Written by On Thursday, July 12, 1979, as part of his on-going ‘Disco Sucks’ campaign against disco music, Chicago ‘shock jock’ DJ Steve Dahl arranged for a crate of vinyl records to be blown up on the field at Comiskey Park between games of a Major League Baseball double-header between the Chicago White Sox and the Detroit Tigers. Many of the records blown to pieces on what was known as Disco Demolition Night weren’t even disco records, but simply releases from black artists, giving a movement, which was already tinged with homophobia, an aded racist edge.
One of the artists negatively affected by the ‘Disco Sucks’ was Chic, the New York band led by guitarist Nile Rodgers and bassist Bernard Edwards. Released on June 4, 1979, the group’s feel-good anthem Good Times hit the top of the Billboard Hot 100 chart in August 1979, becoming their second US chart-topper, after 1978’s Le Freak, but Chic would never have a Top 40 hit in America again. However, Good Times would prove to be a catalyst for one of the biggest rock bands in the world to create the best-selling single of their career.
Queen bassist John Deacon was at New York’s Power Station Studios when Chic were recording their 1979 album Risqué, and Bernard Edwards’ playing on Good Times inspired the Leicester-born musician to write a funky new anthem of his own, It was one which initially bemused and confused his bandmates when he began work on the song at Munich’s Musicland studios during the session for Queen’s eighth album, The Game.
“I’d been wanting to do a track like Another One Bites The Dust for a while, but originally all I had was the line and the bass riff,” Deacon told Bassist & Bass Techniques. “I could hear it as a song for dancing but had no idea it would become as big as it did.”
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“We didn’t have a clue what Deaky was up to,” Brian May confessed, adding that Roger Taylor’s initial response to the song was “unprintable”.
“There were times when all our ideas would really work together magically well,” May once told Guitar World. “Or you’d have a great day in the studio where everybody felt they’d contributed. But then there’d be days when everyone was pulling in totally opposite directions, and it would be painful. And oddly enough, Freddie – who everybody thinks was the great prima donna – was very often the person who would find the compromise. He was very good at mediating.
“But while he was good at finding roads in the mist, he would certainly fight for things he believed in. Like Another One Bites The Dust, which was a bit of a departure for Queen. Roger, at the time, certainly felt it wasn’t rock and roll, and was quite angry at the way that was going. And Freddie said, ‘Darling, leave it to me. I believe in this.’ John had written the song. But it took Freddie’s support to make it happen.”
“Freddie got deeply into it. Freddie sort of sang it until he bled, cause he was so committed to making it sound the way John wanted it.”
Another One Bites The Dust was released as the fourth single from The Game in August 1980. The song spent 15 weeks in the Billboard top 10 (the longest running top 10 song of 1980), including 13 weeks in the top five, and 31 weeks total on the chart (more than any other song in 1980). It also reached number two on the Hot Soul Singles chart and the Disco Top 100 chart, and number seven on the UK Singles Chart.
“I didn’t think that would ever be a single,” Roger Taylor admitted in an 2011 interview on Absolute Radio. “We were playing in the Forum in Los Angeles, and Michael Jackson used to come and sit in the corner and watch. And he said, ‘You guys have got to release this.’ I said, No, you’re mad, that won’t be a hit. And then it was actually taken up by the black radio stations in New York and Detroit, and they were playing the hell out of it. And the next thing I knew that they put it out, and… I think it’s the biggest ever record on Elektra/Asylum, it sold 4 million copies in America. Great, we’ll take it!”
“I think it’s still the biggest record we have ever had,” May recalled. “We kind of become the biggest band in the world at that moment. It’s a fleeting moment cause someone else will come in and take over. But for that moment, we kind of owned the world.”
