“To be honest, it wasn’t going down very well with the rest of us. You know, Roger actually didn’t want to have it on the album.”

Brian May reflected on the creative challenges behind “Another One Bites the Dust”, noting how the Queen drummer Roger Taylor “didn’t want to have it on the album”.Released as the fourth and penultimate single from the 1980 LP “The Game”, “Another One Bites the Dust” is widely credited as the British rock giants’ best-selling singles, as well as a shining example of bassist John Deacon’s songcraft. Combining funk and rock elements, the song was quite the departure for Queen, but, as Brian May tells Guitar World in a new interview, Deacon was “hell-bent on getting what he wants.”As a result, the rhythm guitar heard on the track is all Deacon, while may peppered in some “grungy” licks to bring the song closer to home. Asked how much creative input in terms of his playing he received from the bassist while crafting the song, May said:

“Well, I don’t think I was in it at all to start off with! Because he’s hell-bent on getting what he wants. So it’s his rhythm guitar playing – it’s not mine. That very funky style, that’s John. Oh yeah. And he wanted Roger to have a sort of disco-type sound. And it’s all done on a loop, so Roger reluctantly put loads of tape on his drums and played very stiff, and Deacy made a loop out of it. So it starts to be unnatural at that point. It’s a damn good loop, though, and it’s beautiful. And Deacy did the bass, Deacy did the rhythm.”

“Freddie Mercury adored it, but Roger Taylor didn’t want it on the album”

And while Freddie Mercury “adored” the process, the guitarist notes how Roger Taylor was reluctant to even have it released as part of “The Game”:

“He worked with Freddie on the vocal. Deacy didn’t sing, so he would tell Freddie what the words were, and play the tune on the guitar. You can imagine it was quite a strange process. 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.”

“Because, to be honest, it wasn’t going down very well with the rest of us. You know, Roger actually didn’t want to have it on the album, didn’t like it. It was much too funky and not enough rock for him. I was a bit on the fence. I kind of enjoyed it. But it obviously wasn’t the rock that I would have been creating. And I remember saying, ‘Look, it needs a little bit of something a bit more dirty on it.'”


That’s when the “grungy” licks came in, even though May notes that the world was still years away from actual grunge at that point:

“So I started playing these little bits of the more grungy guitar. I don’t think the word ‘grungy’ existed in those days. But the distorted guitar is obviously me, and that punctuates it and gives it another dimension, takes it to a slightly more rocky place.”

The blueprint for Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”?

Moreover, May credits the song with inspiring Michael Jackson to explore a similar line of creative thought on his own “Thriller”, which by 1983 became the best-selling album of all time:

“I remember Michael Jackson hearing it and saying, ‘That’s where I want to be. That’s what I want to do.’ And I think his whole album which followed [‘Thriller’] was deeply influenced by ‘Another One Bites The Dust’ and the fact that it straddled funk and rock. Michael came to the same place from a different direction. Very interesting!”

Becoming a “very important part of the Queen cannon”

Despite those early second thoughts, May says that “Another One Bites the Dust” is now firmly cemented in Queen’s artistic identity:

“It’s actually still evolving, which is quite something after all these years. So every time we do it, it gets a little bit of a different drift. And I enjoy it a lot more these days. Because we have made it our own I suppose. It’s quite heavy. And we do it early in the set at the moment, which is quite adventurous. It’s in the sort of rock part of the set, which in the beginning you never would have thought.”

“That song is a very important part of the Queen canon. It’s perhaps our biggest song ever in terms of sales. I’m not sure, but it must be close.”