Queen still reigns with top-selling album
Queen’s Greatest Hits recently became the first album to sell more than six million copies in the U.K.; one in three families is believed to own a copy. Put another way, it is now the all-time biggest-selling album in the U.K., and it looks certain that no other release will catch it.
This 1981 compilation has long been so successful, the band such a cornerstone of the British consciousness, that it is tempting to take this news for granted. Given that the stage show We Will Rock You — based around their songs — has been stoking interest in them (not to mention selling the CD in the foyer) for more than a decade, why on Earth, you might argue, wouldn’t the album eventually reach such a position?
On the other hand, why would it? Exactly why are Queen, more than four decades after their formation in London — and 23 years since the death of frontman Freddie Mercury from AIDS complications — still so popular?
They were, after all, preposterous in every way. Mercury was a cartoonish camp figure; the other three were as boringlooking as can be. Resolutely uncool, their music heaved with pretensions, and their lyrics were often pure nonsense (“200 degrees — that’s why they call me Mr. Fahrenheit.” What does that mean?).
In an era that saw John Lennon take on war and Pink Floyd probe the darker reaches of the human psyche, Queen preferred to sing about Fat Bottomed Girls and riding bicycles. They seldom if ever tried to “say” anything, and so laissez-faire was their attitude to politics that, in 1984, they defied the UN’s cultural boycott of apartheid-era South Africa to play several sold-out gigs in Sun City.
If the latter decision was misguided at best, it has nevertheless generally been the band’s refusal to take things too seriously that has so appealed to the public. Mercury always said he wanted to pack as much fun into life as possible, whatever the consequences. His promiscuity caught up with him in the cruellest way, and yet his quest for a good time was also pivotal to the band’s success.
It was Mercury who came up with Queen’s telltale name and designed the band’s fauxroyal crest. Absurd as he was on stage (preening about in crowns and robes, and doing borderline-arrestable things with his oddly crane-like mic-stand), he was also magnificent, his energy as formidable as his crowd-embracing warmth.
Even Mercury’s charisma would have counted for nothing, though, without his and his colleagues’ copper-bottomed musicianship. Mercury tickled the ivories as eloquently as he sang, May and Taylor were talented backing (and occasionally lead) vocalists, and all four of them wrote. Mercury and May dominated the songwriting department, but Queen’s output would be much poorer without Taylor’s rock-out I’m in Love with My Car and Deacon’s disco-esque Another One Bites the Dust.
Nothing seemed beyond them. The opening track of 1974’s breakthrough album Sheer Heart Attack, the vaudevillian Brighton Rock, had May turn a guitar and a delay pedal into an orchestra of sound, with Killer Queen, Mercury’s piano-led paean to a courtesan, hot on its heels.
But even these were scant preparation for the treats to come. A Night at the Opera (1975) was a record that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. From the beautiful arpeggios of Death on Two Legs, to the frippery of Lazing on a Sunday Afternoon and Seaside Rendezvous; from Bohemian Rhapsody’s unprecedented fusion of multi-layered operatic vocals and thunderous rock, to May’s concluding rendition of God Save the Queen — it all felt wonderfully new.
The ’80s were a more variable time for the band. Recorded mostly in Munich, Hot Space (1982) was a disco-fixated disaster. And, although the return of May’s scything guitar in The Works (1984) was a relief, this largely electronic effort made many fans think back wistfully to the band’s proud, DIY proclamation on the sleeve of A Night at the Opera: “No synthesizers!”
Live Aid in 1985 was, of course, where it all went right again. No other group seemed to have planned its set so professionally. Queen were stupendous: they stole the greatest show on Earth.
Live Aid set Queen on a considerable roll, but it was not to last. By the late ’80s, amid torrents of media speculation, Mercury was looking gaunt. On Nov. 24, 1991, having somehow recorded majestic vocals for Made in Heaven while telling bandmates he wouldn’t live to see the album released, he died.
Ultimately, like all great bands, Queen as a group was better than its individual parts. None of the members’ solo ventures measured up to their collaborative work.
Many U.K. acts have looked to the band for inspiration. But swipe Queen’s ever-lustrous crown? You must be joking.