect that his desire to break out of the Rock straitjacket would have marked a creative renaissance with collaborations across the music spectrum. Anyway, it’s fun to speculate, if only to keep the flame of fandom alive.

“Living On My Own” as a stand-alone work, is a good example of where Freddie might have preferred to go in an artistic sense. The dancey stuff would have allowed him to camp it up even more, if it were even possible to out-camp Queen (or himself, for that matter), maybe verging on self-parody. Above all, it was for me a bittersweet #1. You can’t really begrudge him coming back for one more encore.

Freddie nearly had his second posthumous number one in 1992, when his 1987 Montserrat Caballé duet “Barcelona” was revived as the BBC’s theme for their Olympics coverage, but unexpectedly went on to achieve it via the dancefloor. “Living On My Own” originally appeared on his 1985 solo album Mr Bad Guy, an outlet for him to indulge in dance music while Queen were in between albums and tours (and also as partial recompense for the relative failure of Hot Space, Queen’s own New Pop album which appeared in 1982 to a confused fanbase; apart from “Under Pressure,” the only track to appear on any of the three volumes of Greatest Hits is the relatively conventional power ballad “Las Palabras De Amor”). The song did little business on its initial single release but returned eight years later somewhat “rearranged” by Belgian-based dance production team the No More Brothers.

The central paradox of “Living On My Own,” however, is not banished (even if the remix makes one wish that Mercury had collaborated with the Pet Shop Boys); here is one of Mercury’s most acidly alienated lyrics, hurting with loneliness and emptiness (“Somewhere I feel I’m gonna break down and cry/Nowhere to go, nothing to do with my time”), set against a bright Hi-NRG pulse and a vocal performance which, despite the repeated cries of “Lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely, yeah!” in the choruses, seems positively ebullient and brimming with life – all those “dee do de de”s and episodes of joyously playful scat singing – and its video largely consists of riotous footage from Mercury’s 39th birthday party in which he appears anything but cold and/or lonely. Again, in spite of the final, semi-desperate rhetorical question of “Got to be some good times ahead?” the distance between thought and expression is difficult to bridge; is he playing with the concept of (or even desire for?) loneliness, or does all the colour and light fail to mask an essential emptiness? Since his next solo single, in 1987, was a straight(ish) reading of “The Great Pretender,” however, the listener may be inclined towards the latter viewpoint.

I like to think that the scat bit (dedodaydo? Veedolayo?) is a premonition of the public’s love of a future top 5 hit: Scatman (skeebabopbadopbop) by Scatman John. I like Mercury’s brand of scat singing; more call-and-response with the audience than purely virtuoso showing off (although clearly there was a large element of showing off…)

Irritated the hell out of me at the time, but with sober reflection – it’s great (contradiction between lyrics and general almost joyous tone notwithstanding)

I’d not made the connection with Hot Space before, but it does make a lot of sense.

Immeasurably better than bloody Scatman John! Living in South-Eastern Europe in the mid-90s his atrocious and increasingly inane singles (most of which I think thankfully passed the UK by) were almost inescapable.

A mentor on ‘The Voice UK’…?

Scatman’s World was a melancholy tune with a “welcome to my world” lyric, the reverse of Living On My Own.

I initially thought he was singing “got to be some guitars ahead”, as if Brian May was waiting in the wings, desperate to add his converted place to the song. I really liked this at the time, surprised that I haven’t heard it (or thought about it) in years.

#14 Gawsh, I just YouTubed Scatman’s World. Astonishingly bad. I honestly thought it would trigger a memory, considering that I had a Longwave Atlantic 252 fixation, but I’ve sublimated it.

Sorry, Freddie, for invoking a far-less-noteworthy heavenly presence on your final moment in the sun.

#17. I think that my favourite well-intentioned regrettable lyrics of the early 1990s are Gary Clail’s ‘Human Nature’, with its redundant repetitions and curious bathos.

“What IS IT in the nature of man that makes us hate and cheat and steal and kill?
Why do people get off on bigotry, intolerance and racial intolerance?

What IS IT that makes a man gaze down from his penthouse suite
Watching THOSE young children sleeping rough on the streets?
Sometimes people do the strangest things”

Eid already? The year’s just flown by.

I’m glad this has been given a high mark because its one of my favourite songs which Freddie Mercury was involved with. One of the main points of musical interest in the recent BBC documentary about Queen was the schism that arose within the band at the turn of the eighties when dance music fans Mercury and Deacon were keen to push the towards a funk/disco sound while founder members May and Taylor were still of the opinion that they were a rock band with the drummer in particular holding firm to spirit-of-69 principles. The sucesses of Another One Bites The Dust/Under Pressure gave the dancefloor shift the upper hand for a little while at least.
As someone who’s spent some time living on their own I appreciate how this song contradicts itself. Its true lonliness does creep but other times you think well actually its not so bad. It varies.

I know what I want, and I want it NOW!

Best Scatman John fact: his biggest hit was an ideal match for the BPM required by Haile Gebrselassie on his world record-breaking long-distance runs, and hence was played over stadium PAs around the world.

A strangely compelling single, I admire it more than I love it, but still a 6/10 from me.