Queen have released a reworked version of “Machines (Or Back To Humans)” as a digital single. That song has been used as the opener during the band’s “Rhapsody” tour. The original track appears on their 1984 album “The Works.”
Brian May commented:
“The Robot Horde provide a narrative thread to our new show. In these days of artificial intelligence beginning to invade our whole lives, these mechanical guys personify robotic insurgence. In our still-developing current show, ‘Back To Humans’ is the soundtrack to us as humans reclaiming our control. ‘Machines’ and ‘Radio Ga Ga’ actually have a common ancestor, the beginnings of a collaboration between myself and Roger in the sessions for ‘The Works’ album in 1984. But we had different ideas of how it should develop, and the track split into two songs going in opposite directions … Roger piloting ‘Radio Ga Ga’ to completion and into a world-wide hit, and me taking the route of making ‘Machines’ into a kind of unending battle. Putting the new show together, it hit me that ‘Machines’ was more relevant than ever. So the idea came about of theming the show with a 21st century version of this battle — and, incidentally, bringing ‘Ga Ga’ and ‘Machines’ fittingly back together once again. And this stands very well with our long-standing belief that a rock show should be live and dangerous rather than performed to clicks and electronic backings.”
Roger Taylor added:
“‘Machines’ was born out of the electronica we originally explored on ‘Radio Ga Ga’ to create this sense of the battle between the electric side and the human side. Now at a time when it’s increasingly becoming a machines world and we’re all just trying to keep up, we felt it the perfect time to revive this idea of basically going back to humans.
Basically, it starts off where everything is electronic — electronic drums, everything, And what you have is the ‘human’ rock band sort of crashing in. What you wind up with is a battle between the two.”
Metal Anarchy 