Felix said radio ca-ca. A stadium learned the clap.
Roger Taylor heard the title from his son. Felix Taylor was three in 1983, in a car in Los Angeles, when a song came on the radio and he called it ca-ca. Taylor locked himself away for three days with a Roland Jupiter-8 and a LinnDrum and wrote Radio Ga Ga from that phrase. He thought at first the track might belong on a solo album. When the band heard the demo, they kept it for Queen.
John Deacon wrote a bassline under the drum machine. Freddie Mercury rebuilt the arrangement and pushed Taylor to make the song less like a straight pop single. The writing credit stayed with Taylor. Fred Mandel, the Canadian keyboardist from the Hot Space tour, programmed the Jupiter-8 arpeggio that runs through the verses. Taylor sang the backing parts through a Roland VP-330 vocoder and played both acoustic drums and the LinnDrum. Brian May added the guitar solo. Queen and producer Reinhold Mack recorded the song at the Record Plant in Los Angeles through August and early September 1983. It was the only time they made an album in North America. The Works is the record it opens.
EMI released the single in Britain on 23 January 1984. The B-side was Brian May’s I Go Crazy. The track entered the UK singles chart on 4 February and held at number 2 for two weeks, stuck behind Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s Relax. In the United States it reached number 16 on the Billboard Hot 100. It also went to number 1 in Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands and Sweden. The Works came out on 27 February. David Mallet filmed the video at Shepperton Studios and Carlton in November 1983 and January 1984: the four of them in red, cut against Fritz Lang’s Metropolis from 1927. Queen bought the performance rights from the East German government, which owned the film then. The clip was nominated for Best Art Direction at the 1984 MTV awards. One line points at Orson Welles’s 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast. Another borrows Churchill’s “finest hour”.
I remember thinking “oh great, they’ve picked it up” and then I thought “this is not a Queen audience”. This is a general audience who’ve bought tickets before they even knew we were on the bill. And they all did it. How did they know? Nobody told them to do it.
(Brian May, on the Live Aid clap)
On 13 July 1985 at Wembley Stadium, Live Aid, Radio Ga Ga was the second song, right after the opera section of Bohemian Rhapsody. About 72,000 people clapped the chorus together, copying the crowd in the video. Queen played it shorter and faster, and Mercury sang the high lines himself. The song closed the main set on the Works tour and stayed in the Magic tour, including both Wembley nights in July 1986, the last tour with all four of them. The album version runs 5:48. The radio edit is 4:23.
Taylor said at the time that the picture was starting to matter more than the sound. The Live Aid clap is the case where the video taught the room a part, and the room played it back louder than the record. The single is still the Record Plant take: LinnDrum, Jupiter-8, Deacon’s bass, Mercury’s lead, May’s solo. Later remasters did not write it.
