A Coronation Street joke that American radio would not play
John Deacon wrote I Want To Break Free in 1983. He said the spark was the women’s liberation movement. The song is a 12-bar blues in E, three verses and a bridge, and no real chorus. Most of the keyboards are Fred Mandel. He played the solo in one take on a Roland Jupiter-8, then punched in the last note so it could slide down an octave. Queen and Reinhold Mack produced it with the rest of The Works. The album version runs 3:19. The single adds about forty seconds of introduction, with keyboard, cymbals and May’s Red Special, plus a longer solo, and runs 4:18.
EMI released it on 2 April 1984, the second single from the album, after Radio Ga Ga. In Britain the B-side was Machines (Or ‘Back to Humans’). It peaked at number 3. Austria, Belgium and the Netherlands took it to number 1. Capitol’s American single stopped at number 45 on the Billboard Hot 100. The band had already argued with MTV over the Body Language video in 1982. This clip had no sex in it. It still travelled badly.
The video was Roger Taylor’s idea. His girlfriend, Dominique Beyrand, suggested a parody of Coronation Street. David Mallet shot it at Limehouse Studios on 22 March and 4 May 1984. The terraced houses in the opening are in Harehills, Leeds, including 41 Dorset Mount. Mercury vacuums the front room as a dark-haired Bet Lynch, moustache left on, pink top, leather miniskirt, and two-inch heels because the taller ones would not let him walk. Brian May wears curlers, closer to Hilda Ogden. Deacon plays the older woman, Ena Sharples. Taylor is the schoolgirl. The middle section is a ballet that Wayne Eagling rehearsed with dancers from the Royal Ballet, without telling his bosses. Mercury shaved for that part, a nod to Nijinsky’s faun, and mostly let the dancers move him.
We had done some really serious, epic videos in the past, and we just thought we’d have some fun. We wanted people to know that we didn’t take ourselves too seriously, that we could still laugh at ourselves. I think we proved that.
(Roger Taylor, on the video)
Brian May later described a US promo trip where radio people’s faces went ashen. They told him they could not play the record because it looked homosexual. Taylor’s line on MTV was shorter. He called the station narrow-minded, and said it seemed to be all Whitesnake. Britain heard a soap joke in the tradition of pantomime. A lot of American radio heard a confession. The song stayed in the set on the Works tour and the Magic tour. In Britain the single went double platinum, past 1.2 million copies.
The useful split is the chart, not the rumour. Number 3 where the joke was legible. Number 45 where it was not. Deacon’s blues and Mandel’s one-take solo are the record. The housewives are the reason the record stopped at the border.
