Magnifico! Queen’s 30 Greatest Songs

Originally published in Uncut Take 302 [July 2022], Brian May, Roger Taylor and Adam Lambert pick their 30 favourite Queen songs, from stadium anthems to experimental, eight-minute epics, glam stomps and deep cuts…

“I can imagine that lots of fans will argue for days about this selection!”

Even for a band as seasoned as Queen, a new tour presents certain tribulations. For example, as they resume their Rhapsody World Tour – including a 10-date residency at London’s O2 Arena – Brian May, Roger Taylor and Adam Lambert are facing a familiar conundrum. Just how do you adequately represent Queen’s capacious back catalogue in a single live set? “We do just over two hours, which is time for just over 30 songs,” says Taylor. “There’s that constant challenge – to fit in big hit singles alongside slightly deeper cuts. God help anyone trying to whittle our back catalogue down to a Top 30!”

As it transpires, both Taylor and May are fascinated by Uncut’s entirely impartial and scientific list of Queen’s best songs. “That looks like a good mix of hits, live favourites and album tracks,” admits Brian May. “I can imagine that lots of fans will argue for days about this selection! But it’s heartening that there is such depth in our catalogue. There are so many deep cuts we’d love to do live again. Part of me would love to do a whole set of obscure album tracks. But you can’t afford to do that when you have so many hit singles that people expect to hear. As Prince used to say: ‘There are too many hits, darling!’”

“There is always an autobiographical element to every song”

Over the last 50 years, Queen have recorded nearly 200 songs – including 40 hit singles. As a consequence, many of the band’s biggest singles don’t make the setlist – songs like “Flash”, “You’re My Best Friend”, “Good Old Fashioned Lover Boy”, “Play The Game” and “A Kind Of Magic” haven’t been played in years.

Too many hits? Not a bad problem to have. But what Brian May is uncomfortable about is explaining what some of those hits mean… “I’m so glad that Freddie was never grilled by journalists, asking him the exact meaning of ‘Bicycle Race’ or whatever,” says May. “Part of me is uncomfortable about analysing what these songs mean. I love that no-one understands ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. It means that anyone is free to put their own interpretation to the song. One thing I’ve learned over the years is that the intention of the writer is just a small part of what a song means. There is always an autobiographical element to every song, but so much is in the eye – or the ear – of the beholder, of the interpreter. That’s how music should be.”

“We were edging towards drama in our music”

1 DOING ALRIGHT
(Queen, 1973)
Queen before Queen? A Brian May co-write from Smile, recast by Freddie
BRIAN MAY: We played it in Smile, with Tim Staffell and Roger. Freddie used to come and see our gigs. When he joined as lead singer, he said he really loved singing Tim’s song and wanted to bring it into this new regime. I think the first time he sang it properly was in the recording studio – and he sang it beautifully. It’s got quite a complicated structure, it’s very episodic. We were edging towards that drama in our music. We wanted it to have a vast amount of light and shade, because rock music was able to depict the tenderest moments to the very hard and angry moments. The whole spectrum of human emotions. So much of this song is Tim’s work; he is a very talented musician and songwriter. Do I stay in touch with Tim? Oh, yes. He’s a great friend. He went off and pursued the visual arts – he’s done all sorts of model designs and animations, most famously for The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy and Thomas The Tank Engine. But he also makes music and I’ve played guitar on a few of his records. He was involved in the film: he rerecorded his vocals on a great version of this song!

“A bit of a learning curve”

2 KEEP YOURSELF ALIVE
(QUEEN, 1973)
The band’s debut single… championed by John Peel!
BRIAN MAY: This was pretty much the first song I wrote on my own for Queen. Before that I think I’d only written “Step On Me” – which was the B-side to our Smile single, “Earth”. When I went to parties as a student, I was pretty antisocial. I’d go off to some side room and find a guitar and play it. I used to play a bluesy, double-stopping riff where I’m bending two strings at once. People at the party would say, “Wow, that’s great! You should work on that and make it into a song!” So “Keep Yourself Alive” is based around that riff. It was a bit of a learning curve I learned that it was very hard to be ironic in a song. The song is actually supposed to be quite cynical – if all there is to life is to keep yourself alive, then what is it worth? Hence the lines, “Do you think you’re better every day?/No, I just think I’m two steps nearer to my grave”. Despite all that, the song comes across as very jolly. Let’s keep ourselves alive and be happy, happy, happy! I realised that songs mean different things to different people and you’ve got to relinquish control over their interpretations.

“Big, bombastic, hard-hitting”

3 SEVEN SEAS OF RHYE
(QUEEN II, 1974)
Queen’s first Top 10 hit, built around Freddie’s ripping piano line
TAYLOR: This was purely out of Freddie’s mind. Those fantastical lyrics! That piano! It’s big, bombastic, hard-hitting, it really gallops along. We recorded our first few albums at Trident Studios in Soho – I think Bowie was recording Hunky Dory and then Ziggy Stardust during our first album, then producing Lou Reed’s Transformer during our second album. People used to go there to get that Trident drum sound. You can hear it on those early-’70s Elton John albums, on Ziggy Stardust, on Transformer, on George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass and so on. I love all those albums, but the drum sound wasn’t what we wanted at all. It’s a very dead, thudding sound. The engineers used to tape down all the drums and cymbals, so it was like hitting a pudding. We wanted drums that throbbed and reverberated and soaked into the rest of the studio. That’s the big difference between Queen I and Queen II – the second album is the sound of us starting to get the sound that we wanted. We moved the drum kit into another part of the studio and mix’d it up differently, so it didn’t have that Trident sound. It’s when we started to experiment in the studio, and you can hear that throughout “Seven Seas Of Rhye”.

“Regality, femininity, succession, power, pomposity, fairy tales…”

4 FATHER TO SUN
(QUEEN II, 1974)
The “White Side” of their second album begins with this homage to The Who
BRIAN MAY: We had two themed sides on Queen II. Freddie wrote the Black Side, I wrote most of the White Side. We were exploring the Queen concept, visions of “queenly” ideas that could be spun that around our memorable and rather controversial name: regality, femininity, succession, power, pomposity, fairy tales. I think the songs do fit together well – Freddie’s side is much more piano-driven, mine is more guitar-heavy. This particular song is probably, unwittingly, very influenced by The Who. I’ll make no bones about that; me and Roger used to see The Who a lot. It’s hard to picture now quite how dangerous they were at the time, but Who gigs were insane! “Father To Son” is about relationships between generations. It’s partly inspired by my relationship with my father, who vehemently disapproved of me pursuing the course of a rock star. Dad was great – he helped me in everything I did, especially in making my guitar – but when it came to me giving up my career in science, he was heartbroken. We fell out and hardly spoke for nearly two years. Eventually, we did sort our differences out, which was a great relief to me. We can’t really deal with disappointing our parents, can we?

“Very transgressive”

5 THE FAIRY FELLER’S MASTER-STROKE
(QUEEN II, 1974)
Freddie’s tribute to the painter Richard Dadd
BRIAN MAY: The source for this song was a painting from the 1850s or 1860s, which still hangs in the Tate Gallery. Freddie – who was a very good artist, as you know – was obsessed with this painting and he idolised Richard Dadd. Legend has it that Dadd was losing his mind when he painted this, going mad in a strange way. But the quality and detail in the painting is incredible. Freddie used to take us and the road crew to the Tate to see it. We always saw Freddie’s lyrics as very literary and poetic, but I think that he was leaking a lot of autobiographical spirit into his songs. It’s very transgressive – you don’t have to read too deeply into lyrics like “dirty laddie”, “fairy dandies”, “what a queer fellow” and “rickling the fancy of a lady friend”. It’s a wonderful track. Like “The Millionaire Waltz”, from A Day At The Races, it’s one of Freddie’s hidden masterpieces. Not many people know it, because it wasn’t a single and we didn’t play it much live. But I loved multitracking my guitar and playing through the Deaky box – that wonderful amplifier that John Deacon invented, using a circuit board and a radio speaker he found in a skip. I still use John’s amp today. It means I can sound like a violin or a trumpet or whatever.

“It became a big part of our live shows”

6 BRIGHTON ROCK
(QUEEN II, 1974)
Live tour de force, featuring multi-layered guitars and gender-swapping vocals
BRIAN MAY: Was this based on Quadrophenia? As much as I love The Who, I couldn’t sing you a note of Quadrophenia. The lyrics were actually based entirely on a romance I had in Brighton. Me and Roger went down to Brighton and met two girls in our very, very early days. Life is all about romance, isn’t it? I’ve never been very good at it! But you can’t exist without those yearnings and desires. The solo on that song has really developed a life of its own – it’s a sonic adventure. I was fascinated by the ideas of delay and canon – of playing a riff on my guitar, hearing it back and then playing a harmony line on top of that. Nowadays the likes of Ed Sheeran use looper pedals, but I had to build my own! There used to be a thing called an Echoplex, a tape machine with heads on it, but you could only get short delays on it. I wanted a delay of a few seconds, long enough to play along to. So I cannibalised an Echoplex and put it in a bigger box, and extended the rail on which the playback head lives. I even had a pedal to work it, and a motor and pulley system! It was a bit harebrained, a bit Heath Robinson, and it wasn’t stable enough to use on tour. So we simplified it a bit, put the head in a fixed position, so that it would play a delay of a second and a half. And I’d add a harmony on top of that, and then another on that. It became a big part of our live shows. There’s always an element of “Brighton Rock” in everything I do!

“Freddie’s sexuality was never obvious”

7 KILLER QUEEN
(SHEER HEART ATTACK, 1974)
Freddie’s glam rock single about a high-class sex worker
ADAM LAMBERT: This was Queen’s first big, big hit, certainly in America. It’s a wonderfully theatrical one to sing. Freddie used to adore Liza Minnelli and loved singing songs like “Hey Big Spender”. Part of me thinks that “Killer Queen” could feature in a musical like Sweet Charity, it’s very camp. It’s the pinnacle of glam rock, but it’s structured like a piece of light opera. It’s interesting that Freddie was very androgynous at this time. He had long hair, he’d wear women’s clothes, eyeliner, makeup, nail polish. But this was glam rock – and even straight glam rockers dressed like this! So Freddie’s sexuality was never obvious. I am lucky enough to be rather more frank and open about these things. When I’m performing “Killer Queen” live, I see it as a chance to get animated and silly. So we might have me reclining on a chaise longue, wearing some fantastic outfits. I love playing dress-up. As our friend Tiffany Haddish says, “It’s not a costume, it’s fashion, darling!” When I’m singing “Killer Queen” I adopt a skittish persona I’m being myself, but a particularly obnoxious, exaggerated version of myself!

“All the wildness and adventure”

8 NOW I’M HERE
(SHEER HEART ATTACK, 1974)
Inspired by the band’s UK/US tour with Mott The Hoople
BRIAN MAY: It was our first experience of the touring life – the hedonistic rock’n’roll lifestyle – and I got sick at the end of it, with a kind of jaundice. I had to come home in May 1975 and have an operation to fix my stomach. While I was in hospital, I started to weave this song together in my head, based on all the wildness and adventure of the Mott tour, which is why there’s such a heavy and deliberate Mott influence. That was during the making of Sheer Heart Attack – it was the last thing we recorded on the album. I did it pretty quickly, because I knew what I wanted to say. It became a mainstay of the live show. With a lot of my songs, I think, “What can I come on stage and play?’ I’ve always enjoyed trying to write openers and closers for sets. The chugging guitar on this is perfect for that. We came up with the idea of making Freddie disappear and reappear in another part of the stage – and we still do that with me. In Australia, we had me starting the song high above the stage, at the back, playing this riff, and then the lights change and I reappear at the front of the catwalk. Do we use lookalikes? I can’t possibly tell you that! It’s magic! Real magic!

“It’s quite ominous”

9 IN THE LAP OF THE GODS… REVISITED
(SHEER HEART ATTACK, 1974)
Freddie’s dramatic waltz: a live favourite to this day
BRIAN MAY: I love this song. It was our show closer in the early days, before “We Are The Champions” and “We Will Rock You”. It’s very epic. It’s Freddie being magnificent and being a god, which he was quite good at. I always look at Freddie’s songs in wonder. In the beginning, a lot of his writing was very fantastical, but underneath, I think he was really pouring his heart out. Freddie was struggling with various things at various times, and we all know that his sexuality was quite fluid. It was hard for him to express. And I think you can hear him in this song, struggling with his relationships, putting them into words and music. I always thought that there was an edge to “In The Lap Of The Gods… Revisited”. On record, we built it up in intensity until it ended with a huge explosion. It’s quite ominous. We still play it live, but it now ends a certain part of the set. We have to compartmentalise everything!

“A mini opera in a song!”

10 BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY
(A NIGHT AT THE OPERA, 1975)
…Magnifico!
ADAM LAMBERT: This, for me, is where it all started. I performed a version of this for my American Idol audition. It inspired the producers of the show to invite Queen to perform at the finale of the series and that’s how this wonderful partnership happened. So this is obviously very special for me and, of course, it’s such a killer song. Long before I knew who Queen were, I remember hearing this as a small kid and thinking, ‘Wow…’ This wasn’t just theatrical rock, this was a mini opera in a song! I love the range, the drama… It’s such fun to sing! Even though it’s an incredibly complex and episodic song, the trick is to sing my line as a flowing narrative. I’ve heard so much from Brian about how it was recorded – how he and Roger had to put on voices to emulate a whole stage of characters doing backing vocals. They did dozens and dozens of takes, layered over each other. And there is no way you can recreate that live. Everything we do is 100 per cent live, there’s not even a click track. But the one exception is the operatic section from “Bohemian Rhapsody” – the band have never tried it live. Brian always says that he’s glad that Freddie never explained the lyrics. That would ruin it. The great thing is that anyone can ascribe any meaning to these words.

“I was obsessed with my Alfa Romeo!”

11 I’M IN LOVE WITH MY CAR
(A NIGHT AT THE OPERA, 1975)
Taylor’s auto-erotic ode to the internal combustion engine
ROGER TAYLOR: We were rehearsing for A Night At The Opera down at Ridge Farm in Surrey. Our sound guy and roadie, John Harris, was really into his cars. I thought it was a nice little romance, as I was equally obsessed with my Alfa Romeo at the time. So I thought, ‘Wouldn’t that make a great love song, instead of just writing about girls?’ Brian didn’t take it at all seriously: “You are joking, right?” I said, “No, it’s not all about kisses and cuddles!” So that bit of the film – where we have a huge argument about this song – is largely true. I used to be the lead singer of bands when I lived in Cornwall – I was always the singing drummer, like Levon Helm, or Karen Carpenter! If I wasn’t lucky enough to be in a band with one of the greatest singers of all time, I might have sung more. I wrote this on the guitar – and I play some of the guitars on the track – but, of course, Brian does it so much better. Freddie laid down some terrific rock’n’roll piano on it. I love songs in waltz or 6/8 time, and we did quite a few: “We Are The Champions”, “Somebody To Love”, “Sweet Lady”, “In The Lap Of The Gods… Revisited”, “The Millionaire Waltz”. You can tell how good a drummer is by how well he can play a song in threes!

“Not just science fiction, but science fact”

12 ’39
(A NIGHT AT THE OPERA, 1975)
Sci-fi-themed skiffle… as performed for Groucho Marx!
BRIAN MAY: I wrote this song very quickly – it’s almost like a Lonnie Donegan song – because the idea was very clear in my head. It’s based on Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Everyone now knows this, right? If you go on a long journey, going ahead of the speed of sound, and you come back in a loop, your perception of time will be different from the people who have stayed at home. It’s possible – not just science fiction, but science fact – that if you travelled at such an incredible speed for a year, then you’d experience that as a year, but the people on the Earth would age much faster. Maybe by 100 years. That’s the scientific basis, but what drives the lyric is the human side. What an incredible experience – instead of being greeted by your wife and children, you’d be greeted by your grandchildren. So it’s very bittersweet. It’s become a popular part of our live shows, but it’s also a link between my life as a musician and my life as an astrophysicist. Did we perform it for Groucho Marx? Yes, we did! He’d heard that we’d titled our albums after Marx Brothers films and he invited us to his house in Beverly Hills. He was very old and spent most of his days sleeping. A lovely young lady who took care of him wheeled him out. He was full of life, cracking jokes, asking us who the hell we thought we were. He played us a funny song on the piano, then asked us to play something. A guitar was placed in my hands, and me, Freddie and Roger sang this in three-part harmony. He smiled, clapped, cracked a few more jokes and then he was wheeled out for his next nap. That was Groucho!

“We were allowed to run riot”

13 THE PROPHET’S SONG
(A NIGHT AT THE OPERA, 1975)
More harmonies, Brian? Experimental eight-and-a-half-minute epic
BRIAN MAY: This was never the big hit I thought it would be. I thought that “Bohemian Rhapsody” would be the first hit on the album and this would be the other. It was a little too esoteric. I’m very proud of it and it went down well live at the time. It would be a bit too lugubrious to do live now, it would take such an investment of time-and we don’t have time! The two-minute choral section of this song is basically Freddie doing what I did on the guitar on “Brighton Rock” but with his voice. I set up all these delays in the studio and got Freddie to experiment, to sing along with himself, and he really got into it. He improvised lots of bits, which I then painstakingly put together into a sequence. Then we sang more harmonies over his harmonies. So there’s a huge amount of experimentation throughout “The Prophet’s Song”. We were allowed to run riot and go berserk in the studio with this song. We were heavily influenced by The Beatles on the ‘White Album’, but we had access to a few toys that The Beatles didn’t have.

“I take it to church”

14 SOMEBODY TO LOVE
(A DAY AT THE RACES, 1976)
The missing link between Queen the band… and the Queen of Soul!
ADAM LAMBERT: As I understand it, Freddie was really, really fond of Aretha Franklin. “Darling, I think I want to actually be Aretha Franklin one day,” he’d tell the rest of the band. So she was his inspiration for this song. It’s an incredibly soulful tune with a gospel backbone. You can hear her influence in the way he’s phrasing the different verses and in his piano work. When we do this live, I take it to church – take Freddie’s vision of a gospel song and fulfill it. I do a lot of trills and improvisation at the end. You can also get the audience involved – it’s a great one for orchestrating the crowd! The harmonies on the original are incredibly detailed and layered – you can hear Freddie, Roger and Brian stacking these incredible harmonies on top of each other, endlessly. We have quite a lot of singers in the band, enough to give this a go – we have me, Roger and Brian, obviously, but there’s also the piano player Spike Edney, the bassist Neil Fairclough and the percussionist Tyler Warren, who all have incredible voices. We spend a lot of time rehearsing the harmonies. It sounds really, really tight!

“The forces of togetherness”

15 WE WILL ROCK YOU
(News Of The World, 1977)
A transitional moment…
BRIAN MAY: Both “We Will Rock You” and “…Champions” had their roots in a concert that we played at Bingley Hall in Staffordshire. That gig was a turning point in Queen’s history. We’d started out like Free or Led Zeppelin, where we expected people to listen to us and not clap or sing along. Gradually, there was more and more interaction at Queen concerts. People sang along, but in the beginning we’d discourage it. Why don’t they damn well listen to us? What are they doing? But at Bingley Hall the crowd sung along with every song, and when we went offstage before the encore, they sang “You’ll Never Walk Alone”. It was amazing. I remember speaking to Freddie about it after the gig. Maybe we shouldn’t be discouraging this, maybe this should be allowed to become part of Queen. The audience is as big a part of the show as the band. So Freddie went off and wrote “…Champions”. That next morning, I woke up with “We Will Rock You” in my head and jotted it down quickly. What can a crowd do when they’re cramped together? They can clap, stomp their feet and sing along. I deliberately structured it with the guitar solo at the end, like I was acknowledging the audience and speaking back to them. The song harnesses the forces of togetherness. The lyrics are the three ages of mankind. It’s why people sing it at sports fixtures around the world. It reinforces people’s passions. It’s the biggest thrill of my career to see how this song is woven into people’s lives.

“Facing obstacles head on and overcoming them”

16 WE ARE THE CHAMPIONS
(NEWS OF THE WORLD, 1977)
A double A-side with “We Will Rock You”: heavy single!
ADAM LAMBERT: I guess that every single person in America knows this song. I knew it before I even knew who Queen were. People sing along with every word. It works as a triumphalist singalong, but it’s so much more than that. It starts like a torch song, like Frank Sinatra’s “My Way”. It’s incredibly dramatic and quite camp. It’s the idea of facing obstacles head on and overcoming them and celebrating that triumph. Lord knows, we’ve all had to deal with a hell of a lot of that over the last two years. I can imagine that this song is going to have a very special meaning this time around. We always do this and “We Will Rock You” as the final numbers. I’m usually pretty exhausted and sweaty by this point. I’ve given it my all for more than two hours. It’s the one last push. But the song is so uplifting that it pushes you over the line!

“Another chance to play dress-up!”

17 BICYCLE RACE
(JAZZ, 1978)
Includes rock’s only known bicycle-bell solo…
ADAM LAMBERT: It’s only in the last few years that we’ve added this song to the set. When we started doing it, I said, “Wouldn’t it be funny if I actually had a bike..?” At first, it was some silly pink tricycle with flowers in it. At the last tour, we upgraded it and beefed it up and the bicycle became a giant motorcycle. It’s another chance to play dress-up! Do I ride a bike? Yes, I do! I love cycling. Not so much in LA, where I live, but on tour it’s the best way to explore. Especially in more cycle-friendly cities – New York, Montreal, London, Perth, and so much of Europe. It’s why I really wanted to revive this song on tour! This is an incredibly complex song to play live. That’s one of the challenges of Queen’s music: there are so many twists and turns, so many odd chord changes and shifts in key and shifts in time signature. The lyrics are incredibly surreal and playful. Like “Bohemian Rhapsody”, these are lyrics that evoke the imagination. Thank God Freddie never had to explain exactly what they were about!

“I was aware of how funny it was”

18 FAT BOTTOMED GIRLS
(JAZZ, 1978)
Tribute to the fuller figured – of all genders
BRIAN MAY: We wrote that in the South of France, in Jacques Loussier’s studio in Miraval. We deliberately changed the scenery, because we wanted to get closer as a band. The other side of this single, “Bicycle Race”, was inspired by the Tour de France, which went through the village we were staying in. “Fat Bottomed Girls”, however, was inspired by things that had happened on tour, but it took on a different dimension when put through that French prism of the Jazz album. I don’t really have to explain the subject matter, because it’s obvious, isn’t it?! Of course, I was aware of how funny it was that I was writing this for Freddie to sing, because you didn’t get many fat-bottomed girls in his dressing rooms. So I’m fully aware that you can interpret this in any sexuality you choose. It’s very much a glorification of people of any sex – Lord knows we hung out with all sexes on tour with Queen! – who aren’t necessarily pretty, not the archetypal Adonis or Venus, but who contribute to the rock’n’roll lifestyle through their energy and passion.

“It was a total flop in America”

19 DON’T STOP ME NOW
(JAZZ, 1978)
Mr. Fahrenheit’s hymn to hedonism
ROGER TAYLOR: This was a bit of a slow burner for us. I think this would have been written in Munich and finished in the South of France. It was a piano-driven ballad when Freddie first played it for us. I don’t think Brian liked it that much at first. It was a Top 10 hit in the UK, but it was a total flop in America. We played it at a few 1979 dates, but I don’t think it even featured in our setlists most of the time. Over the past 40 years it’s grown into this huge anthem. I’m not sure how that happened – it was featured in Shaun Of The Dead and Glee and it’s been licensed for loads of commercials. The lyrics are pure Freddie – a celebration of the joys of life. It’s hedonistic, unapologetic, fun, flamboyant and hilariously over the top. “I’m an atom bomb, ready to explode” – that always makes me laugh. It’s developed a life of its own. It’s now tremendous fun to play live. I think it’s now our second most streamed song, after “Bohemian Rhapsody”.

“I can sing it with Freddie in mind”

20 LOVE OF MY LIFE
(LIVE KILLERS, 1979)
A Night At The Opera ballad transformed into a live anthem
BRIAN MAY: The original, on A Night At The Opera, was the first and only time I played the harp – which was a disaster. I thought I’d be able to muck around and master it in a few hours, but it took a day and a half just to tune it. Then it’d go out of tune every time someone opened the door and the temperature dropped! I had to record each chord separately and glue the bits of tape into place. Freddie wrote a beautiful arrangement around the piano, but weirdly it never made it into our live setlist, because it was a bit too complicated. Before going on stage one night in the late ’70s, I quickly wrote an arrangement to turn it into a duet for acoustic guitar and voice, just me and Freddie. It was done on the fly, from memory, pretty much thrown together in half an hour before we went on stage, which is why it’s not true to the original, to be honest. It’s not as complex as Freddie’s original piano arrangement, it’s very simplified. But it works well. This live version became a huge, huge hit in South America. We still do it live, with me playing solo. We don’t have Freddie any more, but I can sing it with Freddie in mind. Using the magic of film, Freddie is able to join us at the end. But really, with this song, you don’t have to sing… you just have to conduct the audience!

“One of those sports anthems that gets played everywhere”

21 ANOTHER ONE BITES THE DUST
(THE GAME, 1980)
Crisp, Chic-inspired basslines
ADAM LAMBERT: I think this is my favourite Queen song. It’s their biggest American hit, but also their funkiest number. I love John’s bassline, which as we know was later used by the Sugarhill Gang. Freddie’s vocal on it is just unbelievable. Because the track is so minimal you can really hear all of his voice – and his attack is so good. It makes you want to dance! Again, like “We Are The Champions” and “We Will Rock You”, this is one of those sports anthems that gets played everywhere, the Queen songs that will be known by small children who don’t even know who Queen are! It’s interesting to see Freddie’s look at the time. He was into that supermacho thing, handlebar moustache, very, very masculine, leather, all that stuff. Most people outside the gay scene and outside of queer culture wouldn’t have understood his visual cues in 1980. You had to be in the gay scene to get it. How would anyone else have known? Ha ha!

“Queen were a really great funk band”

22 DRAGON ATTACK
(THE GAME, 1980)
Brian May’s funk-rock epic
ADAM LAMBERT: This was the B-side to “Another One Bites The Dust” in the UK. It’s one of the deep cuts that I suggested to the band, a live favourite from the early 1980s that had somehow dropped out of the setlists. Brian wrote this one and it has such a cool guitar and bass riff, it’s such a vibe doing it live. Queen were actually a really great funk band – Freddie has that elasticity and syncopation in his voice to carry it off. I love the funk tracks on The Game. There are some great funk tracks on Hot Space. I have a soft spot for “Cool Cat”, “Body Language” and “Staying Power”. I’d love to do them all live!

“A new genre for film music”

23 FLASH
(FLASH GORDON ORIGINAL SOUNDTRACK, 1980)
…He saved everyone of us!
BRIAN MAY: I’m very proud of this, because it set a new genre for film music. I think it was the first rock soundtrack commissioned for a film. Dino de Laurentis was a very big producer – he did the remake of King Kong and things like Serpico, Dune and Blue Velvet. He wanted a big budget, huge production version of Flash Gordon. It’s strange to think that he didn’t regard it as a spoof; he thought it was a very serious film. It was the director, Mike Hodges, who made it consciously comic-book and retro and tongue-in-cheek. I’d seen some of the rushes and knew it was quite camp and funny. When we first played my soundtrack to Dino, he sat there with a stony face and said, “Yes it’s very good, but it is not for my film.” I was a bit crestfallen, but Mike winked at me said, “Don’t worry, I’ll fix it.” Eventually, Dino understood. At the premiere he said, “I love what you did, it’s magnificent!”

We opened our 1982 concert at the Milton Keynes Bowl with it, but we don’t really do “Flash” live, because it’s very much a studio piece. I remember finishing this soundtrack in Shepherd’s Bush while the rest of the band were working on The Game in Munich. I asked Mike for all the audio dialogue, all the sound effects, all the incidental music by Howard Blake, and I sat there in the studio painstakingly gluing all these bits together for the finished album.

“We all started doing the finger clicks and claps”

24 UNDER PRESSURE
WITH DAVID BOWIE (HOT SPACE, 1981)
A jam session in a Montreux studio later turned into the band’s (and Bowie’s) second UK chart-topper
ROGER TAYLOR: This is loosely based on a demo I did for a song called “Feel Like” – but, to be honest, David Bowie started it, really. We’d been in the studio in Montreux playing cover versions and David said, “Let’s write our own song.” He was plooking out this descending sequence on the piano, I started playing that hi-hat thing, then we all started doing the finger clicks and claps, which was David’s idea. Then John came up with that unmistakeable bassline. We all went out for a pizza, and when we returned, John had forgotten his bassline! Luckily, I remembered it. Then Freddie and David came up with different melody lines. We’d lock one of them away, so they couldn’t hear what the other was doing, so they came up with alternate lines and then we swapped them. In New York, I finished off the track with David, layering all these different vocal takes.

I followed David avidly, right from the Space Oddity album. After I saw him do Hunky Dory at Friars in Aylesbury, I took Freddie to see him a few weeks later, by which time David had ditched Hunky Dory and was doing Ziggy Stardust. I first met David when we were supporting Mott The Hoople at Hammersmith Odeon – David turned up backstage with Mick Jagger! But I only got to know David well in Switzerland. We became really good friends, we’d hang out a lot, have dinner, muck about together. He was tremendous company.

“We used to write ‘No synths!’ on our album sleeves”

25 RADIO GAGA
(THE WORKS, 1984)
From no synths to mo’synths! Roger Taylor brings Queen into the MTV era
ROGER TAYLOR: I wrote this in LA after my tiny son was wandering around the house singing “radio ca-ca”. His mother is French, and “ca-ca” means shit. To be fair, the radio was playing a load of shit at the time, so I sympathised with that. I wrote it on a Roland 8 synthesiser, a brilliant machine, with good analogue sounds and a wonderful arpeggiator function. It’s ironic that I was the synth champion, as I was meant to be the hard rock purist in the band! We used to write “No synths!” on our album sleeves, because Brian used to get annoyed when critics thought his guitar lines were being played on synthesisers. But we didn’t really have an ideological problem with them. It was more that they were monophonic in the early days, so they were only good for fat basslines. When they became polyphonic, they were brilliant. We recorded this at the Record Plant in LA. I set up at Studio D and laid down this arpeggiated track on my own, and Freddie came in and said, “Ooh, let’s work on this, dear.” John wrote a terrific bassline on the synth and Brian did some brilliant multitracking. We finished it at Musicland in Munich. What was great about this is that it turned us into an ’80s pop band. When we played Live Aid, if anyone thought, ‘Oh, they’re a bunch of 1970s dinosaurs’, we had this big current hit to play. That was satisfying.

“The riff came to me on tour”

26 HAMMER TO FALL
(THE WORKS, 1984)
A Live Aid highlight assumes contemporary resonance in 2022
BRIAN MAY: This is one of those songs where the riff came to me on tour. I was in the tuning-up room – this backstage area where you have amps and spare guitars where we’d limber up before the show. There, I remember listening to the audience in the distance and thinking, “What riff would I most like to play to them?” That’s where the riff for “Hammer To Fall” was born. I knew the riff would work at Live Aid. It’s quite a heavy lyric. The last verse tells you where it comes from: “We grew up tall and proud/In the shadow of the mushroom cloud”. I grew up in the Cold War, with intercontinental ballistic missiles aimed at each other. I’d wake up night after night after having dreams about mushroom clouds. Now we’re plunged back into the dark ages. That balance of power hasn’t stopped Putin from doing some of the most terrible things the world has ever seen.

“The spirit of Live Aid”

27 ONE VISION
(A KIND OF MAGIC, 1986)
Roger Taylor takes an unlikely cue from Martin Luther King Jr
ROGER TAYLOR: This song started off as a big page of lyrics, a word map, which also provided the basis for “A Kind Of Magic”. It was motivated by the spirit of Live Aid and heavily inspired by a Martin Luther King speech. Brian came up with that big guitar riff, which fitted perfectly with the lyrics, which were all lifted from this word map. Everyone in the band took that word map, dived in and changed the odd line. It was an interesting way to work. It’s technically my song, by the usual rules we used to assign songwriters, but we always worked very collaboratively – and by this stage probably more so than ever. We started to credit all our songs collectively, which is much fairer, although it was probably to my detriment, as I started writing a lot more in the 1980s! But it was important to keep the band together and to keep on producing music. The decision as to which song was a single should always be motivated by what was the best single, not just because you wrote it!

“It forces you to write in a different way”

28 A KIND OF MAGIC
(A KIND OF MAGIC, 1986)
A No 3 hit, written by Taylor for the Highlander soundtrack
ROGER TAYLOR: I picked up a very cheap keyboard from a music shop in Ibiza and started writing what became “A Kind Of Magic”. Later, Freddie took over – he wrote a funky little bassline and made it a bit more dancey and poppy, the more commercial song that it eventually became. It was interesting writing for the Highlander soundtrack. We loved watching rushes of the film and getting inspiration from them. It forces you to write in a different way, in an illustrative way, in an impressionistic way. We wrote “Princes Of The Universe” collaboratively, I wrote a song called “Don’t Lose Your Head”, where the wonderful Joan Armatrading did the speaking parts. Did I like the film? I don’t think the acting was that good but it was so beautifully filmed – I still enjoy watching it when it comes on telly. Anyway, “A Kind Of Magic” is a great concert opener and we still use it to open a certain part of the concert.

“A very, very emotional song to sing”

29 WHO WANTS TO LIVE FOREVER
(A Kind Of Magic, 1986)
Brian May’s meditation on life becomes a threnody for Freddie
ADAM LAMBERT: This is such an incredibly haunting song. Brian wrote it for the Highlander soundtrack and, as I understand, it was inspired by lots of things – notions of mortality, illness, of the end of relationships and all sorts of things. It has some very deep, personal meanings for him. But of course it took on a whole new meaning after Freddie’s passing in 1991. To hear Freddie sing it is kinda prophetic. When I sing it, the song becomes almost unbearably poignant. You think about how Freddie must have felt when he was on his way out. It’s a very, very emotional song to sing. It’s pretty hard to remain engaged without breaking down.

“He was fearless to the end”

30 INNUENDO
(INNUENDO, 1991)
Complex and ambitious, this gave Queen their final No 1 during Freddie’s lifetime…
ROGER TAYLOR: I remember writing the words down on a piece of A4 paper and Freddie going through them, line by line – but we definitely all chipped in for this. It’s a very complex song and there are so many musical references. There are references to Bizet’s operas, there’s a bit that recalls Led Zep’s “Kashmir”, there are bits that have an Egyptian feel, and a drum riff I nicked from Ravel’s “Bolero”. I can’t actually remember how we managed to slot them all together! Then there’s that Spanish guitar bit with Steve Howe, someone we’ve loved in Yes since the very early days, when me and Brian used to see them live at the Marquee. In fact, we even supported them once at Kingston Art College!

Consciously or unconsciously, the knowledge of Freddie’s condition must have had a bearing on that album. I also wrote “These Are The Days Of Our Lives” on a keyboard, and that has a similarly valedictory feel. Throughout “Innuendo”, it sounds as if Freddie is screaming in the face of death. “If there’s a God or any kind of justice under the sky…/ Show yourself, destroy our fears, release your mask”. He was really in a lot of pain throughout that album, having to lie down or taking shots of vodka between takes. It’s a fearless performance, but that’s how Freddie was. He was fearless to the end.