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“Do the British still treat Queen like gods?” an American fan once asked their English friend. And how. When Mercury passed away in November 1991, a victim of AIDS, the local pub jukebox played “Bohemian Rhapsody” like nothing really mattered again and again. Except when some rogue insisted on the Smiths’ “The Queen Is Dead.” Queen were indeed treated as Gods. With their crested insignia, they were one of the last vestiges of the “Rule Britannia ethos. Although America slipped from their grip once Wham! came along, Queen stayed huge everywhere else.
It was impossible to imagine Freddie apart from his beloved stadiums, leading South Americans, Africans and Japanese in note-perfect renditions of “We Are the Champions.” The band never apologized for their ambition. It was the reward of both sweat and Freddie Mercury’s strange marriage with guitarist Brian May. Mercury was a Gilbert and Sullivan enthusiast who lived in post-Raj India before moving to the more prosaic English suburb of Middlesex. May was good with his hands - building his first guitar from the remains of an old fireplace - and always kept one eye on the stars, abandoning a dissertation on space dust to form Queen. They met in 1969 but had unwittingly grown up streets away from each other.
The duo combined innovation and imperialism in equal measure. They refused to play live until they were signed. Their self-titled 1973 debut was recorded using David Bowie’s studio downtime. When an American tour was called off because of May’s hepatitis, the band went back to the studio to record their breakthrough album Sheer Heart Attack. “Bohemian Rhapsody,” from their next effort, A Night At The Opera, was an intentional monolith: a six-minute opus so grandiloquent the backing vocal tape was rendered virtually transparent in the studio, so un-performable Queen filmed a video to promote it, and so dramatic that its final gong crash can still raise the neck hairs.
Heavy metal couldn’t handle its effete slap in the face of taste, which is why “Stairway to Heaven” still tops best song lists and Queen eventually fell from grace in the United States. The follow-up A Day at the Races coasted on the success of “Rhapsody” and A Night at the Opera, while Queen quietly forged a reputation for excess with their promotional satyricons.
Bassist John Deacon and drummer Roger Taylor came into their own after turning their backs on epics like “Somebody to Love” for three-minute pop. The American No. 1 “Another One Bites the Dust” saw Deacon co-opting a Chic bass line to create an excellent slice of white disco. He’d do the same for “Under Pressure” squeezing soul out of Bowie and putting the ice in Vanilla.
Taylor’s art was more suited to Thatcher’s parochial Britain. In the Eighties his “Radio Ga Ga” lamented the loss of old values in a video age, unashamedly accompanied by a recreation of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis in one of the most lavish clips ever made. But while Queen alienated Little Steven with their bank account-pleasing performance at Sun City, they wowed a global TV audience at Live Aid in 1985. “It was the perfect stage for Freddie: the whole world,” noted Bob Geldof.
Queen coined that vibe into the hits of 1986’s A Kind of Magic, and capped their career with an enormous gig at England’s Knebworth. By then, Mercury’s ailment had set in, but morality only inspired Mercury to loftier heights. Innuedo and its accompanying album set new heights of ostentation - gypsy guitar solos, songs to Freddie’s cats, Noel Coward tributes - but it was hard not to hear May’s “The Show Must Go On,” and not feel the neck start to tingle again.
When Jimi Hendrix died, a young Freddie Mercury closed down his market haberdashery as a mark of respect. When Freddie Mercury died, the world they rocked kept turning. Somewhere in England, that same jukebox still plays Queen. And somewhere a fan looks back on songs like “Who Wants to Live Forever” and wonders if Queen always knew that something this big had to end in a whimper - commemorated in the abiding images of Wayne’s World. After all, the important thing is that nothing really matters. Except pretending that it doesn’t.
“Do the British still treat Queen like gods?” an American fan once asked their English friend. And how. When Mercury passed away in November 1991, a victim of AIDS, the local pub jukebox played “Bohemian Rhapsody” like nothing really mattered again and again. Except when some rogue insisted on the Smiths’ “The Queen Is Dead.”
Queen were indeed treated as Gods. With their crested insignia, they were one of the last vestiges of the “Rule Britannia ethos. Although America slipped from their grip once Wham! came along, Queen stayed huge everywhere else. It was impossible to imagine Freddie apart from his beloved stadiums, leading South Americans, Africans and Japanese in note-perfect renditions of “We Are the Champions.”
The band never apologized for their ambition. It was the reward of both sweat and Freddie Mercury’s strange marriage with guitarist Brian May. Mercury was a Gilbert and Sullivan enthusiast who lived in post-Raj India before moving to the more prosaic English suburb of Middlesex. May was good with his hands - building his first guitar from the remains of an old fireplace - and always kept one eye on the stars, abandoning a dissertation on space dust to form Queen. They met in 1969 but had unwittingly grown up streets away from each other.
The duo combined innovation and imperialism in equal measure. They refused to play live until they were signed. Their self-titled 1973 debut was recorded using David Bowie’s studio downtime. When an American tour was called off because of May’s hepatitis, the band went back to the studio to record their breakthrough album Sheer Heart Attack. “Bohemian Rhapsody,” from their next effort, A Night At The Opera, was an intentional monolith: a six-minute opus so grandiloquent the backing vocal tape was rendered virtually transparent in the studio, so un-performable Queen filmed a video to promote it, and so dramatic that its final gong crash can still raise the neck hairs.
Heavy metal couldn’t handle its effete slap in the face of taste, which is why “Stairway to Heaven” still tops best song lists and Queen eventually fell from grace in the United States. The follow-up A Day at the Races coasted on the success of “Rhapsody” and A Night at the Opera, while Queen quietly forged a reputation for excess with their promotional satyricons.
Bassist John Deacon and drummer Roger Taylor came into their own after turning their backs on epics like “Somebody to Love” for three-minute pop. The American No. 1 “Another One Bites the Dust” saw Deacon co-opting a Chic bass line to create an excellent slice of white disco. He’d do the same for “Under Pressure” squeezing soul out of Bowie and putting the ice in Vanilla.
Taylor’s art was more suited to Thatcher’s parochial Britain. In the Eighties his “Radio Ga Ga” lamented the loss of old values in a video age, unashamedly accompanied by a recreation of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis in one of the most lavish clips ever made. But while Queen alienated Little Steven with their bank account-pleasing performance at Sun City, they wowed a global TV audience at Live Aid in 1985. “It was the perfect stage for Freddie: the whole world,” noted Bob Geldof.
Queen coined that vibe into the hits of 1986’s A Kind of Magic, and capped their career with an enormous gig at England’s Knebworth. By then, Mercury’s ailment had set in, but morality only inspired Mercury to loftier heights. Innuedo and its accompanying album set new heights of ostentation - gypsy guitar solos, songs to Freddie’s cats, Noel Coward tributes - but it was hard not to hear May’s “The Show Must Go On,” and not feel the neck start to tingle again.
When Jimi Hendrix died, a young Freddie Mercury closed down his market haberdashery as a mark of respect. When Freddie Mercury died, the world they rocked kept turning. Somewhere in England, that same jukebox still plays Queen. And somewhere a fan looks back on songs like “Who Wants to Live Forever” and wonders if Queen always knew that something this big had to end in a whimper - commemorated in the abiding images of Wayne’s World. After all, the important thing is that nothing really matters. Except pretending that it doesn’t.
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