The enormously popular British band Queen epitomized pomp rock, with elaborate stage setups, smoke bombs, flashpots, lead singer Freddie Mercury's half-martial, half-coy preening onstage, and highly produced, much-overdubbed music on record.
Queen can be traced back to 1967, when Brian May and Roger Taylor joined singer Tim Staffell in a group called Smile. Staffell soon left to go solo, and the remaining two Smiles teamed up with Freddie Mercury (from a group called Wreckage) and later John Deacon. They played very few gigs at the start, avoiding the club circuit and rehearsing for two years while they all remained in college. (May began work on a Ph.D. in astronomy; Taylor has a degree in biology; Deacon, a degree in electronics; and Mercury had one in illustration and design.) They began touring in 1973, when their debut album was released. After a second LP, the band made its U.S. tour debut, opening for Mott the Hoople.
Queen’s sound combined showy glam rock, heavy metal, and intricate vocal harmonies produced by multitracking Mercury’s voice. May’s guitar was also thickly overdubbed; A Night at the Opera included “God Save the Queen” rendered as a chorale of lead guitar lines. (Until 1980’s The Game, the quartet’s albums boasted that “no synths” were used.) Queen’s third LP, Sheer Heart Attack, featured “Killer Queen,” its first U.S. Top 20 hit. The LP also became its first U.S. gold.
Heavy-metal fans loved Queen (despite Freddie Mercury’s onstage pseudo-dramatics, which had more to do with his admitted influence Liza Minnelli than with Robert Plant), and the band’s audience grew with its breakthrough LP, A Night at the Opera. It contained the six-minute gold “Bohemian Rhapsody” (#2, 1976), which featured a Mercury solo episode of “mama mia” with dozens of vocal tracks. “Bohemian Rhapsody” stayed at #1 in England for nine weeks, breaking the record Paul Anka had held since 1957 for his “Diana.” The promotional video produced for it was one of the first nonperformance, conceptual rock videos.
Queen has had eight gold and six platinum records; through the mid-’80s only its second LP and the 1980 soundtrack to the film Flash Gordon failed to sell so impressively. The group’s U.S. Top 40 singles include “Killer Queen” (#12), 1975; “Bohemian Rhapsody” (#9), “You’re My Best Friend” (#16), “Somebody to Love” (#13), 1976; “We Are the Champions” b/w “We Will Rock You” (#4), 1977; “Fat Bottomed Girls” b/w “Bicycle Race” (#24), for which the group staged an all-female nude bicycle race, 1978; “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” (#1), 1979; “Another One Bites the Dust” (#1), 1980; “Under Pressure” with David Bowie (#29), 1981; “Body Language” (#11), 1982; and “Radio Ga-Ga” (#16), 1984. At first their hits were marchlike hard rock, but in the late ’70s the group began to branch out; its two biggest hits were the rockabilly-style “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” and the disco-style “Another One Bites the Dust,” a close relative of Chic’s “Good Times,” that went to #1 pop and R&B.
In 1981 Taylor released a solo album, Fun in Space, and later in the year the band recorded with an outsider for the first time, writing and singing with David Bowie on “Under Pressure,” included on both their platinum Greatest Hits and Hot Space. One side of Hot Space was typically bombastic rock, while the other contained funk followups to “Another One Bites the Dust.” Fans were relatively cool to Hot Space; it did not go platinum. Queen’s next LP, The Works (#23, 1984), marked a return to hard-rock form. It contained the nostalgic “Radio Ga-Ga.”
Queen ceased to be a commercial force in the States; its next two LPs didn’t even go gold. Yet all over the world the group retained its regal status. The gold Innuendo, which went to #30 here, shot to #1 in Britain in early 1991. By then rumors were rampant that Mercury was ill with AIDS, something the group continually denied. That November he released a statement from his deathbed confirming the stories; just two days later he died of the disease in his London mansion at age 45.
On April 20, 1992, the surviving members of Queen were joined by a host of stars — including Elton John, Axl Rose, David Bowie, Def Leppard, and many other admirers — for a memorial concert held at Wembley Stadium that was broadcast to a worldwide audience of more than 1 billion. Ironically, around the time of the Wembley concert, Queen was enjoying its greatest American popularity in years, thanks to the memorable scene from the movie Wayne’s World, in which main characters Wayne (Mike Myers) and Garth (Dana Carvey) and buddies sing along to “Bohemian Rhapsody” as it blares on the car radio. The rereleased single soared to #2. A posthumous Mercury solo album was released in 1992. May continues to record solo and with the Brian May Band. Roger Taylor recorded three albums with a sideline band, the Cross, which began in 1987; he eventually resumed his solo career. In 1995 Queen finally completed its swan song Made in Heaven (#58), which features vocals recorded by Mercury during the last year of his life. Queen was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2001.
Filling the shoes of Freddie Mercury is a seemingly impossible task, but Bad Company’s Paul Rodgers gave it a shot when he teamed up with Brian May and Roger Taylor for a tour where they billed themselves as Queen + Paul Rogers. (John Deacon was retired by this point and living far outside of the public eye.) The group released The Cosmos Rocks in 2008 to widespread indifference. They quietly dissolved the group later that year, later admitting Rodgers was simply too bluesy a vocalist for the job.
That seemed like the end of the Queen story until Adam Lambert appeared on the 2009 season of American Idol. His stunning vocal range, command of the stage, and flamboyant persona made him an ideal candidate to front Queen. In 2012, Queen + Adam Lambert hit the road to gushing reviews all across the globe.
The band’s profile grew considerably in 2018 when the Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody arrived in theaters. The movie took tremendous liberties with the truth, but audiences were stunned by Rami Malek’s portrayal of Freddie Mercury, and the recreation of pivotal Queen moments, like their 1985 set at Live Aid.
The movie grossed nearly a billion dollars, won Malek an Oscar for Best Actor, and helped Queen + Lambert play to the biggest audiences May and Taylor had seen since the glory days of Queen. It’s an incredible final chapter for the band that few saw coming.