Under Pressure
Bowie created a whole glut of albums in his twenty years in Switzerland. He hung out with Charlie Chaplin, jammed with Nile Rodgers and perhaps most famously of all, recorded ‘Under Pressure’ with Queen. We went to Mountain Studios in Montreux to learn how it was recorded in a haze of squabbles, cocaine and wine. Then did the same (we didn’t, we ate €15 euro ice cream)
Just outside Queen’s Mountain Studios is a statue of Freddie Mercury. People from all around the world patiently queue to look like a big goof in front of him. Well we did anyway. We pedalled on past colourful iron saxophones and microphones statues, not the result of a spilled cargo of musical instruments, but a celebration of the Montreux Jazz Festival - a natural calling for Bowie who eventually played here in 2002. And, it was his friendship with festival director Claude Nobs that led to a collaboration with the giant bronze statue we were now stood in front of.
Farrokh Bulsara of Zanzibar, like David Jones of Brixton, had changed his name to something more intergalactic. Freddie Mercury as he’s more commonly known, was, of course, the enigmatic Queen frontman. He’d amassed his own army of devotees who were paying tribute with flowers, photos, candles, handwritten notes and anything else they didn’t want in their handbags. Our tribute was to get his famous clenched fist power pose badly wrong whilst leaving a group of Chinese tourists wondering if he collaborated with the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians.
We left Freddie in peace because just a short ride away was the Montreux Casino - the former home of Mountain Studios owned by his band, Queen. It had been a playground for many other big slobbering riffs, too. Deep Purple’s Smoke On The Water was born here in 1971 after a daft fan set off a flare burning the casino to the ground and causing a timely plume to drift across the lake. Rebuilt in 1976, Bowie recorded not only Lodger here but a slew of late eighties, early nineties albums including Never Let Me Down, Black Tie White Noise, The Buddha of Suburbia and 1.Outside. Now, the studio’s last remnants were hidden inside under the guise of the Queen Studio Experience. Inside the studio is a mixing desk (see above) where you can mess around with the sound levels on different Queen songs.
Inside lay a deluge of Queen memorabilia: drum kits, records, handwritten lyrics, electric guitars and glittering costumes. But, of course, we were here for Bowie. On the wall was a note from Queen drummer, Roger Taylor who said, ‘It’s one of the best things Queen have ever done, and it happened so casually, when David visited us at our studios in Montreux.’
A twenty-four-hour bender fuelled by Lavaux wine and cocaine gave birth to the timeless riff by Queen bassist John Deacon. Or was it? The heady mix of stimulants and depressants led to confusion. Deacon credited it to Bowie, Bowie credited it to Deacon. Deacon had gone to lunch and forgotten it, until Roger Taylor remembered it. Then, recently, Brian May speaking to Mirror Online said, Bowie had come back from dinner and tweaked it. Either way, it’s timeless. BUM-BUM-BUM-BUM-DA-DA-DUM-DUM. That’s the bass line, not a jaunty song about bottoms.
During the session the famous frontmen recorded their vocals separately. Mercury’s flamboyant scatting DEE-BO-BAYS building to a soaring crescendo of, ‘Why can’t we give love one more chance…’ leading to the pleading refrain, ‘…why can’t we give love, give love, give love, give love...’ until Bowie casually stubs out his cigarette, slips in through a slide door and steals the whole goddamn show.
‘Cause love’s such an old fashioned word…
And love dares you to care for...
The people on the edge of the night...
And love dares you to change our way of...
Caring about ourselves...
This is our last dance...
This is our last dance...
This is ourselves...
Under pressure...
Under pressure...
Pressure.
Supposedly Bowie and Mercury were a little squiffy about doing their vocal takes together. So Mercury took the lead with Bowie promising not to listen in. When Mercury listened to Bowie’s vocals he couldn’t believe that they seemed to sparkle in perfect counterpoint to his. He wondered in amazement how DB had pulled it off. “He listened in,” a sound engineer told the Queen frontman. “The bastard,'‘ Mercury replied.
Below are those isolated vocal takes.
‘It was very hard,’ Brian May said in 2008, ‘Because you already had four precocious boys and David, who was precocious enough for all of us. Passions ran very high. I found it very hard because I got so little of my own way. But David had a real vision and he took over the song lyrically.’ The song was going to be called, People on Streets, but Bowie decided it should be Under Pressure.
The official video is below.