"Under Pressure" was recorded at
Mountain Studios in
Montreux, Switzerland, in September 1981. Queen, working on their 1982 album
Hot Space, had been working on a song called "Feel Like", but were not satisfied with the result. Although it was said that the collaboration started from Queen running into David Bowie at Mountain while recording "
Cat People (Putting Out Fire)", the story told in interviews was that Bowie happened to be around in Montreux and lived near the studio, so Queen invited Bowie down to the studio and it took off from there. The track was recorded during one marathon evening session at Mountain, with vocals and mixing completed at the
Power Station in New York a couple of weeks later. Bowie sang backing vocals for Queen's song "Cool Cat", but his vocals were removed from the final song because he was not satisfied with his performance. Afterwards, they worked together for a while and wrote "Under Pressure". It was credited as being co-written by the five musicians. The
scat singing that dominates much of the song is evidence of the jam-beginnings as
improvisation. However, according to Queen bassist
John Deacon (as quoted in a French magazine in 1984), the song's primary musical songwriter was
Freddie Mercury – though all contributed to the arrangement. As
Brian May recalled to
Mojo magazine in October 2008, "It was hard, because you had four very precocious boys and David, who was precocious enough for all of us. David took over the song lyrically. Looking back, it's a great song, but it should have been mixed differently. Freddie and David had a fierce battle over that. It's a significant song because of David and its lyrical content." The earlier, embryonic version of the song without Bowie, "Feel Like", is widely available in bootleg form, and was written by Queen drummer
Roger Taylor. Also, some confusion has arisen about who had created the song's
bassline. John Deacon said (in Japanese magazine
Music life in 1982) that David Bowie created it. In more recent interviews, Brian May and Roger Taylor credited the bass riff to Deacon. Bowie, on his website, said the bassline was already written before he became involved. Roger Taylor, in an interview for the BBC documentary
Queen: The Days of Our Lives, stated that Deacon did indeed create the bassline, and that all through the sessions in the studio, he had been playing the riff over and over again. He also claims that when the band returned from dinner, Deacon misremembered the riff, but Taylor was still able to remember it. According to Brian May in a 2016 article for
Mirror Online, it was actually Bowie, not Taylor, who had inadvertently changed the riff. The riff began as "Deacy began playing, 6 notes the same, then one note a fourth down". After the dinner break, Bowie changed Deacon's memory of the riff to "Ding-Ding-Ding Diddle Ing-Ding". == Reception ==