Queen

In the autumn of 1977, it looked as if Queen’s reign might be over. Instead the band rose to the challenge, hit back with the globally successful News Of The World album and ruled once more.

In the autumn of 1977, it looked as if the band’s reign might be over. Instead they hit back with the globally successful News Of The World and ruled once more.

Friday, October 28, 1977. It should have been the day that marked the end of Queen’s reign. The future of their sixth studio album, News Of The World, released that day, looked bleak at best. A year before, their previous album, A Day At The Races, had received such a critical battering that Freddie Mercury’s days of bringing opera to the masses, darling, now seemed decidedly numbered.

A Day At The Races, the follow-up to A Night At The Opera – their Bo Rap-containing 1975 breakthrough international hit – was considered flaccid by comparison. The moment where the group’s desire to push the musical envelope crumbled into self-indulgent parody. The worst accusation of all: that Queen in the studio had begun to tread water; that having found the magic formula for success they now simply joined the dots and offered up the same again – only not different.

At a time when punk rock was considered the new critical yardstick, Queen suddenly epitomised everything about the old rock aristocracy that was now held in contempt: massive production, backarching guitars and the once glorious, now oddly out of step image of Freddie Mercury preening in

“The most popular misconception is that Freddie took himself seriously.”

Brian May

front of the audience, wishing them all

“champagne for breakfast”.

As if to ram the point home, on the very same day that News Of The World was released came Never Mind The Bollocks… Here’s The Sex Pistols. The vast gulf between what was now regarded as the spiky, blades-drawn future and the flatulent, fairy-dust past was thrown into even sharper relief when one compared Johnny Rotten’s God Save The Queen with Queen’s own bombastic version of the national anthem which still closed their shows.

Speaking with me some years later, Brian May – the former PhD student studying Motions Of Interplanetary Dust, who’d fashioned his favourite guitar out of a fireplace, which he played with an old sixpenny piece for a plectrum – insisted that the band had remained impressively unmoved by such accusations. He gave a knowing chuckle as he recalled: “The most popular misconception of people outside the people who ‘get it’, as you would say, is that Freddie took himself seriously. They didn’t understand that although he took his work incredibly seriously, there was always that element of self-parody, if you like, in Freddie. He was always slightly tongue-in-cheek, there was always a little twinkle in his eye. And I think that’s what was missed by the outside world. It never mattered to Freddie, though. It never bothered him. It was like, they either get it or they don’t.”

In fact, what nobody had anticipated when News Of The World was released in the punk-dominated autumn of 1977 was exactly how much we were about to ‘get it’ from Queen – to the tune of seven million sales worldwide, making it the most successful Queen album to date.

“After that we stopped worrying about punk or what the critics had to say,” Roger Taylor told me. “We stopped worrying about anything…”

Although Queen were loath to admit it, the thinking behind News Of The World had in fact been more than a little influenced by the lacklustre reception A Day At

The Races had received – and not just from the critics. Designed very much as what their former producer Ray Thomas Baker decried as a record that “absolutely screamed ‘sequel’”, it had sold less than a third of what A Night At The Opera had sold in both Britain and America, and less than half what it had sold worldwide. Not a flop, but not “the way things should be going”, as Taylor delicately put it. May reluctantly conceded that it “may have been over-produced”.

Any thoughts of simply aiming for a third bite of the same formulaic cheery were finally dashed when Groucho Marx refused them permission to call the album Duck Soup, which would have been the third time in a row they had ‘borrowed’ the