Queen – Friends Will Be Friends
#quotefromthe80s
Friends will be friends
When you're through with life and all hope is lost
Hold out your hand 'cause friends will be friends
Right 'til the end
#Queen #FriendsWillBeFriends
If there was one date that split Queen’s phenomenal career in two, I’d say it was definitely July 13, 1985, the date of Live Aid of course, that really split the wonderful decade in two. On the stages of Wembley and Philadelphia the heroes of the early 80s, Duran Duran and Wham! above all, were already preparing for the evolution of their careers, and their testimony was taken up on stage by a Freddie Mercury now ready to become one of the undisputed symbols of the second part of the 80s.
A few months after Live Aid, a Queen album collection came out, The Complete Works, which was actually a box set (of vinyls or tapes) that included all of Queen’s records to date, but didn’t include anything really new. It took almost a year, until the late spring of 1986, to see the release of A Kind of Magic, Queen’s first album after the resounding success of Live Aid.
To tell the truth, A Kind of Magic was also a bit of a special album, because in essence it was the soundtrack of a very famous film, Highlander, with the great Sean Connery and of course with an unforgettable Christopher Lambert. The film Highlander was in a sense destined to have strong connections to the music world of the 80s, because the director of the film was the great Russell Mulcahy, who had directed all the great videos of the 80s, from Buggles’ Video Killed the Radio Star to Kim Carnes’ Bette Davis Eyes, Bonnie Tyler’s Total Eclipse of the Heart, without forgetting all the great Duran Duran videos, including Rio, The Reflex and The Wild Boys.
There were only three songs on the album A Kind of Magic that were not included in the film’s soundtrack. The first was Pain is So Close to Pleasure, which will be released during the summer as a single only in the US; then, One Vision, which however had already been part one year earlier of the soundtrack of Iron Eagle with Lou Gossett, Jr., and the third was a very special song that became one of the Queen iconic songs: Friends Will Be Friends, release on Jun 9, 1986.
It is a particular song, a true “power ballad” given the slow and sentimental rhythm, which was also absolutely in line with the style and tastes of Brian May, who often liked to be a little more melodic with his guitar.
Friends Will Be Friends didn’t really reach the top of the charts and in many countries it didn’t even reach the top ten, but it entered the hearts of Queen fans when, with various adjustments of the arrangement, this song was performed in concert for the first time. We were in a show in the Netherlands, in Leiden, on the second date of The Magic Tour, and since then this song grew day after day, and it was finally included in the grand finale of the concerts, being the first and only song after about ten years to be performed between We Will Rock You and We Are the Champions.
Since the song was not part of the film Highlander, the video was not shot by Mulcahy, and the very English Queen turned to two foreign producers and directors, very famous in the 80s. We are talking about DoRo, the team of the Austrian producers and directors Rudi Dolezal and Hannes Rossacher, who had also shot the video of Rock Me Amadeus for Falco. It must be said that the collaboration between Dolezal and Freddie Mercury in fact never stopped, and still today on social media Dolezal is absolutely seen as one of the most intimate collaborators and also biographers of the leader of Queen.
The video captures the performance of the song live during a concert, with Freddie Mercury finally letting the audience sing the song, as often happens. The curious thing, however, is that this video was not shot live in one of the tours, but the concert environment was recreated especially for the video, complete with stage, lights, instruments and of course the audience! For this reason the video of the beautiful Friends Will Be Friends is often referred to as “Queen’s Greatest Show Never Performed”!
But ever since, that show was performed every night in our hearts!
Queen on Wikipedia
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