Queen

Queen

Latest Release

Essential Albums

  • News of the World
    News of the World
    News of the World

    In the months leading up to the 1977 release of News of the World, Brian May remembers having a disagreement—a brief, polite disagreement—with Freddie Mercury. The topic was “We Are the Champions”. The members of Queen had gone big before, but May worried that a statement of egomania as towering and unchecked as “Champions” might rupture the silent contract between band and fans that had made Queen so beloved in the first place. Mercury disagreed—and he was right, of course. “We Are the Champions”—and the inextricably linked “We Will Rock You”—would become one of the band’s most definitive songs, a tune that captures Queen’s weird mix of musical theatre and goon-ready football chants. Months later, May couldn’t believe it: The song he’d once laughed at had become an international anthem. News of the World marked the band’s sixth album of the 1970s—another hit entry in a remarkably potent run. Yet the group was still finding ways to build upon its trademark pomp-rock sound. Mercury’s dominance as a lead singer could make it easy to forget that each of the band’s four members wrote songs, and what you hear on News of the World is everyone feeling themselves—and their particular tastes—a little more than usual. There’s the layered guitars of May’s “We Will Rock You” and “All Dead, All Dead”; the warmth of bassist John Deacon’s “Spread Your Wings”; the quick-and-dirty attack of drummer Roger Taylor’s “Sheer Heart Attack” and “Fight From the Inside”; and the sexed-up, almost funk minimalism of Mercury’s “Get Down, Make Love”. But it was the album’s two rah-rah anthems that would make News of the World one of the most impactful albums of Queen’s career. Not long after its release, Mercury wore a New York Yankees bomber jacket onstage as the band played “We Will Rock You” and “We Are the Champions” at Madison Square Garden (the team had recently won the World Series). It was a once-unthinkable moment: The great, heteronormative American tradition of baseball being soundtracked to a pair of anthems written by a gay, Parsi-Indian refugee. Take a second to appreciate that—you know Mercury did.

  • A Night at the Opera
    A Night at the Opera
    A Night at the Opera

    In October 1975, Queen met up with a DJ named Kenny Everett to get advice about a new song called “Bohemian Rhapsody”. Their label had said releasing it as a single would be a disaster, and a handful of people in their circle said the same. Too weird, too long, too absurd. But the band had slaved over it and, having racked up considerable debts over the few years prior, figured it was time to go big or go home. Everett loved it and asked for a copy, which the band furnished on the condition that he kept it to himself. Everett said sure—but then he went to work and played it 14 times, telling his boss that his finger slipped. The audacity of A Night at the Opera is obvious: the walls of multi-tracked vocals, the mix of hard rock and cabaret. But the real accomplishment is how they make music so heavy feel so feather-light. It’s composition, but it’s also touch: Whereas Led Zeppelin are organic, Queen are airbrushed; whereas Zeppelin sound like boys scrapping, Queen sound like models traversing an impossible runway, schoolbooks balanced perfectly on their heads. Guitarist Brian May says he thinks of the album as a whole—not, you guess, out of pretense as much as deference for its extremes: catty hard rock (“Death on Two Legs”) and show tunes (“Seaside Rendezvous”), simple ballads (“Love of My Life”) and eight-minute epics sort of about Noah’s ark (“The Prophet’s Song”). And while they covet precision, it isn’t as a show of power, but of orderliness: They don’t want to smash or pummel—they want to buff each surface clean. The result is an experience that takes the stereotypes of hard rock (masculine, “authentic”) and queers them into something playful and slant—music that doesn’t express pain or libido as much as cleverness and wit. Once asked about the origins and inspirations of “Bohemian Rhapsody”, Freddie Mercury said it was just supposed to be a lark—because, as he put it, why not?

  • Sheer Heart Attack
    Sheer Heart Attack
    Sheer Heart Attack

    Sheer Heart Attack isn’t just Queen’s breakthrough album; it’s an essential blueprint for a kind of high-drama pop-rock, one still followed by everyone from The Killers to Lady Gaga to Imagine Dragons. And while the band’s peers skewed earthy and rough—think Led Zeppelin or Black Sabbath—Queen presented as polished, flamboyant and fastidiously detailed. This was hard rock forged not from the blues, but from opera and musical theatre. As far as a hard-rock acts go, Queen weren’t a bulldozer— they were a ship in a bottle. Prior to Sheer Heart Attack’s release in 1974, Brian May worried that tracks like “Killer Queen” were too light. But the group’s obsessive layering of sounds—the bright bell that comes in around the first minute; May’s brief, feline guitar growl just after the second—became the band’s calling card. And even the heavier tracks on Sheer Heart Attack have a posh, gentlemanly feel (“Stone Cold Crazy”, “Brighton Rock”). If there’s a revolution here, it’s the idea that rock could be powerful without pretending to be natural or raw—that being theatrical was no less authentic than being rugged. Still, in the end, the most important thing was that it all made for a good show, no matter how it all came together. Some bands offered the illusion of coming to you live and direct; Queen’s four members wrung every overdub out of their shiny, 24-track mixing board that they could. The week Sheer Heart Attack came out, an interviewer asked Freddie Mercury if his satin and velvet outfits ever got him attention on the street. Yeah, he said—but he wasn’t about to change into jeans because of it.

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About Queen

For Queen, rock was merely a jumping-off point. Packing enough pomp and grandeur to make their name seem understated, they built high-octane pop songs out of parts boosted from classical music, dance music, doo-wop, New Wave, metal and opera—forging one of the most distinctive and distinguished catalogues in modern music history. They formed in London, in 1970, after art-school graduate Farrokh Bulsara combined forces with guitarist Brian May and drummer Roger Taylor of the band Smile—but they didn’t truly become Queen until they were joined by bassist John Deacon and Bulsara changed his name to Freddie Mercury. Their self-titled debut came out in 1973, just as some of prog rock’s most pervasive clichés were starting to solidify, and they wasted no time subverting them. They wrote complex songs but always winked at their own penchant for excess; the combination of Mercury’s mischievousness and the rest of the band’s relative bookishness—May studied astrophysics throughout his life—made them instantly unique. They captured it best on 1975’s audacious A Night at the Opera, which, in addition to being the most expensive album ever made at the time, featured “Bohemian Rhapsody”, a six-minute mini-opera (and unlikely hit) that became the band’s entire aesthetic in microcosm: It was difficult, it was silly, it made non-rock music feel extremely rock, it simultaneously poked fun at and embraced theatricality, and, above all, it was catchy enough to endure for generations. As their career progressed and their popularity soared, they perfected less complex styles, scoring their biggest hit with the indelible groove of 1980’s “Another One Bites the Dust”. (“We Are the Champions” and “We Will Rock You”, from 1977, will be around as long as sporting arenas of any kind exist.) Their success continued through the ’80s, even as Mercury was quietly living with AIDS. Queen’s breathtaking 1985 Live Aid performance at Wembley Stadium may be the pinnacle of their career (and is, in fact, the climax of their 2018 biopic, Bohemian Rhapsody), showing that for all their studio mastery and ingenuity, no one was better at commanding the attention of a couple hundred thousand people. After Mercury’s death in 1991, Queen occasionally carried on in various forms, with Paul Rodgers and Adam Lambert taking turns in front for tours and new recordings, but those well-intentioned efforts largely proved just how irreplaceable Mercury was.

ORIGIN
London, England
FORMED
27 June 1970
GENRE
Rock

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