Queen and David Bowie Under Pressure

Under Pressure is a 1981 song by the British rock band Queen which was written and recorded in collaboration with the singer David Bowie. It was included on Queen s 1982 album Hot Space. The video for the song features neither Queen nor David Bowie due to touring commitments. Taking the theme of pressure, director David Mallet edited together stock footage of traffic jams, commuter trains packed with passengers, explosions, riots, cars being crushed and various pieces of footage from silent films of the 1920s, most notably Sergei Eisenstein s influential Soviet film Battleship Potemkin, the silent Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde starring John Barrymore, and F. W. Murnau s Nosferatu, a masterpiece of the German Expressionist movement. The video explores the pressurecooker mentality of a culture willing to wage war against political machines, and at the same time love and have fun (there is also footage of crowds enjoying concerts, and lots of black and white kissing scenes).