We have two eminent versifiers for you this weekend at SteynOnline - first, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, whose translation of the fifteenth-century poet François Villon is the latest in our video series of Steyn's Sunday Poems; and second, Freddie Mercury.
If you haven't yet sampled any of Steyn's poetry anthology, we've re-archived them for you in a new easy-to-access Netflix-style home page. As for Freddie Mercury, Mark is traveling today and far from the Internet. So, in his absence, we are pleased to offer a reprise of this popular Song of the Week essay from February 2018:
For one reason or another, I'm in an oddly triumphalist mood this week - and, when that's the way you're feeling, there's only one way to go. All together now:
We Are The Champions, my friend
And we'll keep on fighting till the end
We Are The Champions!
We Are The Champions!
No time for losers...
Indeed. No time for losers, not this week. As Abba so shrewdly observed:
The Winner Takes It All
The loser standing small...
Also:
The Winner Takes It All
The loser has to fall...The judges will decide
The likes of us abide...
And, when the judges decide, the loser has to abide. But enough of losers. Björn and Benny wrote a great song for losers standing small, but, when you're on the winning side, you want a song that just lets you open up and crow:
No time for losers
'Cause We Are The Champions
...of the world!
Those words and music are by Freddie Mercury, who's making a somewhat belated debut in our Song of the Week. Not because I'm not partial to his oeuvre. In fact, I considered including a Freddie Mercury song on my bestselling cat album, Feline Groovy: Songs for Swingin' Cats - because Freddie wrote a great cat song. It's hard to resist this passage:
You make me so very happy
When you cuddle up and go to sleep beside me
And then you make me slightly mad
When you pee all over my Chippendale suite...
My only problem was that Freddie named the song after his own cat - Delilah. And, of course, there can only be one song called "Delilah" - Les Reed and Barry Mason's great anthem for Tom Jones about seeing the flickering shadow of love on her blind and then stabbing your woman to death. Which relationship-wise is rather more final than peeing over Freddie Mercury's furniture seems to be. But I am mindful of Sammy Cahn's injunction, made very forcefully to me over the years, that writers should "respect title". So nobody should be writing another song called "White Christmas" or "Over the Rainbow" - or "Delilah". And thus, with reluctance, I set aside Freddie Mercury's cat. (Incidentally, you can read my thoughts on Tom Jones and Reed & Mason's "Delilah" in A Song for the Season.)
As it happens, there are at least another dozen songs called "We Are the Champions", most of them British, and some of them by respected figures such as the light-music composer Reg Tilsley, and Mike Berry, a mainstay of the BBC masterpiece "Are You Being Served?", and Hal Shaper, lyricist of "Softly As I Leave You" and husband of a former agent of mine. But none of these prototype "We Are the Champions" went anywhere, and so a hit title just lay there waiting for someone else to come along and (as Ira Gershwin liked to say) "prove it".
The somebody who came along was the flamboyant (as we used to say) frontman of Queen. By 1977 Queen had had three years of pop hits, starting with "Seven Seas of Rhye", "Killer Queen", and of course "Bohemian Rhapsody". Length isn't everything, but it's quite a lot in rock music, where significance tends to get measured by the yard. In the Seventies, when Capital Radio and others polled their listeners on their all-time favorite tracks, "Bridge Over Troubled Water" was a shoo-in at 4' 55". Then "Bohemian Rhapsody" came along at 5' 57". At a certain level, the "Rhapsody" is complete bollocks. But it's marvelously assured bollocks, and it takes a rare and splendid brio to pull that off.
The credit for that goes to Freddie Mercury, born Farrokh Bulsara in the Sultanate of Zanzibar in 1946. At that time Zanzibar was a British protectorate, which (for our American and European readers) isn't the same as a colony. Under a protectorate, the Sultan still sits on his throne but the British Resident is the guy who discreetly runs everything - at least until the Sultan decides he wants to be Sultan in more than name. That happened on August 25th 1897, when Khalid bin Barghash succeeded his cousin. So on August 27th 1897 the Anglo-Zanzibar War broke out, when the Royal Navy shelled Sultan Khalid's palace and harem. The war lasted 38 minutes, which makes it officially the shortest war on record, at the end of which the Sultan was cowering in the German consulate like a Broward County deputy. Half-hour wars: those were the days. Things had calmed down by the time Bomi and Jer Bulsara, a Parsi couple from Gujarat, arrived from India in order that Mr Bulsara, a career civil servant under the Raj, could take up a position as cashier at the Zanzibar High Court.
At the age of eight, Farrokh was sent to St Peter's, a boys' boarding school near Bombay, but left early to return to his parents in Zanzibar. Britain gave the sultanate full independence in December 1963, and a month later African Marxists launched a revolution in which they slaughtered thousands of the ruling Arabs and the middle-class Indians imported by Britain to run the joint. The Bulsara family fled in March 1964, and made their way to the imperial metropolis to settle down in West London at 22 Gladstone Avenue.
A decade later, in March 1974, as the Bulsaras marked the tenth anniversary of their flight from the revolutionary bloodbath in Zanzibar, their son Farrokh was singing on "Top of the Pops" and bubbling just outside the UK Top Ten. The Number One guy that month was Canadian (Terry Jacks) and the rest of the Top Ten were Brits (the Hollies, Slade) or Yanks (Charlie Rich, Diana Ross) - and at Number Eleven, singing "Seven Seas of Rhye", was the hit parade's only Zanzibari Gujerati Zoroastrian Parsi: Farrokh Bulsara, now Freddie Mercury.
That's kind of impressive. In Zanzibar, his parents were upset that his O Levels weren't good enough to get him an accountancy job back in India. Instead, he was writing hit songs with opening lines like:
She keeps Moët et Chandon In her pretty cabinet...
That's from Queen's second hit, "Killer Queen". I was once in the house next door to Mercury's, with a pal of his, and had a sudden urge to pop round and see if Fred kept Moët et Chandon in his pretty cabinet. In similarly Moët mode, he would purport to be Persian rather than Parsi. In the Seventies, the grubbier, ostentatiously proletarian rock critics hated Freddie's cocksure swank and all the florid spectacle. In a fabulously tetchy interview with New Musical Express in 1977, Mercury begins by observing that he'd been interviewed by the same hostile rock critic - Tony Stewart - three or four years earlier, and here the hack was, still doing the same old thing:
'Don't they have such a thing as...aha...promotion? Life is not treating you very well, is it..? I would have thought,' he adds lightly, 'that since the last time I met you, if you had any go by now you should have become...aha...editor of The Times or something.'
On stage, Mercury liked to toast the audience with a favorite line: "May you all have champagne for breakfast." But the dour rock scribe finds no fizz in Queen's bubbly - to Freddie's amusement:
You hated that, didn't you..? I loved it, and I think that people love it. It's part of entertainment.
God! You haven't an ounce of artistry in your veins really.
What do you know about showbiz?
A damning question. Freddie knew about showbiz - and opera, and spectacle. As Tony Stewart reported, aghast, Mercury was "narcissistic" enough to talk about "getting very involved with this showbusiness type of thing and this sort of cabaret-ish...stroke, ballet thing." He declared that ballet would soon become "commonplace" in rock, and inquired whether Stewart had ever reviewed "a ballet show".
The "ballet thing" was the final straw. NME published the interview under the headline:
Is This Man A Prat?
The following month - July 1977 - Queen went into the Basing Street Studios in Notting Hill to record their new album, News of the World. The new boys in town, the Sex Pistols, chanced to be recording their debut album, Never Mind the Bollocks, in the adjoining studio. On a break, the Pistols wandered into the room next door to see how the Queen session was going. "Oi, Freddie!" hailed Sid Vicious. "Have you succeeded in bringing ballet to the masses yet?" Freddie didn't mind Sid's bollocks. "Why, Mister Ferocious!" he cooed. "We're doing our best, dearie."
Yet the "is this man a prat?" stuff was beginning to get to him. His band was a huge global hit, and he was being sniped at by pygmies. If the halfwit rock press weren't willing to proclaim him a winner, he'd do it himself. And so, for the new album, he sat down and wrote:
We Are The Champions, my friend
And we'll keep on fighting till the end
We Are The Champions!
We Are The Champions!
No time for losers...
"I was thinking about football when I wrote it," said Mercury, meaning soccer rather than the Super Bowl. "I wanted a participation song, something the fans could latch on to. It was aimed at the masses." And certainly the opening phrase could be a chant straight from the terraces of Millwall, even if the chorus quickly evolves beyond the contours of your average Saturday-afternoon beery bellowing. The verse, however, is less Crystal Palace than Caesars Palace:
I've paid my dues
Time after time
I've done my sentence
But committed no crime
And bad mistakes
I've made a few
I've had my share of sand kicked in my face
But I've come through...
All that dues-paying doesn't sound very Wembley. "'We Are the Champions' was the most egotistical and arrogant song I've ever written," Mercury conceded, but insisted it had nothing to do with the likes of New Musical Express:
I certainly wasn't thinking about the press when I wrote it. I never think about the British music press these days. It was really meant to be offered to the musicians, as well as the fans. I suppose it could also be construed as my version of 'I did it My Way'.
Ah, yes. On the one hand, Frank:
I've lived
I've laughed and cried
I've had my fill
My share of losing...
And on the other, Freddie:
I've taken my bows
And my curtain calls
You brought me fame and fortune, and everything that goes with it
I thank you all...
"Bows" and "curtain calls" are the language of showbiz, not soccer. And, in fact, as longtime reader Dan Hollombe pointed out last year, the melody of the above verse is entirely derived from the bridge of another showbiz (okay, circus) song, "Send in the Clowns". At the time Freddie Mercury wrote "Champions", Stephen Sondheim's "Clowns" was just four years old - and, in fact, that very year (1977) was a Top Twenty hit for Judy Collins in the US and Canada. The "We are the Champions" bit comes in the middle section - "Just when I'd stopped opening doors/Finally knowing the one that I wanted was yours":
Ever since Dan wrote to point out the similarity, whenever I hear "We Are the Champions", on the lines "I've paid my dues, time after time" I always sing "Just when I'd stopped opening doors". And whenever I hear "Send in the Clowns", on the lines "Just when I'd stopped opening doors", I always sing "I've taken my bows and my curtain calls..." I'm going to have to make a medley called "Send in the Champions" or "We are the Clowns".
So the question is: Did Freddie know "Send in the Clowns"? Why, yes, he did:
That's Freddie at home on the piano, recorded by his boyfriend Jim Hutton.
"We have made it, and it certainly wasn't easy," said Freddie. "'No bed of roses,' as the song says. And it's still not easy." It certainly isn't - not when, as Dan Hollombe complains, you have to shoehorn "fame and fortune andev'rythingthatgoeswithit" into a space that can't possibly accommodate it. But, granted that Kern and Hammerstein wouldn't have written it that way, I guess the syllabic pile-up makes Freddie's point: Queen are so big they're busting the bar lines. With "My Way", Paul Anka was slightly stunned to find himself proffering tub-thumping bombast he'd hitherto never dreamed of writing: "I ate it up and spit it out", etc. But Freddie Mercury took it to a whole other level:
But it's been no bed of roses
No pleasure cruise
I consider it a challenge before the whole human race
And I ain't gonna lose!
Yeah, baby! You tell 'em! Tell that whole human race...
Not everyone was on board, even in the studio. "We were mildly shocked," said Queen's guitarist Brian May, primly, "because it sounded so arrogant." But Freddie had figured he'd do "My Way" his way. In essence, "We Are the Champions" is Sinatra verses combined with the all-time great football chant - the only stadium-rock song purposely written for the stadium, for a 20,000-strong crowd where it's Cup Final every night:
We Are The Champions, my friend
And we'll keep on fighting till the end
We Are The Champions!
We Are The Champions!
No time for losers
'Cause We Are The Champions
...of the world!
But even the footie chant doesn't stay entirely terrace-centric: That dramatic pause just before "of the world" is pure, as Freddie would say, showbiz. Of course, the build-up to it isn't really your bog-standard soccer singalong, either. Mercury had an extraordinary voice, with a functional and highly expressive range from bass low F to soprano high F. As his sometime operatic duettist Montserrat Caballé put it: "The difference between Freddie and almost all the other rock stars was that he was selling the voice." Very true - and so even his song "for the masses" includes high notes both belted and falsetto. Like most rock offerings of the period, the record is produced to the hilt. But last year, on its fortieth anniversary, Queen released Mercury's raw vocal tracks, and they certainly support La Caballé's case. And, even amidst the produced track, the harmonies he wrote for the multi-voice choruses are quite jazzily voiced. I don't know whether he could have made a living arranging for Lambert, Hendricks & Ross or the Manhattan Transfer, but I'll bet he'd have enjoyed giving it a go.
Against that must be set the judgment of the men of science, who in 2011 declared "We Are The Champions" to be "the catchiest song in the history of pop music". As Dr Daniel Mṻllensiefen of Goldsmiths University, London, explained it:
Every musical hit is reliant on maths, science, engineering and technology.
Got that? It's STEM, not staves. "We've discovered," said Dr Mṻllensiefen, "that there's a science behind the singalong and a special combination of neuroscience, math and cognitive psychology that can produce the elusive elixir of the perfect singalong song." There are apparently four scientifically determined critical elements:
1) long and detailed musical phrases;
2) multiple pitch changes in the song's hook;
3) male vocalists;
4) and higher male voices making a noticeable vocal effort.
Dr Mṻllensiefen doesn't say why, if "We Are The Champions" is the catchiest song in history, it failed upon release in October 1977 to hit Number One in any major market. In America "We Are the Champions" was "We are the Fourth Place Runner-Up", and in Britain it stalled at Number Two, held back by Abba's "Name of the Game" and then by Wings and "Mull of Kintyre", which makes a pretty good singalong, albeit without "noticeable vocal effort". Perhaps it was all the fault of the track on the other side: "We Are The Champions" was half of a double-A-sided single with a second song written by Brian May - the guy who puts that fantastic guitar solo under the final thrilling chorus of "Champions". But his own composition, "We Will Rock You", is almost the antithesis of Mercury's song: entirely un-showbiz, driving guitar rock all the way. It's almost as if the other band members are anxious to remind Sid Ferocious and the NME that they're not all hung up on ballet.
That said, "We Are the Champions" was taken up by footie fans and became a genuine terrace chant, culminating in its adoption by FIFA as the official theme for the 1994 World Cup. When Mercury came to make the video for the song, he staged it as a genuine singalong, filling the house with real-life Queen fans. But note where he filmed it: the New London Theatre. Four years later, in 1981, Cats would move into the joint and play to packed houses for the next two decades, but back then the New London was a rather peripheral, semi-moribund venue. So why would Mercury pick it?
Because five years earlier the very first thing to be filmed in the theatre had been Marlene Dietrich's first and only television special.
Freddie Mercury died in 1991, a day after announcing he had Aids. At his bedside, of all unlikely fellow rockers, was Dave Clark of the Dave Clark Five. His father - the colonial civil servant from Bombay - outlived him by twelve years; his mother died just over two years ago. The inevitable tribute concert at Wembley Stadium in 1992 was a wan affair: for all the undoubted talent of his bandmates and for all the star power of his A-list rock chums, there was too much earthbound blokiness to capture the spark of the Zanzibari Gujerati Zorastrian Parsi-cum-Persian Dietrich fan. And then came the inevitable finale - "We Are the Champions" - with all the big-time rock stars crowding on stage to back ...Liza Minnelli. And, as I wrote in Broadway Babies Say Goodnight, you suddenly realized that Mercury and Minnelli were sisters under the skin: Like Liza, Freddie favored basic black. Like Liza, he looked good in tights. It would be ungallant to venture who had the better legs. And so the two sides of the song - "My Way" and Millwall, Atlantic City and Bristol City, Steve Wynn and a cup win, Marlene and White Hart Lane - triumphantly came together:
We Are The Champions, my friend
And we'll keep on fighting till the end
We Are The Champions!
We Are The Champions!
No time for losers
'Cause We Are The Champions
...of the world!
Freddie Mercury called it "a winner's song", but added "I can't believe that someone hasn't written a new song to overtake it." Would you want to try "overtaking" that voice and May's guitar in the final stretch?
No time for losers. That's always good advice. Have a champion week - and we'll have lots more for you in the days ahead.
~Many of Mark's most popular Song of the Week essays are collected together in his book A Song For The Season, personally autographed copies of which are available from the SteynOnline bookstore - and, if you're a Mark Steyn Club member, don't forget to enter the special promo code at checkout to enjoy the special Steyn Club member discount.
The Mark Steyn Club is just beginning its third year. We thank all of our First Month Founding Members who've decided to re-re-up for another twelve months, and hope that fans of our musical endeavors here at SteynOnline will want to do the same in the weeks ahead. As we always say, club membership isn't for everybody, but it helps keep all our content out there for everybody, in print, audio, video, on everything from civilizational collapse to our Sunday song selections. And we're proud to say that thanks to the Steyn Club this site now offers more free content than ever before in our sixteen-year history.
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