Queen

Queen turned rock into grand theater and made some of the most recognizable songs ever recorded. The British band formed in London in 1970 around Freddie Mercury on vocals, Brian May on guitar, Roger Taylor on drums and, from 1971, John Deacon on bass. Across the 1970s and 1980s they moved between hard rock, opera, pop and funk with a confidence few bands have matched. Decades after Mercury’s death their anthems still fill stadiums, films and playlists.

From Smile to Queen

May and Taylor had played together in a band called Smile when Mercury, a fan of theirs, joined and suggested a new name: Queen. After a 1973 debut and a breakthrough with 1974’s Sheer Heart Attack, they became one of the biggest acts in the world. Mercury, born Farrokh Bulsara in Zanzibar, brought a four-octave voice and a sense of showmanship that set the band apart.

Bohemian Rhapsody

A Night at the Opera, in 1975, contained “Bohemian Rhapsody”, a six-minute piece that swung from ballad to opera to hard rock with no real chorus and no obvious home on radio. It topped the UK chart for nine weeks and helped turn the music video into a standard promotional tool. It is still one of the most-streamed songs of the last century, and a new generation found it through the film Wayne’s World in 1992.

Anthems and Live Aid

News of the World in 1977 delivered “We Will Rock You” and “We Are the Champions”, two songs that became permanent fixtures at sporting events. “Somebody to Love”, “Don’t Stop Me Now”, “Another One Bites the Dust” and the David Bowie collaboration “Under Pressure” followed. Their twenty-minute set at Live Aid in 1985, in front of 72,000 people at Wembley, is still named one of the greatest live performances in rock history.

Freddie Mercury

Mercury was the heart of it. He wrote much of the band’s best-known material and commanded crowds like almost no performer before or since. He was diagnosed with AIDS in the late 1980s, kept recording as his health declined, and died on November 24, 1991. Innuendo, released that year, was his last album with the band, and a 1992 tribute concert at Wembley drew a who’s who of rock.

A legacy that keeps growing

Queen never really went away. The 2018 biopic Bohemian Rhapsody, with Rami Malek as Mercury, earned close to a billion dollars and won four Academy Awards, sending a new wave of listeners to the catalogue. Brian May and Roger Taylor have toured for years as Queen + Adam Lambert, the singer they met on American Idol. In 2024 Sony acquired the band’s catalogue in a deal reported at around a billion pounds, one of the largest of its kind. Fittingly, “Radio Ga Ga” even gave Lady Gaga her stage name.

Most loved songs

A spread across the catalogue. Each title opens through the in-site player.

From a stadium chant to an operatic epic or a riff you cannot quite place, the odds are good a Queen song has lived in your head. Type the line you remember into the search box above and you may find it leads back to them.