More than forty years since ‘Cool Cat’s release on Hot Space, the song is being re-released this time as a limited edition 7″ pink vinyl. It will be made available to the public on Record Store Day, April 20th; complete with a never before heard instrumental B-side. The popularity of the song likely stems from an Amazon Prime advert, directed by Olivia Wilde, which has gathered more than 25 million views on YouTube.
Written by John Deacon and Freddie Mercury,the song is one of Queen’s funkier works, and features the two writers alone on the track. Hot Space is also notable for ‘Back Chat’, a choppy number written by Deacon alone, and ‘Under Pressure’, a ballad the band wrote with David Bowie. Incidentally, Bowie recorded harmony vocals for ‘Cool Cat’, although the singer was reportedly unhappy with the results, and asked the band to remove his contributions. Hot Space came out in 1982, a record that may have been influenced by the success of The Game (1980), where the band abandoned some of the trappings of 1970s heavy metal, for a more palatable sound.
If it was the fame they were looking for, then it worked, because ‘Another One Bites The Dust’ wound up becoming a sizable hit for the band. Like ‘Cool Cat’, ‘Another One Bites The Dust’ was a Deacon composition, and his bandmate Brian May paid tribute to the musician in an interview with Far Out. “John was a wonderful player,” May remembered. “I think he’s still underestimated – his contributions were immense. And, of course, he was a writer as well. We were all writers, but John penned the biggest hit of all, which was ‘Another One Bites The Dust’. If it was a batting average in cricket, he would have the best score. Because he only wrote like ten songs for Queen [sic], and half of those were huge hits! Pretty amazing record.”Mercury passed away in 1991, and Deacon retired from the band later in the decade, but May still tours under the Queen name with vocalists Adam Lambert and Roger Taylor in tow.
