Hot Space - Album Styles and Genres

Album Styles and Genres

Before 1979, Queen had a "no synthesiser" policy on their albums (because people would confuse May's multi-tracked guitar effects with synthesisers). Beginning with The Game album, Queen began using Oberheim OB-X synthesisers on their songs ("Play the Game" and "Save Me" are examples), and continued to do so. On Hot Space the band went even further, introducing the drum machine for the first time. A departure from their trademark seventies sound, most of Hot Space is a mixture of funk, funk-rock, dance, disco and R&B – while the "rock" songs continued in a pop-rock direction similar to their previous album (an exception is the song "Put Out the Fire"). Disliking the new sound, May and Taylor were very critical of the influence that Paul Prenter, Mercury's personal manager between the early 1980s and 1984, had on the singer.