A remastered Budapest concert film screening at London’s Roundhouse makes the crowd mechanics of Radio Ga Ga hard to miss. The song began with Roger Taylor, a Roland Jupiter-8, a LinnDrum, and a child’s mangled phrase.
A remastered Budapest concert film screening at London’s Roundhouse put Queen’s crowd mechanics back on a big screen. The call-and-response double-clap in “Radio Ga Ga” is the sort of device that can look contrived on paper and feel inevitable in a room. The song’s history is just as unlikely.
“Radio Ga Ga” was the first Queen single written solely by Roger Taylor. Freddie Mercury, John Deacon and Brian May still helped shape Taylor’s idea into a setlist fixture, but the initial spark was his. It arrived after the band took a year out following 1982’s “Hot Space,” then struggled through early sessions for 1984’s “The Works” at Los Angeles’s Record Plant. Mercury was unimpressed by some of Taylor’s first submissions and told him to go back and write more.
Taylor found the trigger at home. His young son Felix, bilingual and the child of Taylor and Dominique Beyrand, heard the radio and said “radio ca-ca,” French for faeces. Taylor turned the phrase into “Radio Ga Ga”; “Radio Ca Ca” became the working
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