26 July 2019 – Freddie Mercury’s ‘Time Waits For No One’ is released for purchase on CD and a picture disk 7″
The original recording of the song ‘Time’, which Dave Clark co-wrote with John Christie, came out on the soundtrack for the musical of the same name, it was produced with layers of backing vocals and heavy drums.
Dave was warned about working with Freddie, he would be difficult , he was a perfectionist, but it was actually quite a marvelous experience for him. Freddie’s humour was one of the things that made working with him such a delight for Clark.
“When Freddie came into the studio and it was just Mike Moran on the piano and him,” says Clark, “it really was fantastic. Then we got into the track and we did 48 tracks of backing vocals, which had never been done in Abbey Road before. The final version was a 96-track production. Freddie plunged in full force creating a timeless epic. I loved it, Freddie loved it. It was a joint idea to make it different that way. Freddie, at that stage, liked innovative things, so that’s what we aimed to do.
Though the final version of ‘Time’, with all those backing vocals by Mercury, Christie and Peter Straker, was a hit – Clark later pondered about the original stripped-down version featuring just Mercury and Moran. In the mid-90s, he made his first attempt to do something about it.
“In the back of my mind, I knew that the final version worked, and you can’t knock it because it is fabulous. I loved it when Freddie was on his own singing it. I’ve never felt that sort of goosebumps feeling that I got on that original run-through at Abbey Road [Studios] with just Freddie and piano,’” Clark said in the statement.
But, the issue was, the song had been buried deep in his vaults for more than three decades. He couldn’t locate it.
“Every few years I would say to my engineer, ‘Go down to Abbey Road and go through it all again at the vaults.’ We could never find the track
At the end of 2017, we found it in the tape archives and I thought, Wow, it’s great.” Moran redid the piano and Clark was able to produce the performance he’d always wanted to hear again. Freddie’s bare vocals were placed on the new piano track. This version is Freddie at his most compelling.
Freddie previously asked Dave, “How do you want me to perform this?” Clark told him he wanted “a cross between Edith Piaf, Jennifer Holliday and Shirley Bassey”. Freddie joked, “Well, dear. I have all the dresses. I can do it perfectly!” He wasn’t kidding. He nailed it!
“Hearing the new stripped back track, with Freddie on his own without anybody else, shows the emotion of the song. It was a wow! We all know he’s a great singer, but I don’t think he’s been seen on his own with just a piano like this. It makes you realize how good somebody is.”
In the first five days after its online release, on 20 June 2019, the single of ‘Time Waits for No One’ sold in such huge quantities that it entered the charts. The video was viewed more than five million times in five days. Clark is proud that he captured a different side of Mercury.
“We were all simply aiming to make a special record. Now, nearly four decades on, it’s great to show Freddie off, and for people to see what he is like just on his own and not in front of 100,000 people, or with a band behind him,” says Clark. “Freddie’s performance on ‘Time Waits for No One,’ with his show-stopping vocals, was and will always be simply magical.”
