Proving that Queen could fill dance floors as easily as they could sports arenas, ‘Another One Bites the Dust’ ushered in a whole new era for the group. By Jason Draper
Click here to listen to ‘Another One Bites the Dust’.
Having spent the 1970s pushing rock music into new territory, Queen entered the following decade with a determination to bend the genre into entirely new forms. While recording their eighth album, The Game, in Musicland Studios, in Munich, Germany, they began to add new wave, pop and funk into their already complex mix, with bassist John Deacon fashioning a song that would lead to a rethink of the type of band Queen itself could be.
“I listened to a lot of soul music when I was in school, and I’ve always been interested in that sort of music,” Deacon told Bassist & Bass Techniques magazine when discussing arguably his most famous composition for the group. “I’d been wanting to do a track like ‘Another One Bites the Dust’ for a while,” he admitted, “but originally all I had was the line and the bass riff. I could hear it as a song for dancing but had no idea it would become as big as it did.”
Designed to bridge the gap between arena venues and nightclub dancefloors, ‘Another One Bites the Dust’ was unleashed upon an unsuspecting audience in the summer of 1980. Before that, however, it took even Deacon’s bandmates by surprise.
“The rest of us had no idea what Deaky was doing”
While touring in support of 1978’s Jazz album, Deacon paid a visit to Chic at the Power Station recording studio, in New York City, where the ‘Le Freak’ hitmakers were working up their latest record, Risqué. “John Deacon was sitting right next to me when ‘Good Times’ was recorded,” Nile Rodgers, the group’s sonic architect, later recalled, and it was that song’s distinctive bass line, laid down by Bernard Edwards, that sparked Queen’s own foray into disco music.
Less than six months later, Deacon presented a new idea to producer Reinhold Mack at Musicland, and the German studio whiz immediately set up a drum loop for the bassist to work with. Eventually adding bass, piano, rhythm guitar and his own handclaps to the finished recording, the naturally reserved Deacon was, in Mack’s view, “like a bird who stays quiet until it finally lays a perfect egg”.
“I must admit that the rest of us had no idea what Deakey was doing when he started this,” Brian May would say of the sessions that led to ‘Another One Bites the Dust’. However, the remaining three-quarters of Queen were crucial to the end result: May added a swirling sound effect from his Eventide Harmonizer processor, along with what he described as “these little bits of the more grungy guitar”. Roger Taylor looped a drum part whose crisp sound was achieved by filling his kit with blankets and laying strips of tape across the skins. And Freddie Mercury strutted his way through a performance that matched the song’s danger-strewn lyrics – “Out of the doorway, the bullets rip/To the sound of the beat” – for intensity. “Freddie sung until his throat bled,” May told MOJO. “He was so into it. He wanted to make that song something special.”
“We became the biggest band in the world at that moment”
‘Another One Bites the Dust’ proved perfect for the Sugar Shack, a local Munich haunt where the group would test new recordings out on the city’s nighttime revellers. “It was a rock disco with an amazing sound system,” May said of the venue, and the dancers’ response would “change our whole perspective on our mixes and our music”. But one outside opinion held the most weight of all when it came to convincing Queen that their funk-infused number would clean up on the charts.
Flush with the success of his Off the Wall album, Michael Jackson had already told the group that they “needed a song the cats can dance to”. Watching the Motown star as he listened to Queen’s response, Mercury “knew we had a hit as he bobbed his head up and down”.
“That’s it, that’s the gravy,” Jackson told him. “Release it, and it will top the charts.”
With parent album The Game already on the shelves, US soul and funk radio stations put ‘Another One Bites the Dust’ on heavy rotation before it was even picked for standalone release. Once it was issued as a single, in August 1980, supported by a performance video filmed at Reunion Arena, in Dallas, Texas, the song went to No.7 in the UK and No.1 in the US, giving Queen their second US chart-topper less than eight months after their first, The Game’s lead single, ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’. Underscoring the song’s wide appeal, it also peaked at No.2 on Billboard’s the Hot Soul Singles and Disco Top 100 charts.
“We kind of became the biggest band in the world at that moment,” May asserted years later, noting that even the future “King of Pop” had looked to Queen’s bold mix of styles when he recorded his all-conquering Thriller album: “His whole album which followed… straddled funk and rock. Michael came to the same place from a different direction.”
Sampled by everyone from hip-hop pioneer Grandmaster Flash to electronic boundary-pusher Flying Lotus, and slyly referenced by pop icon Gwen Stefani in her kaleidoscopic hit ‘Hollaback Girl’, ‘Another One Bites the Dust’ remains a genre-blurring landmark in rock music. Yet while its lyrics tell a loose tale of vanquishing opponents, the song has come to take on more life-saving significance in some quarters: In guidelines endorsed by St John Ambulance, Deacon’s bass line has been identified as having the perfect number of beats per minute for medical professionals to follow when performing CPR.
For Brian May, however, ‘Another One Bites the Dust’ is “one of the more difficult things” he’s been tasked with replicating on stage. “I have to not try too hard, because it has to roll off the wrist in a very natural way. And you have to get the sound exactly right,” he told Total Guitar. “It’s actually still evolving, which is quite something after all these years. So every time we do it, it gets a little bit of a different drift.”
Jason Draper