Somebody to Love (Mercury)

At last! An update! (Said nobody)...

Truth* is, it's taken me ages to work what I think of this song and even longer to work out what to write. It's not that I don't know it or anything, it's just that...

I can't make up my mind what I like about it, or even if I do.

With Bohemian Rhapsody it's easy to be bowled over by the ambition, scale, and grandeur of it all. With Tie Your Mother Down (coming up next, Brian fans), it's easy just to let it take you into rock-out bliss. This one, however...

It has ambition and grandeur. It has noise aplenty. Don't be taken in by the small piano that leads into the first verse, the big crashing vocal of "Take a look at yourself in the mirror" is a bigger clue to where this is going: this is mock-gospel on a huge scale. The drums are huge, Brian throws a whole host of guitars at it and Fredie's lead vocal is simply massive in parts, switching between plaintive falsetto and huge, loud, almost-desperate sounding phrases.

But there's trouble at t'mill.

Take those backing vocals. They're all done by Brian, Freddie and Roger. No choirs were harmed in the making of this song. And, of course, they sound excellent: huge and, at times, overpowering, occasionally colliding with the lead vocal in moments of pure brilliance that take you along with them, by sheer force if nothing else.

But what point do they serve? When they first come in, they seem to be a call to Mercury, almost mocking him. It's the same during the third verse: "You just keep losing and losing". But at other times, they just seem to echo Freddie's vocal, adding nothing new.

And that bit after the third verse, where we have almost a tribal chant of "Find me somebody to love", building up into a massive reprise of the "Can anybody find meeeeeeeee?"; again, is it just there to show off?

This is a hard song to get. It's easy to nod and say, "Yes, this is all fantastic, very good, great musicians, those guys." But it lacks something: soul, you might call it (ironic, really, for a pastiche of a musical style that is all about soul, exuberance and passion). It's technically all there, in spades, but as a song, this does display Queen's occasional tendency to value musicianship and technical excellence over heart and soul; something they wouldn't properly overcome until right at the end..... 7

Video: Queen performing the song in the studio, mixed with footage from their Hyde Park concert in 1975.

* it took me 4 attempts to spell that word correctly.