The Works
Queen Album
Produced by Queen and Mack.
Engineered by Mack.
Cover Concept by Queen
Fred Mandel : rip-roaring piano finale on ‘Prowl’ synthesizer arrangements and programming on ‘Radio Ga Ga’ synth on ‘Break Free’ and candy floss on ‘Hammer To Fall’.
Mack : Demolition fairlight programming on ‘Machines’.
Recommended Songs : Radio Ga Ga (Taylor), It’s a Hard Life (Mercury), Hammer to Fall (May)
Review
The album ‘The Works’ was released 2 years after the poorly received ‘Hot Space‘ but there was still tension in the Queen camp. The intervention of Freddie in some of these, may easily have saved Queen from a split.
They worked my harder on this album, but this also caused friction, as they poured over the tuning of individual notes, Brian was a perfectionist, Roger just wanted to get things done and didn’t want to know the difference between F and Fadd9 (see Radio Ga Ga).
That aside, Queen output one of their most consistent albums for a while and made up for ‘Hot Space’. ‘Machines (Back to Humans)’ is probably the only track I feel let the album down, one music magazing called this song ‘Big flatulent nonsense’.
There are a few tracks in the album which I consider to be my favourites, and this has to be one of Queens best albums of the 80’s along with ‘A Kind of Magic‘.
Did you know … the video for ‘Radio Ga Ga’ contains actual footage from a film from the 1930s.
- Overall Rating 86%