Tens of millions of records sold, a musical, the phenomenal success of 2018 biopic Bohemian Rhapsody, ubiquity at almost any sporting event… the songs of Queen have arguably become ingrained in the popular consciousness more than any other group outside of The Beatles. While most sentient beings will be familiar with the likes of We Will Rock You and Don’t Stop Me Now, there are plenty of lesser-heralded gems worth investigating alongside the band’s crown jewels. On what would be singer Freddie Mercury’s 78th birthday, MOJO’s Danny Eccleston takes a walk down a – relatively – less travelled royal road…
Keep Yourself Alive
(from Queen, 1973)
Glam or prog? Early Queen went both ways, mixing the unpretentious stomp du jour with daring harmony and epic flourishes. Mercury delivers May’s tongue-in-cheek lyric – “I had a million women in a belladonnic haze” – like it’s the God’s honest, and Queen’s mix of ludicrous bravado and sly humour was set.
White Queen (As It Began)
(from Queen II, 1974)
Plenty of bands fail to deliver on their first album promise. Few build so brilliantly. Queen II’s track 3 is a prophecy of their peak mix of high and low art, unearthly harmonies and snorting guitars, affected courtliness and red-blooded lust. May wrote it about a real-life crush – a girl in his Biology class.
Ogre Battle
(from Queen II, 1974)
This live favourite dates from pre Queen, managing to invent thrash metal while being the only fun song inspired by Tolkien twaddle ever. Were Queen the new Zep? The new Who? Aspects of the former’s grandeur and the latter’s sonic jousting are audible. And just when it surely can’t get more ridiculous – the gong!
The March Of The Black Queen
(from Queen II, 1974)
A head-spinning six-minute dry run for Bohemian Rhapsody, its first 60 seconds an opera in itself. Mercury lards on the fireflies and blue powder monkeys, voices sound like guitars, guitars sound like some yet-to-be-invented supersynth, and tubular bells chime because why not? Like “going up to heaven and coming back alive”.
Brighton Rock
(from Sheer Heart Attack, 1974)
Sheer Heart Attack sloughed off the sword and sorcery shemozzle, and refocused on Queen’s signature moves: raw excitement and robust sexuality. Brian May’s hot-under-the-collar guitars are the main event on a rollercoaster album opener that revisits a seaside tryst. No other band sounded anything like this in 1974. Well, maybe Sparks. A bit.
Flick Of The Wrist
(from Sheer Heart Attack, 1974)
Mercury’s sprightly piano-pop open transforms quickly into a gothic fantasia that reflected the group’s dark view of their business position in 1974, enslaved to a medieval contract with Trident Studios. Here, the music biz is Mephistopheles incarnate (“Prostitute yourself, he says”), although he’s not without his seductive, even slightly S&M appeal.
Now I’m Here
(from Sheer Heart Attack, 1974)
After the transatlantic smash of Killer Queen, this May-penned follow-up was a commercial anticlimax. But in every other respect it’s a triumph, swinging effortlessly between moods, throwing elements together – May’s skeletal guitar chug; Taylor’s Moon-esque explosions; the “around-around-around” vox; those squeals – with a sui generis élan.
Stone Cold Crazy
(from Sheer Heart Attack, 1974)
Queen’s heaviest rock song predicts NWOBHM with its freight-train speed and boggler-boggler rhythm. And like all their best music it delivers high craft – right down to the unpredictably ‘out’ melody of the “stone cold cra-zy” interjections – with a ‘what, this little thing I just dashed off?’ insouciance. 2.14 of pure thrill.
Death On Two Legs
(from A Night At The Opera, 1975)
For all Queen’s pre-rock references (the beat and guitar here both owe something to flamenco) they were anything but burdened with reverence for the past. Mercury’s sulphurous flaying of the band’s first manager Norman Sheffield is a hell of a way to open the group’s self-styled Sgt. Pepper. Sonically, it’s all about the sci-fi rock band they’d become.
You’re My Best Friend
(from A Night At The Opera, 1975)
Another decently-performing single sneaks into this deeper-cut list due to an ‘un-Queen-ness’ typical of bassist John Deacon’s compositions. Its freshness – Deacon played the signature Wurlitzer electric piano part having barely learned the instrument – is rivalled by the simplicity of the sentiment. Deacon wrote it for his wife, Veronica Tetzlaff. As far as anyone knows, they’re still married.
Tie Your Mother Down
(from A Day At The Races, 1976)
By now, Queen were adept at kicking off an album at full throttle, but the trick never palled. Here, May disinters a tune he wrote on Spanish guitar in Tenerife in 1968. It rocks like blazes, but not before a whimsical instrumental visit to a distant eastern court. The “little school babe” in the lyric is in the Upper 6th Form, presumably.
You Take My Breath Away
(from A Day At The Races, 1976)
Not Mercury’s first homage to Abbey Road, but one of his most charming. Several Freds open proceedings with a nod to the Fabs’ Because, then the piano takes over with melancholy tonalities that add to a sense of the narrator’s isolation (“I get ever so lonely”). Sensitive to the mood as always, May somehow makes his guitar sound sepia.
Sheer Heart Attack
(from News Of The World, 1977)
Side One of News Of The World takes no prisoners. We Will Rock You, We Are The Champions, then this, Roger Taylor’s crypto-punker. The pummeling downstrokes of the drummer’s own rhythm guitar are far too crude to have been thought up by May, and the three-word chorus – if it can be called that – is like a searing flash of migraine across the frontal lobe. Scorchio!
All Dead, All Dead
(from News Of The World, 1977)
The miraculousness of May and Mercury – two (in their own ways) extreme eccentrics unencumbered by regulation guys-in-the-gang rock’n’roll cool – finding one another is no better underlined than on this, where the pair (May on vox, Mercury on piano) channel each other’s flair for forehead-clutching melodrama. If only it weren’t about an ex-cat.
It’s Late
(from News Of The World, 1977)
There’s nothing duff on NOTW (though Sleeping On The Sidewalk’s Mose Allison stroll is undervalued), but It’s Late might shade even the LP’s mammoth singles. Late Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins told MOJO in 2019 he detected something of the Faces in its soulful, hanging-loose feel – making those typically choral ‘it’s late!’ segments all the more explosive. Quite wonderful.
Play The Game
(from The Game, 1980)
After the run of Bicycle Race/Fat Bottomed Girls, Don’t Stop Me Now and Crazy Little Thing Called Love – singles that played Queen’s joker to full effect, The Game album’s opener painted back their subtleties with lashings of Beatleness (backwards stuff; the A Day In The Life vibe of the “my game of love has just begun…” section), ingenuity and measured charm.
Dragon Attack
(from The Game, 1980)
A real ‘live’ rock groove and relatively little frippery, with Mercury singing one of May’s ‘chant’-style lyrics (cf. We Will Rock You). The song appears to mean very little, although is it fair to note how domineering May’s female protagonists seem to be? And is there a subconscious reflection on the hard drugs swimming around the hard rock scene in 1980?
Body Language
(from The Game, 1982)
Appetite for Queen as an electro-funk outfit was arguably sated by Deacon’s supersmash Another One Bites The Dust two years previously, but Queen were never about reining themselves in. Daringly sparse, this is weird enough to transcend its porn soundtrack vibes and an album which, Under Pressure aside, most Queen fans (and members) seem keen to forget.
Who Wants To Live Forever
(from A Kind Of Magic, 1986)
Against Mercury’s tendency towards frivolity, stack May’s tendency towards extreme earnestness. But Mercury was great at following the latter’s lead, and the intensity he offers when May hands over after the first verse is transformational. Given the gloopy strings and awful drum machine interjections, this is a triumph of songwriting and vocal over arrangement.
I Think I’m Going Slightly Mad
(from Innuendo, 1991)
Queen’s version of vulnerability was not as other bands’. But this, sung by Mercury as AIDS took its toll on his vocal powers, addressed a decline in his mental faculties with poignant gallows humour (Noël Coward is an obvious antecedent). And like all the best Queen songs, popularity notwithstanding, it underlines their spectacular oddness.
The latest issue of MOJO is on sale now! Featuring Bob Dylan, Motown, The The, Neil Young, Arthur Lee, Nick Lowe, Gillian Welch, Galaxie 500, Laurie Anderson, John Mayall and more. More info and to order a copy HERE!
Picture: Alamy