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How Michael Jackson gave Queen one of their biggest songs
- 2 days ago
- 7 min read
Updated: 19 hours ago
This absolute banger is one of Queen's best songs… but they almost never released it.
Brian May and Roger Taylor didn’t like it, and took an intervention from the King of Pop himself to convince them to actually release it.
And in the process, Michael Jackson and Freddie Mercury ended up recording some duets that never actually saw the light of day. This one is a great story.
The credit for this song goes mostly to John Deacon, who came up with the idea and that now iconic bass line for this song in 1980.
He’d been watching old western movies, and scribbling down notes that he thought might make good inspiration for songs. One thing he kept coming back to was the phrase ‘another one bites the dust’.
There’s a bit of a myth it was inspired by the 1929 Saint Valentines Massacre, a notorious gang shootout. But I can't find any mention anywhere from John Deacon or anyone connected to the band about that. It seems to be one of those false theories. Unless you have any proof? Pop it in the comments.
Anyway, John was also into disco funk, and in particular was a fan of a band called Chic, who he’d hung out with a few times. Good Times by Chic directly influenced that bass line.
And you can clearly hear the influence of Good Times in Another One Bites The Dust.
John liked what he had and brought it to the band.
He said in Queen: The Greatest, Episode 19:
“I’d always wanted to do something a little bit more, that was more disco, which was very uncool at the time.”
Queen always had a very diplomatic approach to songwriting. There wasn’t any one ‘head writer’. If someone had an idea, they brought it to the table and bounced it round. But John ran into resistance on this one, particularly from drummer Roger Taylor. He didn't want to get into dance music, feeling it wasn't his thing.
And he also didn’t appreciate having his drums messed with. Brian May said in the same episode:
“John got Roger to play with tape all over his drums, which is exactly what Roger hated. Roger hated his drums being made to sound dead.”
Understandable. If you don’t like the vibe, and your playing is being restricted, you’re probably not going to be that into it. What’s more, they wrote the song using looped drums, so there really wasn’t much for Roger to get into. But, this was a democracy, so he went with it to see out John’s vision.
Brian May had his doubts too.This was Queen in 1980. They were one of the biggest rock bands in the world, with emphasis on the word rock. All their best songs had great big drums, guitar riffs, Brian’s tasteful solo’s and Freddie’s pure star power.
These were the guys that did Killer Queen, We Are the Champions, and We Will Rock You. They were arena fillers who wrote arena sized songs.
So, what John was bringing to the table just… wasn’t Queen. Brian felt that it needed more rock, that it needed ‘a bit more dirt’ on it
But, he soon came up with some of his signature distorted guitar touches for the song, and that brought him off the fence and on board.
Fun fact, John Deacon himself played most of the instruments on this song: Bass, guitars, some percussion and piano that they reversed - i’ll touch more on reversed parts of this song later. He’s actually listed as the sole songwriter - despite May’s contributions.
Freddie on the other hand was well into it. May told Guitar World in 2024:
“Freddie absolutely adored it. He just stepped into it with a vengeance. And he sang it until he bled! He was forcing himself to get those high notes and he loved it. Freddie really was such a driving force."
This is where John realised he needed to change up the lyrical theme a bit. His original version was a lighthearted affair about cowboys, and at the end of each verse, another one ‘bit the dust’. But he recalls he was embarrassed to even show them to his bandmates. When they came to record the song, he completely rewrote the verses.
They seem to be about a bloke called Steve getting shot, and another guy getting dumped. Not exactly groundbreaking, but hey. Freddie turned it into something great.
So in the end, they did record the song. But still Roger wasn’t convinced it belonged on the album. This is where Michael Jackson comes in.
Michael had been close to the band, particularly Freddie, for a few years. It’s easy to see what they had in common: Both were in a class of their own as performers.
I could say a big string of buzzwords here to describe how good they were, but it still wouldn’t do it justice. Instead, I'll just remind you of this:
That’s Freddie holding 90,000 people in the palm of his hand. And many many many more watching at home.
As for Michael, you could pick any moment from any of his shows. In fact, what about the Superbowl halftime show when he came out on stage and stood still for two whole minutes - building the anticipation in the crowd.
He wasn’t called the king of pop for nothing right? He was a performer through and through.
Michael had been to watch Queen several times, and was a confirmed fan.
But it wasn't just musical appreciation. Michael and Freddie were proper friends. Mercury told the Rolling Stone in 1983:
“He kept coming to see us and then we started talking and, in those days, I think he would actually go out. He’d go out and have dinners. I remember going to dinner with him.”
Michael had also heard the material Queen had been recording for their next album, and was so impressed with Another One Bites the Dust that after one show at the forum in LA he came backstage to talk about it:
Even Roger Taylor knows to listen to Michael Jackson's music advice. And so Another One Bites the Dust was included on The Game in 1980, and obviously went massive.
It was released as a single a couple months after the album and became their second biggest ever selling hit. Obviously, Bohemian Rhapsody is the first.
Another One Bites the Dust was just eaten up by fans everywhere. It marked a crossover for Queen from their arena rock days to something new. Not quite pop, not quite rock, not quite disco. It was just Queen.
If anything, that helped put them even further in a category of their own. In fact, The Game was the first Queen album to not include the famous liner note “No synthesizers”. This had become a running gag in their previous releases - and a point of pride for Queen. They always insisted that any synth-like sounds were created purely with instruments.
Brian May was particularly good at layering sound and effects to get the desired results - and wasn’t a fan of early synth machines. And so their albums carried the tag ‘No Synthesizers’ or 'No Synths!’.
The Game actually had a special mention for the first synth used in a Queen album.
This above all else showed a willingness from Queen to move with the times. This was the 80’s - Synths were in. AOBTD might not have used them, but it was definitely used in the album.
Remember I mentioned reversed piano parts? Well that was a simple studio technique they used to get an interesting sound. But this song managed to get caught up in one of those ‘if you play it backwards it has a hidden meaning’ controversies.
For some reason, some people decided that if you play many songs backwards, it would reveal secret messages. An evangelical group in the 80’s really jumped on to the idea that many were giving the American public subliminal satanic messages.
In ‘81, Evangelist Michael Mills hosted a radio show taking aim at The Beatles, the Stones, Led Zep, and others. Including Queen.
He argued that Another One Bites the Dust contained the secret message 'some of us smoke marijuana.'
He specifically stated as well that he was moving the record back and forth with his finger, not just playing it backwards.
I reckon someone had been on the devils lettuce himself.
I also mentioned that Freddie and Michael recorded some duets together Jackson had actually been calling Freddie for a while, wanting to work together.
I just can’t get over the idea of the two of them in the studio together. That's the most overpowered singing team in the world. Can you imagine if they’d ever hit the stage together? There’s various stories about what the songs were for - some say it was a Jacko album, some say an album of duets, some think it was a Queen album. But what we do know is they recorded three songs in 1983: There Must Be More to Life Than This, State of Shock and Victory.
It’s not completely clear why the songs weren’t released, but Freddie was quoted in a later Biography that it had a lot to do with the two of them being extremely busy at the time. I don’t know why this doesn't mean they couldn’t at least be released at the time, if not performed.
There's other stories, such as Michael allegedly disapproving of Freddie doing cocaine in his house, but these stories don’t have much proof.
This story does make me laugh though: Freddie frantically calling his manager to get him out of a recording session. Understandably, his manager was confused. Jim Beach quoted Freddie in Freddie Mercury: The Great Pretender as saying:
“Because I’m recording with a llama. Michael’s bringing his pet llama into the studio every day and I’m really not used to it and I’ve had enough and I want to get out.”
Did Michael Jackson do anything normally? Who brings a Llama to a recording studio?
State of Shock was re-recorded with The Jacksons and Mick Jagger and released in ‘84, and Freddie released a solo version of There Must Be More to Life Than This on his solo album Mr Bad Guy in ‘85.
But we did eventually get a version of Freddie and Jacko in 2014, when Queen released a version of There Must Be More to Life Than This on the compilation album Queen Forever.
Sad that the two of them never got to see it released.
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