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Here are some music events that have happened today, August 3.
*August 3, 1985 – Madonna scored her first UK No.1 single with ‘Into The Groove’. The track was taken from the movie ‘Desperately Seeking Susan’ which featured Madonna and Rosanna Arquette. ‘Into The Groove’ is Madonnas best selling single in the UK, having sold over 850,000 copies.
*August 3, 2007 – Queen guitarist Brian May handed in his astronomy PhD thesis – 36 years after abandoning it to join the band. May had recently carried out observational work in Tenerife, where he studied the formation of “zodiacal dust clouds”.
*1970 – The newly formed Queen featuring Freddie Mercury (possibly still known as Freddie Bulsara) on vocals, guitarist Brian May, drummer Roger Taylor and Mike Grose on bass played their first gig at Truro City Hall, Cornwall, England. They were billed as Smile, Brian and Roger’s previous band, for whom the booking had been made originally. Original material at this time included an early version of ‘Stone Cold Crazy’.
*1981 – Motorhead scored their only UK No.1 album with ‘No Sleep Til Hammersmith’. The live album was recorded at Leeds and Newcastle shows during their Short, Sharp Pain In The Neck tour in 1981. The name of the tour was a reference to the injury sustained by Phil Taylor when he was dropped on his head during some after-show horseplay. Despite the title of the album, the London venue the Hammersmith Odeon was not played on the tour.
*1987 – Whitney Houston became the first women in US history to enter the album chart at No.1 with ‘Whitney’ she also became the first woman to top the singles chart with four consecutive releases when ‘I Wanna Dance With Somebody’ hit No.1.
It was 1981 when Queen were recording their album ‘Hot Space’ in Switzerland and David Bowie was recording music for the movie Cat People that the great song ‘Under Pressure’ came about. Bowie stopped by to visit Queen with the intention of adding vocals to the song Cool Cat. Freddie Mercury and Bowie were messing around with some songs when Bowie said, let’s just write a song. 24 hours of wine and cocaine brought on these vocals for Under Pressure. The scene is described in the book “Is This the Real Life?”
“We felt our way through a backing track all together as an ensemble,’ recalled Brian May. ‘When the backing track was done, David said, “Okay, let’s each of us go in the vocal booth and sing how we think the melody should go–just off the top of our heads–and we’ll compile a vocal out of that.” And that’s what we did.’ Some of these improvisations, including Mercury’s memorable introductory scatting vocal, would endure on the finished track. Bowie also insisted that he and Mercury shouldn’t hear what the other had sung, swapping verses blind, which helped give the song its cut-and-paste feel.
Freddie Mercury is finally getting a movie made about his incredible life. I don’t know what to think of when hearing that Sacha Baron Cohen is going to star in the movie. Queen guitarist Brian May said they will begin shooting later this year with a release date in the autumn of 2012.
