By DENNIS HUNT

Times Staff Writer

Los Angeles Times”, 13 September 1982

Imagine Foreigner doing a country album or the Rolling Stones recording an album of soft rock or Air Supply making a hard-rock album. All these would be daring ventures because each group would be working in an unfamiliar genre.

These hypothetical albums would violate one of the basic codes of the record business: Don’t change a successful formula. Major groups almost always stick to this code. But this year Queen didn’t. It would be pleasant to report that this English quartet dared to be different and got away with it. Unfortunately, though, Queen’s popularity has suffered.

It all began with the band’s latest album, “Hot Space,” which isn’t its usual collection of hard-rock pieces. The album is heavily R&B-influenced and only partly geared to the rock audience. Instead of selling, like most Queen albums, a few million and featuring some smash hit singles, “Hot Space” has struggled to sell 800,000 and includes only one hit single, “Body Language.”

It’s surprising that this single, which isn’t one of Queen’s most popular, got much air play. With its bizarre blend of rock, pop and R&B and its crazily shifting tempos, “Body Language” is one of the most unorthodox singles ever released by a major rock band.

At a Beverly Hills hotel suite one recent evening, the band’s glib, scholarly drummer Roger Taylor discussed the conception and consequences of “Hot Space.” Queen was in town briefly to prepare for the local dates—two at Irvine Meadows the past weekend and the Tuesday and Wednesday concerts at the Inglewood Forum—that close out its American tour.

“The white, heavy-metal side of our audience basically didn’t like the album,” Taylor pointed out. “That’s to be expected. We were going against that audience when we made the album. It’s time some major band really challenged this audience.”

According to Taylor, the band, which also includes lead singer Freddie Mercury, guitarist Brian May and bassist John Deacon, had been fed up with playing the same kind of rock music and simply wanted a change.

“We would have welcomed a change in any direction just so long as it was a change,” Taylor said. “We had to do something. We were so bored by the music we were doing.”

QUEEN: ‘HOT SPACE’ OFF ROYAL TRACK

…number of musical directions but R&B was the logical one. The band’s 1980 album, “The Game,” included the R&B-oriented single, “Another One Bites the Dust,” that was, for Queen, offbeat. Many industry observers never thought it would be released as a single because it was too “black” for this white rock group. Certainly no one expected it to become one of the most popular singles in years, selling more than three million copies.

“Since we had such success with an R&B single,” Taylor observed, “it only seemed natural if we were looking to do something different, we would try more R&B. Freddie (Mercury) and John (Deacon) are really into R&B anyway. They were all fired up about concentrating on R&B. But I think they perhaps took things a little too far.”

“I must admit that this isn’t my favorite Queen album. The R&B isn’t really my personal taste. But it’s something different for us and I was all for trying something different.”

Taylor candidly revealed his bias against commercial pop-rock, the genre into which Queen had drifted: “The music is stagnant, almost disgusting. We can do this stuff, too. We could make an album like ‘Escape’ (Journey’s multimillion seller). We could write lyrics like Foreigner if we wanted to. But they make me cringe. It’s so easy, so formularized, so bland, so gutless. We could make albums like that and sell lots of albums and have Top 10 singles and be bored silly.”

Apparently the band didn’t make a conscious decision to record an R&B-oriented album. “It just happened,” Taylor insisted. “Most of our writing is done in the studio. Most of this album was spontaneous. We all saw the direction we were going in and we just went with it. We could have opted to do ‘The Game, Part II.’ We could go into a studio and do that tomorrow. But there’s no challenge there.”

Don’t get the idea that Queen’s yen for experimentation is linked to some raging anti-commercialism. “We want to sell millions of records,” Taylor said. “It’s stupid to make records that no one wants to buy. But we want to do music that’s different and still sell millions of records. That’s hard to do, harder than we expected.”

According to Taylor, Queen, an 11-year-old band that became popular in America in the mid-’70s, started to make changes when it recorded “The Game.” “We changed to a new producer (Mack), we changed studios and started to experiment with a different sound. That’s when we tried some R&B things. But what we did then wasn’t anything compared to what we tried on ‘Hot Space.'”

“How did the band feel about the rather cool reaction to ‘Hot Space’?” “We were all very disappointed and a bit angry that it didn’t get more air play,” Taylor said. “We don’t like to talk about what happened with this album. It’s a real sore point.”

Though “Hot Space” isn’t one of Queen’s biggest sellers, it’s certainly not a flop. Selling 800,000 isn’t bad in this soft market. It’s just that next to the sales of “The Game” album and the “Another One Bites the Dust” single—both more than four million—the totals of “Hot Space” and “Body Language” seem puny.

Will these disappointing record sales prompt Queen to retreat to a more commercial rock sound on its next album? “To some degree we’ll be intimidated by what happened with ‘Hot Space,'” Taylor replied. “We’re definitely not going to do another record like this one. We’ll probably back off from the R&B direction a bit.”

“But I don’t think we’ll chicken out and totally back away from experimenting with music outside the basic rock format. But we won’t know what effect this album has had on us until we go back into the studio again. It will be very interesting to see what happens.”