Queen’s Brian May has revealed the recording of their duet with David Bowie was complete chaos.
“Under Pressure", the legendary duet between Queen and David Bowie, was recorded in 1981 and became a chart-topping hit.
Queen were working on their tenth album in the Swiss Alps at the time when Bowie, who was recording a song nearby, dropped by for a casual jam. During the session drummer Roger Taylor recalls the Ziggy Stardust singer saying “This is stupid, why don’t we just write one?”
However the process was far from plain sailing with chaos ensuing from the very start. To begin with the two acts clashed over their vastly different ways of writing songs. Bowie had a spontaneous style that was ahead of it’s time but Queen preferred to stick rigidly to their structured songwriting format.
In the end the vocals were created using an unorthodox method, with each artist recording their parts separately and then compiling them together.
Brian May explained the vocals were “Constructed in a very novel way, which came through David, because he had experience of this avant-garde method of constructing the vocals…He said, ‘Everybody just goes in there with no ideas, no notes, and sings the first thing that comes into their head over the backing track.’ So we all did, and then we compiled all the bits and pieces—and that’s what ‘Under Pressure’ was based on; all those random thoughts.”
“It was hard, because you had four very precocious boys and David, who was precocious enough for all of us. David took over the song lyrically. Looking back, it’s a great song, but it should have been mixed differently. Freddie and David had a fierce battle over that.”
The pair also argued over the name of the track. Freddie wanted to call it ‘People on the Streets’ but Bowie insisted on ‘Under Pressure’ to give the song a sharper edge.
“Under Pressure” went on to become a chart-topper and rapidly became a legendary track. Despite the two acts never even performing it live together the duet was voted the second-best collaboration of all time by Rolling Stone readers in 2018. The number one spot in that poll went to Mariah Carey and Boyz To Men’s One Sweet Day.
