and providing the band with their second No. 1 single in America.
Freddie said of the piece, ‘I wrote “Crazy Little Thing Called Love”
in the bath. I actually grabbed an upright piano to my bedside
table once. I’ve been known to scribble lyrics in the middle of the
night without putting the lights on.’ Brian May argued against
the band’s reputation for being a singles band, saying, ‘We’re not
a singles group. We don’t stake our reputation on singles and we
never have done, but I think that it’s brought a lot of younger
people to our concerts.’
Around this time, Mercury was also performing with the Royal
Ballet – literally, as Sid Vicious had put it two years previously,
‘bringing ballet to the masses’ – dancing and singing to both
‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’ and ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. He
also supposedly found love, albeit briefly, with the wardrobe man,
as his homosexuality had now become public knowledge.
Right at the end of 1979, the band embarked on the Crazy Tour,
so-called because the band were playing in such tiny venues, and
had so much equipment that the whole idea of the tour was both
‘crazy unthinkable’ and ‘crazy illogical’, as John Deacon would so
aptly put it. Roger Taylor would also recall the problems on tour,
stating, ‘I remember at the Lyceum gig in 1979 – the roof was
too small to fit in all our lights – so we cut two holes in it. We
got a call from Paul McCartney saying Wings were playing there
next week and they’d need a hole in the roof, so could he pay for
one of them? Just think – we became the first group to sell Paul
McCartney a hole!’
As well as working on ‘The Game’ during this sustained period
of touring, the band were also busy writing the soundtrack for
‘Flash Gordon’. Both albums saw the band experimenting with
synths for the first real time in their career, after their strict ‘no
synths’ rule of the 1970s. John Deacon would go on to explain,
‘We wanted to experiment with all that new studio equipment.
We had always been keen to try out anything new or different
chris devlin
(Chris Devlin)
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