Over the last couple of years, I have noticed that whenever Queen’s We Will Rock You came on the air on a radio station, it would ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS segue straight into Queen’s We Are the Champions. The latest Thinking Ape Blues comic talks about this matter, but I still don’t have an answer to this. Does the album or promotional copy of whatever album We Will Rock You is on have Champions on right after it, and are the DJ’s falling asleep at the console every single time, or do they think that it’s incredibly clever to play those two songs back to back EVERY SINGLE TIME they play it? Or was my subject head correct and they’re actually just one song?
They are separate songs with separate catalog numbers and different composers (Brian May and Freddie Mercury, respectively). They were released as a ‘double A side’ single and placed on some special 45 pressings on one side for ease-of-play.
Toss in the fact that there’s little pause on the album between songs and the similarity of the subject matter AND the fact that both songs are rather short (totally less than 6 minutes combined) and you’ve got a marketing stroke of genius for the college boys from London. Woohoo!
All kidding aside, it was intentional. The band always meant for them to be played together if possible. Queen duplicated this concept on the ‘Jazz’ album with ‘Fat Bottomed Girls/Bicycle Race’.
- Jonathan Chance - Member of the International Queen Fan Club for more than 2 decades.
There are many other song pairs like this. On the radio, you hardly ever hear any of the following songs just by themselves:
The Beatles–Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band/With a Little Help From My Friends
ZZ Top–Waitin’ for the Bus/Jesus Just Left Chicago
Pink Floyd–Brain Damage/Eclipse
I’m sure there are more, but that’s all I can come up with at the moment.
Squeeze Another Nail for My Heart and Pulling Mussels from the Shell.
There was a whole thread recently about other songs like this.
Elton John’s “Funeral for a Friend/Love Lies Bleeding”.
Don’t forget Led Zeppelin’s “Heartbreaker”/“Living Loving Maid” and INXS’s “Need You Tonight”/“Mediate”.
My old vinyl copy of Queen’s Greatest Hits had a four-second gap between “WWRY” and “WATC”. Annoyed the piss out of me.
You should have picked up the European verision of the original GH LP. The one with ‘Seven Seas of Rhye’ and ‘Good Old Fashioned Lover Boy’. That was by FAR the best of the Greatest Hits packages.
Linked.
This isn’t recent. I’m old enough to remember when these came out and I have never, EVER, not even once, heard a radio station play them separately.
Yeah, I replaced my old vinyl with the UK CD a few years later. Still got it, too. It was also the first time I heard the songs “Don’t Stop Me Now” and “GOFLB” which weren’t on the U.S. release because of their homoerotic overtones (I guess) so that was the first time I wondered, “Hmm, maybe the band’s name does contain a hidden meaning…”
On the CD they’re the same track. I never had the record though, were they the same track on the record?
I have another one. Off of Savatage’s Streets - A Rock Opera classic, the last two songs (Somewhere in Time and Believe) are actually one track. Mind you, they don’t even blend into each other - for all intents and purposes, they’re two different songs altogether. And it’s actually kind of annoying, since Believe is by far the better song, and can only be reached by listening or FFD-ing through Somewhere in Time (which is not bad at all, just not nearly as good as Believe).
No, they were left off the US release because they were European singles and not released (fully) in the US. The original GH collections were strickly singles collections.