Under Pressure

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Lore & Background

The song was recorded at Mountain Studios in Montreux, Switzerland, in September 1981. Queen, working on their 1982 album Hot Space, had been working on a song called "Feel Like", but were not satisfied with the result. The collaboration started from Queen running into David Bowie at Mountain while recording "Cat People (Putting Out Fire)", though the story told in interviews was that Bowie happened to be around in Montreux and lived near the studio, so Queen invited Bowie down to the studio and it took off from there. The track was recorded during one marathon evening session at Mountain, with vocals and mixing completed at the Power Station in New York a couple of weeks later. Bowie sang backing vocals for Queen's song "Cool Cat", but his vocals were removed from the final song because he was not satisfied with his performance. Afterwards, they worked together for a while and wrote "Under Pressure". It was credited as being co-written by the five musicians. The scat singing that dominates much of the song is evidence of the jam-beginnings as improvisation. According to Queen bassist John Deacon (as quoted in a French magazine in 1984), the song's primary musical songwriter was Freddie Mercury – though all contributed to the arrangement. As Brian May recalled to Mojo magazine in October 2008, "It was hard, because you had four very precocious boys and David, who was precocious enough for all of us. David took over the song lyrically. Looking back, it's a great song, but it should have been mixed differently. Freddie and David had a fierce battle over that." The earlier, embryonic version of the song without Bowie, "Feel Like", is widely available in bootleg form, and was written by Queen drummer Roger Taylor. Some confusion has arisen about who had created the song's bassline. John Deacon said (in Japanese magazine Music life in 1982) that David Bowie created it. In more recent interviews, Brian May and Roger Taylor credited the bass riff to Deacon. Bowie, on his website, said the bassline was already written before he became involved. Roger Taylor, in an interview for the BBC documentary Queen: The Days of Our Lives, stated that Deacon did indeed create the bassline, and that all through the sessions in the studio, he had been playing the riff over and over again. He also claims that when the band returned from dinner, Deacon misremembered the riff, but Taylor was still able to remember it. According to Brian May in a 2016 article for Mirror Online, it was actually Bowie, not Taylor, who had inadvertently changed the riff. The riff began as "Deacy began playing, 6 notes the same, then one note a fourth down". After the dinner break, Bowie changed Deacon's memory of the riff to "Ding-Ding-Ding Diddle Ing-Ding".

In Their Own Story

The music video for the song features neither Queen nor David Bowie due to touring commitments. Director David Mallet edited together stock footage of traffic jams, commuter trains packed with passengers, explosions, riots, cars being crushed, and various pieces of footage from silent films of the 1920s, most notably Sergei Eisenstein's influential Soviet film Battleship Potemkin, The Eagle, My Lady of Whims, the silent Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde starring John Barrymore, and F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu. Top of the Pops refused to show the video in its original form due to it containing footage of explosions in Northern Ireland, so an edited version was instead shown.

Reader's Guide

The song was played live at every Queen concert from 1981 until the end of the band's touring career in 1986. Live recordings appear on Queen live albums, including Queen Rock Montreal and Live at Wembley '86. Although very much a joint project, only Queen incorporated the song into their live shows at the time. Roger Taylor sang Bowie's parts, as Bowie was never present for a live performance of the song with him. Bowie chose not to perform the song before an audience until the 1992 Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert, when he and Annie Lennox sang it as a duet (backed by the surviving Queen members). However, after Mercury's death and the Outside tour in 1995, Bowie performed the song at virtually every one of his live shows, with bassist Gail Ann Dorsey taking Mercury's vocal part. The song also appeared in set lists from A Reality Tour mounted by Bowie in 2004, when he frequently would dedicate it to Freddie Mercury. Queen + Paul Rodgers have performed the song. In summer of 2012, Queen + Adam Lambert toured, including a performance of the song by Lambert and Roger Taylor in each show. "Under Pressure" was sampled by American rapper Vanilla Ice for his 1990 single "Ice Ice Baby". Vanilla Ice initially did not credit Bowie or Queen, who sued and gained a songwriting credit on Ice's song.

Did You Know?

• The song was recorded during one marathon evening session at Mountain Studios in Montreux, Switzerland, in September 1981.
• Bowie sang backing vocals for Queen's song "Cool Cat", but his vocals were removed because he was not satisfied with his performance.
• The music video uses stock footage and clips from silent films like Battleship Potemkin and Nosferatu because neither Queen nor Bowie could appear due to touring commitments.
• Top of the Pops refused to show the original video because it contained footage of explosions in Northern Ireland.
• Vanilla Ice sampled the song's bassline for "Ice Ice Baby" without initially crediting Bowie or Queen, leading to a lawsuit and a songwriting credit.