!["Recollections of David Bowie Advising John: 'That's Not the Way,' While John Retorted, 'Wait, I'm the Bass Player!'": The Charged Evening When Bowie and Queen Created a Timeless Hit.]](https://backingtracksfullcollection.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Recollections-of-David-Bowie-Advising-John-Thats-Not-the-Way-758x426.png "\"Recollections of David Bowie Advising John: 'That's Not the Way,' While John Retorted, 'Wait, I'm the Bass Player!'\": The Charged Evening When Bowie and Queen Created a Timeless Hit.] 1")
It’s not always nailed-on that when the world’s biggest artists come together, greatness ensues. But in the annals of the truly legendary collaborations, there’s one shining example of how two titans can effectively blend their respective qualities in the making of an enduring classic. Under Pressure – the 1981 David Bowie and Queen monster hit – was a clear feat of songwriting, instrumental and vocal prowess.
But in truth, the creation of the chart-topping song, led by its instantly recognisable bassline, wasn’t something that neither party anticipated would happen when they began a relaxed hang-out on one September night in 1981.
The legendary David Bowie and Queen merger was an unintended consequence of a time when the latter was attempting to pivot away from the hard rock-meets-vaudeville trappings that characterised the bulk of their 1970s output. Instead, Queen were keen to capitalise on the rising prominence of disco, and, like their imminent co-star had so frequently done, change with the times.
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Queen had always been markedly against synths, but the deployment of an Oberheim OB-X synth on 1979’s The Game indicated a significant policy shift.
This toe-dipping would lead to a full-body dive on Queen’s first proper album release of the 1980s (Flash Gordon aside), Hot Space.
In making the album, it was decided that a more wholehearted embrace of then trailblazing technology would help the band weather the changing trends then besieging the charts and dominating popular culture. Once cynically shunned by the proud instrumentalists, synths and drum machines were suddenly de rigueur for Queen in 1981.
“We fought about arriving at a sensible format for Hot Space, then decided to push into a very rhythmic and sparse area, disciplining out all the indulgences we’ve been used to putting in,” Brian May said in Faces magazine in 1984. “We felt our fans would take it as another experiment.”
Acquired by the band in 1979, Mountain Studios in Montreux, Switzerland was the perfect setting for the band to take some time thinking, writing, experimenting and trying to latch onto just what this new version of the band would sound like.
Freddie Mercury, Brian May, John Deacon and Roger Taylor set to work on the record which would subsequently become regarded as among Queen’s most disappointing LPs. A bold experiment that, one significant track aside, was largely seen as a failure.
“[It] isn’t really my favourite album,” Taylor reflected to our sister site Louder. “We had drum machines and this stupid sampler – which was the world’s most expensive coffee table. I can understand the people who liked our stuff before not particularly liking that album. It’s got some good stuff on it. I fail to remember what.”
Recorded well ahead of the band’s more emphatic disco excursions, but later included as the album’s incongruous closing track, Under Pressure was, by a long way, the most successful thing to come out of the Hot Space era.
Interestingly, elements of the song (namely the flavour of the drum and guitar parts) were already in play when recording what would ultimately be a flimsy studio outtake titled Feel Like.
While some have later alleged that Bowie’s involvement was the result of a chance encounter at the studio when he was there cutting Cat People (Putting Out Fire) (for the soundtrack of 1982’s Cat People), Bowie himself, in a video interview in 1983, specifically remembered being personally invited to the studio.
“That was through Dave Richards, the engineer at the studio,” Bowie stated. “I was in town, in Montreux, doing some other work there, and because I believe that Queen have something to do with the studio on a business level, I think it’s their studio or something like that and they were recording there, and David knew that I was in town and phoned me up and asked me to come down, if I’d like to come down to see what was happening, so I went down.”
More polite acquaintances than cosy besties at this point, Queen and Bowie exchanged pleasantries and discussed their respective careers.
Hearing that the band were attempting to explore new avenues pricked up Bowie’s ears, and, with small talk dispensed with (and surrounded by instruments!), they decided to have a little jam.
It would be one of the most productive jams in either of their careers.
“Now time dims the memory a little, but the way I remember it, we all very quickly decided that the best way to get to know each other was to play together,” Brian May told The Mirror in 2016.
After a few laid-back runs through of classic rock tracks, including Mott The Hoople’s All the Way From Memphis and (the Bowie-penned) All The Young Dudes, a more freewheeling bit of studio fun found Mercury and Bowie trading vocal fragments and freeform scatting at each other, while Taylor and May reprised some of the elements of Feel Like.
But it was John Deacon who started the ‘Pressure-ball rolling.
“John came up with the riff which starts it all off,” Brian said in the DVD commentary for Queen’s Greatest Video Hits II. “We all got into it – suddenly I remember putting in the heavy chords stuff. And then it came to the point of, ‘What is this song about and what’s the melody line?’’
Driven by Deacon’s infectious bassline, played on his Fender Precision Special, this new musical idea clearly had legs.
Perhaps a spot of dinner, and a fair few glasses of wine, would help to figure out what the song was driving at?
Following a healthy amount of gorging and glugging, Queen and Bowie giddily returned to the studio. Bowie signalled to Deacon to begin cycling through the riff again. John obliged. However, to David’s ear, something was off with the bassline.
Bowie’s (potentially wine-addled) memory of the bass riff’s groove was slightly different to how John Deacon had started to re-play it.
“I remember David Bowie reaching over to John and saying, ‘No, don’t do it like that,’ and John going, ‘Excuse me? I’m the bass player, right? This is how I do it!,’” May recalled in an interview with Ultimate Classic Rock.
“This was a funny moment because I can just see DB going over and putting his hand on John’s fretting hand and stopping him,” May explained further over in the Mirror and on his official website. “It was also a tense moment because it could have gone either way. Deacy did not take kindly to being told what to do, especially by physical interferences while he was playing! But he was good-natured, and it all went ahead.”
May clarified how the bass rhythm had slightly changed in his piece for the Mirror. “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’”
Due to this seemingly minor (but actually quite significant) change, Deacon would later attribute the entire bass riff to Bowie himself.
“It was an interesting experience, because David wrote the bassline, he’s responsible for it,” Deacon said to Viva Rock in 1983. “He’s a talented man, and that song is one of those that I really like.”
With the iconic bassline now locked-in as the one millions would soon become familiar with, a chord sequence that led out from the riff was devised.
A progression of D, A, G and A shaped the first section of the song, while other variations in the key of D (defined by the relentless pedal of the bass part) shaped a rising dynamic structure with numerous fits and starts, peppered with Freddie’s ubiquitous scats.
To topline the song, it was Bowie who directed that Freddie, Brian and everyone else in the room should take it in turns to sing prospective vocal melody ideas over the top.
“The procedure was each of us went into the vocal booth consecutively, without listening to each other and listening to the track, vocalised the first things that came into our heads, including any words which came to mind, working with the existing chord structure,” May said on his official website.
Now bursting with a morass of vocal fragments and some pretty strong melody lines (many of which – including the repeated phrase ‘people on streets’ would be retained for the final song), the song’s dynamic build and ultra explosive end-part were feeling weighty.
Travelling between obscenely high peaks and barely-whispered troughs, what the song needed a suitably profound lyrical theme.
By all accounts, it was the next morning in the studio that Bowie presented the band with the more locked-in central idea.
“David was in there first and told us he wanted to take the track over, because he knew what he wanted it to be about,” May said on his official website. “We all backed off and David put down a lyric which now focused on the ‘under pressure’ part of the existing lyric.”
Freddie parried with more lyrics that elaborated on Bowie’s theme, spelled out within a typically bombastic vocal performance.
Lyrically, Bowie laid out the more philosophical, and quite stark, introductory perspective on the life-shattering effects of pressure:
Pressure
Pushing down on me
Pressing down on you
No man ask for
Under pressure
That burns a building down
Splits a family in two
Puts people on streets
Trading the vocal through numerous sub-sections, Mercury took the lead on the heroic and triumphant crescendo, which felt like an ascension from the looming darkness of Bowie’s intro.
Can’t we give ourselves one more chance?
Why can’t we give love that one more chance?
Bowie rode out the song to its close by elaborating on Mercury’s jubilance.
‘Cause love’s such an old-fashioned word
And love dares you to care for
The people on the edge of the night
And love dares you to change our way of
Caring about ourselves
Under Pressure had been born. And it was a transcendent piece of work.
Rapidly grown out of the seeds of that jam the previous night, what the two megastars were now faced with was a potential game-changer, a huge collaboration that neither of which had anticipated, and a song that would later be regarded as a contender for both of their finest moments.
More than just a milestone collaboration, Queen and Bowie’s plans were adjusted to prioritise making Under Pressure a single.
The realisation that this little song was special perhaps goes some way to explaining why both Bowie and Queen (Freddie in particular) tussled over the final mix for the single, which was undertaken a few weeks later in New York’s Power Station Studio.
“It was very difficult… because we all had different ideas of how it should be mixed,” May told Total Guitar.
“I think it’s probably the only time in my career I bowed out, because I knew it was going to be a fight. So basically it was Freddie and David fighting it out in the studio with the mix. And what happened in the mix was that most of that heavy guitar was lost.”
Unable to reach a compromise, a rough monitor mix was delivered. This would end up being the final version of the song released to huge acclaim on October 27th 1981, topping the UK, Canadian and various other charts and reaching 29 over in the US. As of the time of writing the song has exceeded 2 billion streams on Spotify alone.
But Brian May remained lukewarm of the final mix that yielded such adoration. “I never liked it, to be honest, the way it was mixed. But I do recognise that it works. It’s a point of view, and it’s done very well. And people love it. So we play it quite a bit different live, as you probably noticed, it is a lot heavier and I think it benefits from it.”
Following Mercury’s death in 1991, Bowie joined the remaining members of Queen and Annie Lennox to perform the song at the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert in April 1992. It was a breathtaking and emotive performance.
“For me [Under Pressure] was a great pleasure,” Roger Taylor told VH1 in 2011.
“I think [David Bowie] is one of the most talented people I’ve ever worked with or met and he just sings so well and has got such presence and he’s got an incredible catalogue of wonderful songs and a huge range and imagination and it was just a pleasure.”
