It’s no News of the World or Jazz, but “Body Language” is still killer track. Sparse and comical nastiness. Also, fantastic sleeve.
The Quietus | | | Don’t Talk! In Defence Of Queen’s Hot Space
“Hot Space takes all the things that Queen were known for and either removes them or treats them to ridiculous subversions. So that means drum machines instead of booming tom-toms, ludicrous brass arrangements instead of opulent guitar histrionics and, more than ever before, an obsession with sex. You know, rather than ogres and dragons and flouncing about.
Experiments litter the choppy pace of the album, each an insightful clue as to what the hell they were thinking when they recorded it. By this point, remember, the band had already become a touring beast of legendarily debauched repute. Steaming pyrotechnics, dwarves covered in cold meats and an encyclopaedic appetite for drugs were the order of the day, and if little Deacy was going to start pissing about with disco songs then it was about time a huffy May and Taylor delivered some stadium bangers to keep the live show normal.”
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The Quietus on RAM, aka the sound of “Because I can”:
1971 was a god awful time for music. Acoustic guitars weren’t so much machines to kill nazis as instruments utilised by entrepreneurs hiding behind beards….
By this time however, Paul McCartney was so ensconced in conjugal felicity and isolated from what was going on beyond the homey domesticity and tranquility of his farm that the outside world must have seemed like a distant noise. In the 1960s he’d influenced everything in a way he never could have imagined, but having killed the Beatles monster he was free to indulge himself. Having proved everything he needed to prove, his music no longer fed his ambition, and the next decade would see him driven by whimsy and curiosity. As one half of the most successful songwriting partnership the world had ever known, who could argue? He might have lost his chief quality control officer in John Lennon, but Ram is a record that clearly doesn’t concerned (er..?) itself with public approval.
I do take exception to 1971 being called a “godawful time for music”…
